N64 Vs Sega Saturn

[Antiriad2097]

However it shines in areas the Saturn and PS1 can only dream of, solid 3d worlds. It has the most convincing 3d of any of them by miles, textures aside. Also the sense of scale and draw distances are often massive when you have a developer that actually knows what they are doing.

I hope you're not referring to the pathetic Hyrule field there. What on N64 compares to the scale and distance presented on PS1 by,say, the Tomb Raider games?

[joefish]

They all had their top games, but the typical 3rd party games are what sways it. Or you could simply look at which lasted longer.

The Saturn had some great 2D games, and most of its content was, like a lot of SEGA stuff, arcade style. Not a lot of longevity for the average gamer. And, as has been mentioned, a lot of the good stuff never made it out of Japan. So apart from a few key titles, nothing looked all that good. And hardly anything kept you interested long term. And clearly the console failed in the market.

The N64 also had some fantastic first-party games, but for all its graphical finery it suffered from small texture memory and a low polygon draw rate. It took a very tight design to make a game look good under those conditions, and although that suited the Nintendo style of child-friendly graphics it left third party games that tried to make anything look serious all looking a bit rubbish. Even GoldenEye, for all its success as a multiplayer game, has hideous looking papercraft characters, far more freakish than even the crudest renderings of Lara Croft. The only thing that saved it was Miyamoto's ability to tell a fantastic story through a game. And RARE hitting a peak of playability.

The Playstation was far more developer-friendly and great games came out of third parties. The list of decent games was far longer than any of the other consoles. Admittedly the early PS1 stuff looks dated, but I still think Tekken 3 and WipeOut 3SE are the best games of either franchise and are still playable and look good today. Gran Turismo may have gone a bit higher res, but there was hardly any point in GT2, let alone whatever they're up to now. And we all know the Ridge Racer franchise should have been put to bed after the excellent Rage Racer.

[retrosofer]

I wonder how the N64 would have faired without Rare and its gemes? They produced so many of the systems top games its unreal, AAA games one after the other, when I think of the system I immediately think about their games amongst others. On the Saturn though I couldn't really single any developer out as being so synonymous with the system in the same vein as Rare as there were alot of different devs that produced two or there excellent or significant titles between them.

[Mootown]

N64 was primarily driven by Nintendo dev teams / Rare, Saturn was the home of amazing Capcom conversions and Sega dev teams.
Playstation was everyone else!

[samhain81]

On games -

Saturn
PS1
N64

On personal attachment -

Saturn
N64
PS1

There was always a general consensus at the time that whatever console could mimic arcade hardware the best, would therefore be considered the more powerful console. Therefore, based on graphical capabilities

Saturn
PS1
N64

[sirpigmeat]

However it shines in areas the Saturn and PS1 can only dream of, solid 3d worlds. It has the most convincing 3d of any of them by miles, textures aside. Also the sense of scale and draw distances are often massive when you have a developer that actually knows what they are doing.

I hope you're not referring to the pathetic Hyrule field there. What on N64 compares to the scale and distance presented on PS1 by,say, the Tomb Raider games?

He said 'solid 3d worlds' not ones made of Blancmange

[nakamura]

However it shines in areas the Saturn and PS1 can only dream of, solid 3d worlds. It has the most convincing 3d of any of them by miles, textures aside. Also the sense of scale and draw distances are often massive when you have a developer that actually knows what they are doing.

I hope you're not referring to the pathetic Hyrule field there. What on N64 compares to the scale and distance presented on PS1 by,say, the Tomb Raider games?

He said 'solid 3d worlds' not ones made of Blancmange

Hyrule Field is one example yes. Others include Goldeneye, Doom, Perfect Dark, DooM and Mystical Ninja.

In MS you can scale a mountain and see for miles. The fogging is down to poor developers, not the console. The PS1 and Saturn have huge issues with pop up and fade in also. Tomb Raider is certainly impressive but nowhere near solid looking. The machine lacks the Z buffer to avoid warping and locations can look paper thin.

