Virtua Fighter 3(Shenmue) on Sega Saturn

This subject will never stop coming up until someone does an extensive interview with yu zusuki again.

 

Although a certain journalist was lucky to get direct quotes from Suzuki on the subject of Saturn VF3, he later requested that any discussion of this particular game remain strictly private, unpublished and off the record, so to speak. Of course, this was long before his exit from Sega, and it's quite possible he may be more open to such questions now. On the other hand, I suspect he may join former AM2 colleagues like Shin Ishikawa and Hiroshi Kataoka in downplaying this title altogther - the latter claims to have never known that a Saturn conversion was in the works, even though I strongly suspect he was deliberately trying to focus attention elsewhere, knowing it had long since become a project that would never see the light of day.

For a similar case, just look at how dismissive of the infamous (and soon to be released!) BioHazard/Resident Evil 2 prototype ex-Capcom director Hideki Kamiya has become in recent years. Then again, since VF3's ill-fated 32-bit conversion experienced a similarly troubled existence, perhaps Suzuki would rather not be reminded of this period? After all, it was really the first instance of his once untouchable judgement being questioned by the powers that be, leading to a reduced position and further similar acts of his authority being undermined, culminating in Shenmue never being concluded to his personal satifaction then ultimately his eventual depature, having not produced anything of worth for quite some time before.

 

Personally, this shows me how screwed up Sega was. They obviously spent a lot porting Shenmue to the Dreamcast, but this makes it seem like even more of a screwup.

They seemingly had a lot of the game depth done, just needed to up the engine and improve it and then focus on the game. Instead, we get thousands of little doo-dads you can buy from vending machines and stores that have zero affect on the game.

I've felt the same way about the Elder Scrolls games, they put too much into adding little things that I guess to them seem to add depth but really don't. If they cut all the little pointless items down to about 1/10 of what they have it'd still have a lot without it being on the point of absurdity, and they could likely use the extra time/effort on something more beneficial.

Considering that both series' games had clear issues that definitely could have used more time being addressed, it just is baffling. I like both, but they had so much more potential than they ended up realizing.

Nobody knew how to develop games for dual processors at the time. It even supposedly had two GPUs. None of that really became standard till around 2005. Even then, coding for them was iffy at times. Sega was ahead of their time in the late 90s. Sadly, that's what ultimately killed their hardware business.

The Saturn was just a failure across the board. The dual processor setup was poorly implemented (they would be constantly competing for memory in such a manner that it effectively nullified either of their performance). The two GPUs did different things. They also screwed up by going for quadrangles instead of triangles.
, I gave panzer dragoon a try from the extras menu and I could hardly believe how much of an eyesore the game was. No doubt it must have looked incredible at the time.

It's pretty ironic developers gave sega such a hard time as hard to design for considering how they were chomping at the bit to line up and give Sony praise for the technical marvel that was the PS2 and later PS3 development nightmares. Oh well. I think what hurt Sega was that they sold for $400 while Sony charged 300 and they didn't stick with their release date. (Saturnday Saturday) Shipping half a year ahead of time out of the blue just infuriated developers because it meant only Sega had had the time to get some launch games out on the console.

It also infuriated a number of retailers because only a select few had it in the surprise launch. KB toys would be so angry they'd never carry another sega system again and Walmart well... If you piss off walmart you're pretty much screwed as a business. Meanwhile you had sega trying to sell people on the idea that they got a 32 bit system out of the 32x while simultaneously pushing the saturn. Their own products worked against each other for retail space and it was just a lost cause.

The PS3 had the same problem as the Saturn. Multi-core gaming didn't appear until around 2005 with the 360. It features three cores, the PS3 has six. Not to mention that the Cell was a radically new and complex chip design. It's a PowerPC like the Xenon, but it's not. The trick was getting full utilization out of the SPEs.

Sega's hardware business failed for a lot of reasons. Price, lack of titles, too much focus on arcades, complex hardware.

 

I am sure some people here remember the arcade scene in the mid 90s and how vibrant it still was compared to the stagnation of today, arcades use to always be at the forefront of graphics and gaming technology.

At this forefront was undoubtedly SEGA, with its powerful Model 2 arcade board it had runaway successes with franchises like SEGA Rally, Daytona USA, Virtual Cop and Virtual Fighter, many you can still enjoy and play today.

