Join Nick, Dave, Pat, and Peter for an informed and distinguished (ha!) back-and-forth on the PC conversions that helped fill the software drought early in the Saturn’s life. We get all MYSTical by going back to the future to SimCity 2000, indulge in over-salted fries at the local Theme Park, and then bounce on a Magic Carpet. Want to know what Nick thought of these games when they first came out? That’s a trick question…
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Episode 4: Early PC Games to Saturn
Air Date: 2023-10-17
Patreon Early Access: 2023-09-19
A massive Saturn fan since Christmas ’96, Dave is enthusiastic about growing the community and spreading Saturn love and knowledge to fans old and new. Co-founding the SEGA SATURN, SHIRO! podcast back in 2017 and creating the SHIRO! SHOW in 2020, he seeks to create interesting and engaging Saturn-related content for the community. Dave’s interests circle around game preservation, and he is a huge fan of game magazines and developer interviews.
Played Myst and Riven on the Saturn back then and we, after sweat and tears and almost giving up on Riven, managed to finish them. With that, not too long ago I compared both games to their PS1 counterparts and it’s astonishing how the PS releases use high resolution as comparing to the Saturn raw images, it’s clear that the Saturn is running possibly in 320p while the PS1 is probably 480p, I wonder why they have chosen to use a lower resolution for the Saturn, specially because the game relies on still images mostly, maybe it has to do with the FMV codecs and perhaps the game would become require more CDs? I know the PS1 Riven release has 5 CDs, while the Saturn is a 4 disc game, but honestly, it’s weird, the PS version is much closer to the PC original. True that on CRTs, this is not a big deal, but still…
Hey Bob, thanks for listening and for commenting! All I can say is that if the PlayStation is running at 480, then it’s interlaced, while the Saturn version is essentially progressive, and has a very solid image with no flicker, so it looks quite nice, all things considered… Still, I played both versions back in the day (my dad had it on PlayStation) and they are both great ports of an already great game! -SaturnDave