On a NTSC RGB modded N64, it's surprising just how solid and huge things look. The best games feel very modern in comparison. The issue is most of these games are only from a handful of developers.

[koopa42]

I'll give the N64 draw distance, I remember trying to see just how far you could sniper from ..... on the Dam level? you could pop a guy from one end of the dam to the other. I'm sure if I played it now? it would probably seem like 2 feet LOL but I do remember thinging 'woah that is awesome distance'

[outdated_gamer]

N64 is the weakest system of the three imo. Its PS1, followed at a great distance by the Saturn, then N64 tagging along behind. Too many devs stretched textures and ruined otherwise decent games by making my eyes hurt. Those few like Rare that relied more on shading than texturing fared better.

I don't really get why people have a beef with "blurry" N64 textures. Atleast the N64 had filtered texutres. Unlike the Saturn and PS which had only raw, pixelated ones.

N64 could also do stuff like perspective correction (i.e. Z-buffering) and anti-aliasing with ease while the other systems stuggled at it. If we go by pure tech specs, then the N64 was the strongest console in it's gen. It just had bad development tools, some hardware bottlenecks (i.e. 4kb texture cache - split in half if mip-mapping was used) and, of course, it used cartridges which were tight and expensive compared to CDs (they had instant loading times though).

It doesn't matter what it could do, when that looked like you'd smeared the screen in vaseline. It was around that time I got glasses, and looking at N64 games I was ever sure if it was my wonky eyes or the machine that was wrong. Turns out its the machine, it has a quease inducing blur filter, no matter how much I squint it's never sharp.

Give me the sharp edged pixels of PS1 any day.

But in reality... the PC beat them all

I'd hope so, since your 90s PCwould have cost at least three times as much.

But at least with PC you can turn off the horrible filtering.

Well to each their own but I can tell you that PC gamers were buying the "3D accelerators" for that filtering effect (besides higher resolutions and framerates).

For example here are a few shots from 3D accelerated Quake:





It may look blurry and poor today but back then gamers were amazed. The N64 version of Quake looked the closest to the 3D accelerated PC version in this regard, despite the low-res textures:

[outdated_gamer]

The N64 is one I have tried to enjoy but I find the blurry looking graphics on a HD TV

Well that's your problem - the N64 was not designed for a HD TV. You can get a sharper picture out of the console with a RGB mod (only works on some early NTSC and French models) but it will look poor on a HD TV in every case. Rather play N64 games on an emulator or Virtual Console if you don't have a classic tube TV.

[shiftytigger]

Even underneath the blurry graphics on a HDTV , there simply isnt anything to bring me back to it. If I enjoyed the games , id play them on a crt if i had to. Ultimately I can play any of the only few titles I enjoyed in other places than an actual console.

[retrosofer]

I think when it comes down to draw distance as well as pop-in it all comes down to the developer regardless of the console. In the right hands none of the three systs suffered in these two areas in any great lengths. Banjo Kazooie didn't have a problem in these two areas from what I remember. The Saturn game that has the biggest problem with pop-in, clipping, glitching and draw distance is easily Burning Rangers, for all its technical achievements the game suffers really bad in these areas. Wipeout 2097 has a pretty good draw distance as does PD Zwei, in Saga it varies and the Labotomy gemes come good in these areas to.

[n1nty]

No matter how much I love my n64 , the saturn beats it on games alone especially when you start playing the jpn shooters. Plus the Saturn has the best pad full stop.

[outdated_gamer]

Aren't most of the best Saturn games either remade and enhanced on other hardware now though? I mean, Virtua Fighter 2 you can play an arcade perfect version now on XBOX Live and PSN....Sega Rally is arguably better on PC, PS2 had a version in Japan, and the sequel Sega Rally 2 was superior anyway. Quake is infinitely better on other systems, and many apply.

I can't see how any of that is in any way a reasonable argument against the Saturn in the vs N64 debate.

