Every once in a while, I come back to this footage and I'm always amazed to see the Saturn could even render any of that at all. The character modeling and motion, and texture detail look phenomenal for the hardware (or any game hardware from that era).
Not to mention that the Saturn was created as a 2D power house, and the Playstation was built for 3D. This looks amazing when you consider the amount of polygons the Saturn could push compared to the Playstation, and this looks better than some of the best playstation games.
It did run tomb Raider didn't it ? I don't see why it couldn't run this. Games like panzer Dragoon are much more demanding graphically and they run smoothly.
This is not running on a stock Saturn you m0r0n. Its running on a Saturn devkit with more RAM and an extra 3D accelerated board on top. This demo wouldve run at 5 fps on a stock Saturn you ignorant fool
Yes and it's little known but Shenmue didn't really push DC's hardware that much. They used the "straight forward" and fast way through Windows CE with a PC based devkit.
You clearly do not take the loading times and memory constraints into account. What we got IS the absolute max, even with the crazy constant streaming engine they pulled off... if anything, the Shenmue presentation clearly demonstrates to the public how graphical demos and actual games relate to each other on a system. What is possible in its rawest form is shown on the extra disc where the ultra definition heads give those speeches, while what is possible with a bunch of game logic, is the actual game we got. Shenmue II dares to state otherwise... with its ridiculously beefed up crowd shots mainly, and overall somewhat more complex environments, but was in serious need of further millions worth of optimization, and even then it wouldn't ever be perfectly smooth.
I think that's why a lot of games nowadays have the option of a grain filter. Because HD textures look great, but not everything in real life looks so "clean". It's the imperfections that make stuff look good
True, though some of todays games would never be as immersive without modern graphics. But there's something about these oldskool 3D graphics that makes them special. Perhaps it's just nostalgia, but there's something almost artistic about it. When playing old games in emulation or some of the modern console ports I hate the crisp textures and edges. Whenever possible I'll always go for the original mode and preferrably with scanlines. It just looks so much more authentic. Anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going with this comment... bye now 😅 EDIT: I've recently become very tired of seeing the same polished realistic style of games everywhere. I love the day's when games looked a little rough around the edges, they were experimental, used workarounds to achieve certain things. I've dug up all my old consoles and am replaying my old favorites from scratch. God have things changed. No lenghty tutorials or bitchin's about some minor graphical flaws. Just good old gameplay focussed design, graphics that require some imagination at times. I haven't found any new games in the last couple months that interest me one bit. Yet Ocarina of Time, Mario RPG, the original Sonic Games, my large collection of GBA,N64 and Gamecube games are reminding me how great gaming used to be before all this online stuff.
I can only imagine how different tha gaming landscape would be today if SEGA didn't botch the Saturn at nearly every opportunity they had, this looks absurdly impressive, and way ahead of what the PSone could do.
They really did shoot themselves in the foot every chance they got with the Saturn, if they had marketed it better and worked with devs by sharing their coding etc they would have captured more of the market.
all they had to do was not rush the launch and market it better. that's it. it would've been a down year compared to the genesis, but by having a respectable launch platform they would've attracted more third party developers and hell, maybe even shenmue is released which absolutely would've sold the system.
This is what the Saturn would have been capable of when programmed by someone that knows the console properly. Sadly nobody had the time to learn how to program it even though Sega documented it superbly. Sega themselves commented that only about 1 in 100 programmer would be good enough to fully make use of the Saturn's hardware without a lot of extra learning.
Amineo Very true, but at the end of the day its foolish to develop a console THIS hard to develop on in the first place. PS2 was similar in this way, only it was so popular that it was worth it for developers to learn the machine. If it wasn't so popular, the other machines likely would have gotten more support just for being easier & more powerful to work on.
Hm the diffference is that PS2 and PS3 were really powerful machines, not just complicated. The Saturn was a lot weaker than the PS1 even with optimal coding. Sega had the best 3D coders of the early - mid 90s, Saturn was punching above its weight, there was no juice left.
Your speculations are "proven" by whom exactly? By yourself?. If anything you are desperately making lame excuses, well, keep on dreaming. The PS1 was way better with 3D than the Saturn could ever been - that has been actually PROVEN a 100 times. If the Saturn was better, Sega would have destroyed Sony with their 1st Party titles, that simply did not happen, so get over it.
