It’s been a bit of a slow news week for the Saturn, but there have been a few notable developments nonetheless. Here’s a roundup of what’s new with Sega’s fifth-generation console.
New Findings Unearthed in Latest Burning Rangers Prototype
The prototype of Burning Rangers that was made public earlier this month isn’t done spilling its secrets.
Bo Bayles, who sought out the prototype and got it released through Hidden Palace, has been scouring it for differences between it and other known prototypes as well as the final game. He’s updated his blog post about the prototype with his new findings and has written about them on Twitter.
On Wednesday, he found a co-op mode accessible by using the “round skip” feature after choosing the main menu’s versus option.
There are some odd quirks, like the second player normally controlling Shou — until another ranger is normally present, in which case player two uses that person instead.
And players can attack each other, just like in the versus mode.
On Monday, Bayles detailed the differences he found in mission 1 in a YouTube video — some survivors have different names and some rooms are a bit different relative to the final game.
He also found confirmation this week that sound effects engineer Masaru Setsumaru really did redo all of Burning Rangers’ sound effects a month before the game went gold — every sound effect in the ADX.ACX file in an earlier prototype has been replaced in the newest proto, most of whose sounds are retained in the final game.
Check out the rest of Bayles’ findings at his Low Context Burning Rangers Twitter account.
Worldwide Soccer ’98 Gets Fan Update for 2023
A member of the community, “Retro Dad and Modern Lad,” released a patch last weekend that updates Saturn sports title Sega Worldwide Soccer ’98 with 2023-accurate teams and players as well as a variety of other tweaks.
The patch can be downloaded from SegaXtreme and uses the Xdelta patcher.
Retro Dad’s forum post lists all the changes he made in his patch:
- Man City replaced Coventry City (badges, images, names, players, team rating, custom kit, sounds)
- New custom title screen and menu background
- Custom sega sports screen
- Custom Retro Dad & Modern Lad opening video
- Changes to option names to make more accurate
- New BGM music from both WWS98/97 (this has been removed from updated patch for ease of patching and will be added back in for a potential future update)
- All 1,728 players in the game have updated names for 2023 season
- All club teams have updated team ratings
- Al premier league teams and top 5 teams in Spain/France have updated player statistics/player appearance/correct kicking foot
- 5 new advertisement hoardings around the pitch
- All new power shot (like FIFA 23-ish) exclusive to the world’s top 5 strikers
The patch only works with the PAL version of Worldwide Soccer ’98 — the Japanese and North American versions are significantly different, and Retro Dad said he chose to work on the PAL version because it’s the only one with a licence for team names.
Since there are also three different versions of the PAL release, Retro Dad said the REV A one with a version number of V1.00319 in its header should be used with this patch.
A year ago, Retro Dad had said he was working on a 2022 update to Worldwide Soccer ’98 but never released such a patch. It seems he rolled his work over into 2023 and finally finished it for the community to enjoy.
House of the Dead Hits PS5
The House of the Dead Remake from Forever Entertainment comes to the PlayStation 5 today, merging the new version with the PS4 one and offering a free upgrade to owners of the game on Sony’s last-generation platform.
While the PlayStation version is full price, US$24.99, all other versions are 50% off or will be soon — on the Switch, on the Xbox, on Steam and on GOG.
Publisher Forever Entertainment provided a helpful graphic detailing the sale dates on each platform using European day-before-month formatting, as the company is based in Poland.
The House of the Dead is one of the most well-known light gun shooters that was ported from the arcades to the Saturn. The remake, developed by Forever Entertainment’s subsidiary MegaPixel, recreates the arcade original from the ground up. While retaining the original gameplay and level layouts, it sports completely new graphics as well as different music and voice acting.
The remake debuted last spring before getting an Xbox Series X version that September.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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