In 1996 Sega released its latest arcade board revision called Model 3. While its specs look unimpressive today (a mere 66mhz processor with 8mb of RAM at release) this machine blew away the competition with a massive leap in graphical fidelity (an interesting sidenote, SEGA actually use to co-operate with none other than Lockheed Martin for their graphics at the time, the US aerospace company). While gamers at home were being amazed with Mario 64 and the likes of Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, SEGA in one swoop had just made these games look glaringly obsolete with Virtual Fighter 3.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=f9IkfEWwNAM

By looking at that video you can appreciate how far SEGA had pushed the envelope of gaming and graphical fidelity in 3 short years from the release of Virtua Figher in 1993.

Anyways, after VF3 was released for the arcade SEGA started plans to release a home console version for the Sega Saturn. However this undoubtedly would pose a great problem for SEGA, as the Saturn let alone any console on the market at the time would simply be unable to run VF3 without a severe degredation in graphical quality. As time passed rumours began to emerge when the home port would be released and how they would handle it. The most popular rumour is that SEGA was working on a special RAM cart for VF3 which came with the game (it was common among many fighting games on the Saturn to come with 1mb/4mb RAM carts to allow arcade perfect ports) which would boast a significant boost in video memory and an upgrade in graphics thanks to a chip which would give the Saturn a 'step-up' to Model 3 capability.

This rumored RAM cartridge would have given the Saturn some serious muscle and been able for it to reach and probably exceed the 3d graphical capabilities on the PS1 and N64, but sadly the failing fortunes of the Saturn in the west made it impossible for this lost gem to ever see the light of day. The Saturn was pushed aside in favor of the Dreamcast, which launched in Japan in 1998 and SEGA pulled the plug on the Saturn port (the reason is suppose to be because they did not want the inferior Saturn port affecting publicity and sales of VF3tb, which was going to be a significant draw card for the Dreamcast). The Saturn port went gold twice was ready for production but SEGA never released it, to the disdain of many Saturn gamers.

It is a shame that this game was never released as if it lived up to the rumor and promises it would have been a fantastic collectors item for any SEGA fan and gaming collector.

Luckily there have been screenshots that have emerged and I would like to share them with you. When I came across these photos my draw literally hit the floor, I still can't believe that they got the Saturn to achieve these levels of 3d graphics. While they are an obvious downgrade from the arcade and dreamcast version of VF3, I think if this was released that this game would have been the most impressive game on the market for 32 bit consoles and shut up any critics of the Saturn's 3d capabilities. I have read that AM2 was able to get VF3 pushing well over 500,000 polygons/sec on the Saturn, which is incredible at the time.

it may seem amusing to some but I would KILL to get my hands on this game, as it is an amazing piece of video game history that has been lost. Hopefully one day we may see some more media on this game or actually see a leaked version hit the web, that could be playable with a Saturn emulator or maybe on a future issue of SEGA Ages.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy these screens as much as I did, as it is amazing that the Saturn was capable of graphics of such quality

These pictures have already been posted, my pleasure as I want to see and it copy past from other thread as text !
View attachment 5178 View attachment 5179 View attachment 5180 View attachment 5181

 

I find it so funny that people still talk about the Saturn being a flop when in Japan it was far from a flop. ONLY IN THE WEST was it a flop. It's like the great video game crash people go on about. That only happened in the US.

Also, those Virtua Fighter 3 shots are from a poor emulation of the model 3 arcade. Anyone who thinks the Saturn could look anything like that obviously has no idea about what the Saturn can do or how a Saturn looks in the graphical department. All consoles have their own graphical look. The 3DO, N64, Saturn, PlayStation, PS2, Dreamcast, Game Cube. They all have their own unique look.

 

...Am I the only one that notices there's no way in hell Greatest TR Beta's wrote either of those posts? Except for the contrasting "These pictures have already been posted, my pleasure as I want to see" at the end.

Where did you steal those from?

Edit Quick google search: http://forums.anandtech.com/archive/index.php/t-2194884.html

Dude form your own opinions instead of stealing someone else's wall of text. :biggrin-new:

 

I did say it was already Posted as copy and Past didn't I ?

 

Oh my god this is hilarious. I also love the fact that we talked about those screenshots just a couple of pages back.

 

No, before your post ended by saying ""These pictures have already been posted, my pleasure as I want to see." Now only after seeing me call you out you edited it to say "These pictures have already been posted, my pleasure as I want to see and it copy past from other thread as text !"