***** Saturn is more powerful than PSX, but Saturn was like PS3 of it time, except even first party developers didn't know how to get that performance out, often it happened that only 1 of the 2 CPUs were used, also a lot of it was coded in assembly, which while more optimized, it took longer.
Marcuss2 That's a myth. The Saturn was bad, really bad for 3D. There is a video up there which explains it very well: the thing is what you see the background is rendered similar to mode7, watch?t=278&v=f_OchOV_WDg The only advantage the Saturn had is the correct texture mapping, in all other 3D aspect the PSX was better. It still has awesome looking 3D games though....
feamatar I didnt say Saturn was good for 3D, it wasnt, however, fact that developers were coding in assembly for it instead of C (Most PSX games were in C), meant that they were several times more optimized. This Saturn footage blows anything of its generation out.
Critical parts of the engines were written in assembly on both hardware, the difference is not that. What you don't understand that they use here a technique to render the backgrounds with VDP2, which is fine for some cases, but useless for games like GT or Tomb Raider.
The polygon clipping is a staple of Saturn 3D. This wasn't running on a PC, it was captured from a real SEGA Saturn. Fucking insane. VDP1 working overtime. Imagine if the rom were leaked, oh my god...
Saturn had atrocious polygon clipping and due to using quads it was much harder to cull them on the view frustum.......and BTW THIS IS NOT RUNNING ON A STOCK SATURN YOU FREAKING M0R0NS.......this is running on a Saturn Dev unit with much more RAM and an extra 3D accelerating board on top.....ignorant fools, the stock Saturn barely can run Burning Rangers at 15fps and you think is going to run this? Clowns
@@segaunited3855Saturn definitely had polygon clipping, but it didn't have nearly as bad issues as the PlayStation, especially with regards to texture warping and just general precision.
I'm trying to imagine what it would have been like to play this on the Saturn. It's mindblowing that they could get graphics like this out of that machine, especially compared to something like Metal Gear Solid for the PS1, where every character has about two polygons in their face and a 3x3 pixel texture map.
This is why Shenmue cost '$70 million' dollars to make. Becuase they essentially made Shenmue 1&2 twice. For both the Saturn and Dreamcast. Plus the Saturn was a bitch to develop for. Costing time and money.
Nikyle McIntosh And Yu Suzuki said it was closer to $47 million and that was the whole project. As you can see Shenmue 1 & 2 was split in parts later on the Dreamcast.
Nikyle McIntosh I think Shenmue 3 is going to cost so much less than that. There are better development kits and games like The Witcher 3 made a great job with 33 million dollars of budget.
+Nikyle McIntosh Yeah it must have cost them so much to make it for the saturn. Also, a lot of the money is the marketing which I believe Sony is paying for when Shenmue III comes out.
+Jeipi59 33 million is more than we could dream of for Shen Mue III. At the moment they do not even have 7 millions at their hands. If you want to change this, and contribute to a better game: shenmue.link/order/
Speaking as someone who spent way too many hundreds of dollars in the Shenmue 3 KS, I feel the same way. They're already getting a huge amount of flak about the graphics in their work-in-progress clips, but with the budget they have they simply can't compete with modern AAA titles in that area. The graphical style of Shenmue 1 and 2 sits right on the line where there's enough detail to create a vivid, believable world and characters, without dipping into the uncanny valley. I'd prefer Shenmue 3 to have the same vibe, rather than pushing for photo-realism they simply won't be able to achieve.
@@xtr.7662 Yeah, kinda disappointing. It's good that it released on the Dreamcast instead, but imagine what the audiences reaction would be had this come out on the Saturn.
I remember hoping MGS to be like this but being disappointed at the nodding heads, which still had a charm to it. With this level of quality in face expression and overall graphics, I would have bought a Saturn in an instant, definitely killer app material!
With this, it is clear to me that the Saturn could meet and even exceed the PS1's capabilities, with about 100 times the effort to develop when compared to a typical PS1 title, lol. The people behind Shenmue for Saturn were clearly masters of the craft. This makes me wish we could have seen more of what the Saturn could do.
@EightBit Man Saturn's 1994 SDKs were notoriously flawed and riddled with confusing language and badly translated coding instructions, that's because SEGA released the console incomplete. Saturn's overall design was only 80% finished and its Documentation was completely UNFINISHED. N64 had the same issue in 1995, SDKs weren't fully ready yet, With Saturn and N64 BETTER more versatile SDKs arrived 2 years later, Saturn in 1996 and N64 in 1997 showing BOTH consoles as being FAR more superior to PSX and more advanced and POWERFUL.
