First Impressions: Sega Saturn

I've had my Saturn now for two days and I've been playing it quite a bit. I'm very happy for what I got for my money; on eBay they only said it'd come with four games, when in fact it came with eight! The games are all complete; disks in good nick, manuals, the little bits of paper inside the manuals and also the little game label things which Japanese Saturn games came with. The only problem was that some of the cases seemed to have got a little damaged in transit, but these are jewel cases we're talking about here, and I should be able to transfer all the covers and everything to new ones. The ST Key works great, but I now wish I'd bought the Action Replay 4 in 1 instead which not only allows play of any region's games, but also a cheat device and as a 1mb and 4mb RAM cartridge which some games need.

The games I've played so far mostly have an arcade feel to them. For example Sega Rally, which is a very basic racing game, part of the beginning of 3d racers in the 32-bit era alongside titles such as Ridge Racer, however this is a very different game to that, but they are both really simple to play with great gameplay to boot. Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua Fighter Kids are very much the arcade fighter, again very simple to pick up and play like arcade games are. Unfortunately the other games I probably won't play for a long time as they are in Japanese and I don't understand a word of it!

The console itself looks solidly built, even though the plastic does look a bit cheap. The battery to store memory was a great idea, and shows Sega were ahead of there time with this due to data being stores in a similar vein nowadays with hard drives in consoles, although at the Saturn's time this technology was underdeveloped for consoles and the battery can run out.

The controller is nice and comfortable to hold. It's like a Mega Drive controller, but smaller making it easier to grip with your hands, and the addition of X, Y and Z buttons as well as two shoulder ones. These shoulder buttons seem a bit stiff, but still work well.

I'm glad I chose this console. I can see that I am going to have a good time collecting it; the games I've played so far have impressed me. It's clear that this console had a huge amount of potential which it didn't live up to; Sega probably shot themselves in the foot with the surprise launch.