You're pretty bad at lying man.

 

Indeed. Even I remember what was originally posted before the edit.

 

Thank you for saying this. It sums it up very much.
Amazing how people are uneducated when it's related to that era and gather their information just by parroting the 1995 may-to-september mishap and conclude how the Saturn ended that generation.
And $400 ? You do realized Sega made a price cut to $299 when the PS1 was released, even more down the line. :rolleyes-new:

 

tbf, most of the market is in the west....so if its considered a flop there then people are going to see it as a flop. Japan is considered as a pretty niche market compared to the states and europe

 

I'll say...

Correct me if i'm wrong here... But it was to my understanding that the Saturn's board architecture was rather hard to consolidate in order to make for easy price drops, which is why Sega instead opted to bundled their console with a 3 best selling pack in games to justify a $400 price tag even with a $299 rival console on the market.

 

That's just how it is. The US is the industry's most substantial English-speaking audience bar none. Other countries in the grand scheme of things are more significant for their contribution to hardware/software R&D, than end-users.

 

From what I remember, Sega released the Saturn early in the US/Eur to prevent (and profit from) the import craze at that time and match it in price to Japan accordingly. It was released in the JPN market in november (I think?) 1994.
That give us a difference of what ? Around 10 months if it were released in september as they planned earlier.
As a business, would you just turn a blind eye and let that happen unmoderated and lose profit ? For 10 months or so as well ?


Ofcourse, the Japanese launch was extremely successful and they presumed it it would be so in the US hence the rush release. And don't let anyone tell you Virtua Fighter or Daytona were bad and ruined the machine's image.


The reason people were importing a Saturn, was due to these 2 specific games.
Where would you get these 2, high in demand games on a home console at the time really ? Or would you rather queue at the Arcades all day ? Even the 32X version came WAAAY later. So that was not a choice btw. (In VF case)


Lastly, your calendar is way off dude. The 3 Pack-in was a 1996 holiday offer.
IIRC the Saturn was @ $200ish by that point.

 

Dude, thats me on other forums.




Sega Saturn has full rendered quadrilaterals while Playstation, Nintendo 64 and PC only used triangles on own geometric primitive.
What I mean by that, when Lara croft run in almost 45 degree angle on sega saturn, you just able to see lara rounded boob in few second due to that quadrilaterals graphics and you notice that you don't see square block lines on Sega Saturn while Playstation and PC does has that.

That another reason why there is so many Tomb Raider betas test done on Sega Saturn than Playstation or PC at the time. It really sad cause feature has been taken away and been downgraded in certain areas.

 

Yeah those bouncing tits totally showed the power of the Saturn.
Totally worth it.

 

Sega used to make games consoles. Then it took its audience for granted, and they didn't like it. Now Sega only makes games...

Sad but true.. They killing themselves off !

Correct me If I'm wrong, Similar to PSVita, not doing well sell in Japan due to games that Jap don't want while Europe is.

Well I wouldn't say it worth it... just new at the time for gaming industry, even I didn't know Sega Saturn Has that kind of the PoWeR back then until I saw it on youtube in 2010.

I'm Still amaze it was originally design for 2D Platform gaming but manage to make it into 3D Platform game.

 

just my 2 cents. Saturn's BIG problem were awful devkits and sotware handed to 3rd party teams.

 

I might be wrong, but I really don't think the issue of disc space was to blame for Core Design reworking Lara's hair in the original Tomb Raider. If anything, it was probably because they weren't able to realistically animate her original ponytail, or maybe it was due to polygon clipping. This would also explain why later sequels had this "problem" rectified, since the developers had more time/programming expertise to go back and look at the situation in greater depth. Actually, I seem to recall a comment about the real time physics calculations being made that was ultimately slowing the overall game down, though there was never any mention of storage limitations. Sorry if this isn't correct - I just don't want to see a thread (or at least one branch of discussion, as this was initially on the topic of Saturn Virtua Fighter 3) being derailed as a result of misinformation. Can someone confirm the quote I seem to be remembering?

P.S. Similarly, would the bouncing, er, assets in Dead Or Alive really need that much processing power? I'm not so sure about this claim, either! Surely the overall effect is quite similar, from a software point of view, at least, to the undulating floor surface in the NiGHTS stage, Soft Museum?