And as for AAA titles: try Nights, Panzer Dragoon Zwei/Saga, Burning Rangers, VF2, Sega Rally, Radiant Silvergun, Gungriffon 2 and Guardian Heroes to name but a few.

Here are some corresponding games from the Nintendo camp: Mischief Makers, Star Fox 64/Sin and Punishment, Jet Force Gemini, Mace: The Dark Age, Top Gear Rally, Bangai-O, BattleZone: Rise of Black Dogs, Rakuga Kids

Some of these may be hit or miss but I tried my best to find equivalents.

EDIT: I'd place Gauntlet Legends as the hack n slash to go for and Ogre Battle 64 as the "tactical RPG" of choice.

[Jayextee]

I'd love to default to "they're both good, don't make me choose!" on this subject, but I'm afraid I'm going to plump for Saturn. A number of reasons:

- The definitive (at the time) Sonic compilation was a great hole-filler for families or individuals who had needed to sell their Megadrives to upgrade to Saturn. I craved a similar (i.e. Mario) collection on N64 to replace my beloved Mario Allstars/World, but it never happened. Regardless of how good Super Mario 64 was (and still is) it left a hole.
- Possibly the best digital controller ever seen, once the UK got the Japanese design. PlayStation had a curious (and in my opinion, counterintuitive) 'the d-pad is four buttons' approach, and the N64 controller took some understanding -- I grasped it immediately, many others still can't work it out. I can't empathise, but I can at least understand.
- Arcade games. Sega's main strength here, and I'll happily defend them as not being 'shallow'. They have depth! You seriously can't tell me that learning the courses in Sega Rally well enough to determine a perfect racing line and then acquiring the skill to make that theory work in practice doesn't take the same dedication and time spent that, say, an RPG would.
- On the subject of depth, fighting games. Whether 2D or 3D, Saturn offered "AAA" games of both types (Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Virtua Fighter 2 being literally the favourites of my teen years -- and anyone who claims either to lack depth really needs to revisit their dictionary). N64 had the fantastic Rakuga Kids, but little else. Mortal Kombat? Psh! Ultimate beat out Trilogy and 4 easily, which is why it had been an EVO tournament game for years.
- First-person shooters. Alright, so N64 got Quake II and Goldeneye and both were pretty amazing. Saturn offered a far better version of Duke 3D and a (barely) more faithful Quake. And that before including my own personal favourite, Exhumed -- which did Metroid Prime's schtick well before Metroid Prime.
- RPGs. Where did Final Fantasy go, Nintendo? Although in seriousness, Shining Force III, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Mystaria: The Realms of Lore and (although this is just personal taste) The Story of Thor II gave much more than any non-Zelda game on N64.
- Wipeout 2097. With analogue control. And I *liked* that soundtrack, damn it.
- Concurrent with my initial point, Sega were more respectful of their back catalogue than Nintendo in this era. Sure, Smash Bros. onwards saw them pick up the slack, but Sega had the 'Ages' collection, Sonic Jam, shoutouts to older games in Christmas NiGHTS and Bug! among others.
- Third party content. And I'm talking the LACK of it as a strength here, which may seem incredibly backwards - but hear me out. EA famously dropped the Saturn early enough to spare Segaphiles such gems as the continual dredge of FIFA games (I believe the last we saw was '98), and a lot of third-party publishers never showed up at the party, not even late -- so Saturn owners missed out on a fair few decent titles, but at least we probably missed out on more shovelware, too.
- RAM cartridge was obscenely-huge. Unless you're playing Hexen or are a Sim City 2000 addict, you'll only ever need the one.

Of course, Nintendo 64 had some amazing things, too. F-Zero X is one of my favourite racing games, Ridge Racer 64 was tons of fun and I've actually got all 120 stars on Mario 64 about six times; I love the game that much. And it got an infinitely better version of Doom, but still. Saturn wins by an inch, but it's still a win.