One thing I did like about the Saturn, especially when applied to 3D fighting games, was it's ability to use a scaling and rotating background playfield to generating the fighting rings (similar to the old Mode 7 effect on the SNES) hence saving on the polygon count. On the PS1, everything had to be constructed via polygons. It's a trivial point now, but back then it was fairly significant :)
This video still blows me away. It really shows what the Saturn was capable of. The Saturn was tough to program for but with more time more developers would have learned it. its a shame really
Funny, I was pretty much going to post the same comment. I wish they would have pushed games like Burning Rangers or Panzer Dragoon Saga to the Dreamcast. Imagine what those would have looked like.
Apparently, by the time Sega made the monumental blunder of claiming that "Saturn isn't our future", they had released new devkits for the system, which made it much easier to utilise the power.
Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Dreamcast would have been awesome. Tons more people would have been able to play it. This Shenmue Saturn footage is amazing but I'm so glad they pushed it to the Dreamcast. If it had come out on Saturn it would just be a game most people have heard about but never played. It would probably go for $600 on ebay now.
***** Perhaps, but that seems like just an excuse to me. The PS2 was just as difficult to work with as the Saturn was, yet most developers were willing to overlook it and try to push the PS2 despite it. Sega learnt from its mistake and made the Dreamcast a lot easier to program for, yet that made no difference, as most developers instead supported the much more difficult-to-program PS2 instead. Sony was able to get away with it, yet Sega wasn't. And the main reasons are because of financial power and marketing muscle, which Sega was lacking and Sony had in abundance.
***** Nope the Saturn is more difficult to develop for than the PS2. The PS2 doesn't have its RAM separated like 15 times. ...but the PS2 isn't far behind. On the scale of hard to develop for: Saturn = 8/10 PS2 = 6/10 N64 = 5/10 PS1 = 2/10 Dreamcast = 2/10 If you're still curious: PS3 = 7.5/10 360 = 4/10 Wii = ?/10 Original Xbox = 2/10
siIvermate Not really. The Saturn and PS2 both have their RAM separated in the same manner: Main RAM, Video RAM, and Audio RAM. You're under-estimating the difficulty of the Sony systems. I'd rate it as follows: PS3 = 9/10 Saturn = 7/10 PS2 = 7/10 The PS3 is definitely more difficult to develop for than the Saturn. Developers were complaining about the Saturn's dual-core setup, yet they have to deal with up to nine cores with the PS3. Despite the complaints, many third-party developers have been supporting the PS3 regardless. The difficulty thing is just an excuse. The real reason is marketing, which Sony has been doing better than Sega.
***** Believe me, I agree %100 that people wouldn't be complaining about the Saturn's architecture if the console actually sold good. The Saturn's processors share the same memory bus, thus screwing over the whole dual-core setup unless you do some really tough programming.
GOD bless Saturn. Graphically blasts every game on PSX! Ultra detailed faces, evinroments, detailed extras, lighting, additional stuff, ... very optimum fps ! That clearely show Saturn was poverfull, but saddly hard to program :((
Yeah, due to the Saturn having 2 processors, it was very tedious to program games so that they could operate optimally using both processors without complications coming up with the code. If you knew the hardware inside out, and took the time to study how the Saturn works, then you could become a great Saturn developer... but that would only pay off in making games for the console late in its life, which was cut short, unfortunately.
The Saturn was a wacky system, you could pull resources from every corner. They even used the sound chip to help process some of the 3D. The PS1 couldn't do that. With an arsenal, including the kitchen sink, the Saturn was more 3D capable than the PS1 could ever be, even though the ps1 had a dedicated 3D chip. The saturn used brute force.
This looks insane, blowing out the other two consoles. My mouth is just agape watching this, never realizing the Saturn could really have that kind of power. I would love to see this become playable someday.
This definitely looks better than anything the N64 ever gave us. It's not really a fair comparison though. This is just a video, might have not even been running on native Saturn hardware, so who knows if it could even run well. In this video itself animation seems quite choppy for instance.
I Would give anything to see a playable version, the Saturn had much more to offer than many gave it credit for, it was an outcast in the 32bit era because of the success of the PlayStation, and the hardware was so odd that really only sega themselves knew how to develop for it, but if they had released shenmue for Saturn though, it probably would have changed a lot of people's minds about the system, but still wouldnt have been enough to save it, the Saturn had far worse problems than competing graphically with the Ps1, but the final game on the dreamcast is still a masterpiece and the Saturn was and still is a great console, long live the Saturn and shenmue!
hopefully one day the code and all the work that had been done is released and a small team butchers something together that is somewhat playable. Definitely would be pretty epic to play just the very start and watch the entirety of the lan di vs father fight on the saturn.
2:02 really like how this area is lit, it looks a lot more like how Kowloon looked in real life while still being traversable with Shenmue's tank controls
Crazy how good this looks. It looks 100 times better than ANYTHING on any other console of the time. Shame it didn't happen but we got it evetually so its all good.
This footage covers the first two games from start to walking through the forest with Shenhua at the end of Shenmue II. Makes me wonder how complete this was. It even includes fairly minor cutscenes, like when Ryo and Ren bring the cassette tapes to Ren's hideout. Fingers crossed for a leak sometime!
Saturn was clearly the best machine in its era,this video prooved it.If only how developers knew how to utilize its power,the gaming map today would have been different.SEGA was gaming itself the most important company,they set new standards each time they created a console.Video games just werent the same after SEGAs downfall.
Yes, but it was very difficult to develop for and many developers chose not to bother with the Saturn for that reason. It was much more powerful then the PS1, but the PS1 was was a breeze to work with compared to the Saturn. That's why the PS1 had such a huge amount of 3rd party support. The N64 was apparently also hard to develop for and didn't have a ton of 3rd party support, but Nintendo's very strong 1st party titles helped to make up for that. Then they had Rare who made things even better still. The Saturn didn't have a Rare or that many great 1st party titles (only a few). Sega also had Bernie Stolar in charge who decided not to allow rpgs to be released on the console outside of Japan (although a few somehow managed to slip by.) Honestly, it's no wonder PS1 came out on top by such a long shot. I've always thought that the Saturn was by far the best console in regards to the transition from 2D to 3D games though. While the PS1 and N64 were both plenty capable of running 2D games, they were definitely not made with 2D gaming in mind. The Saturn was, and it was better suited for 2D games then the PS1. It also seemed to have almost an equal amount of 2D and 3D games. The other consoles definitely had FAR more 3D games then 2D (especially the N64 which only had a scant few 2D games.)
DaveDoc1984 Because it is not running on a stock Saturn. This demo is actually running on dev kit with more memory. The stock Saturn could not run this, another reason development was shifted to Dreamcast.
Yes, it was a better decision to release on the Dreamcast due to the Saturn's age and the DC's release schedule. That, and that there was no way to run this on a stock Saturn. Sorry.
I think this could have been possible, even with the hardware. Let's not forget, Resident Evil 2 required two discs for the story but Capcom managed to fit the entire game into one cartridge for the N64 even without the expansion pak.
This game shapes how GTA 3 world rendered. You can see people outside the building when you are in the building in Shenmue 2, suggesting if all of the area isn't separated or bonded together. In GTA VC, you can see the same evidence as Shenmue 2 by exiting the building improperly.
I love my playstation. But wow. The saturn was hard to develop for but if this is what we could have expected from this game. Wow. The saturn had some serious untapped potential.
i have really stated to appreciate the saturn for its capabilities. It was such an underdog system that had a lot of potential. Just seeing the facial features and how smooth they are is amazing. Especaily from 2:05 to 2:10 and 2:55 to 3:00 I the shadows and lighting look good.
If this made use of the Saturn 3D controller I would have bought it for that. That shit needed more applications. Also is this supposed to imply Shenmue and Shenmue II were once a single game?
SolidSonicTH If I remember correctly Sega originally intended to release the game in episodes covering a few chapters of the story with each release. This is also what 'modern' Saturn games might have looked like, because they were using a new version of the dev kit.
+Manjoume Maybe Panzer Dragoon Saga or Burning Rangers. Those were originally released in Japan at least a year earlier, but were brought to the US and Europe in 1998 and boasted impressive 3D visuals.
You know... I grew up during the 90s, i was a ninty kid back in the day, although i equally liked every console..but if this game came out on the saturn at the time, i wouldve begged my dad to buy me one... I still regret to this day to buy a dreamcast when sega supported it.. Brought one 3 years ago just for this spellilbinding, long forgotten, gorgeous franchise...i sorta feel responsible for segas demise during the 00s as console manufacturer. And of course for this franchise.... I urge sega to bring it back, i would buy the third game within a heartbeat!!!!! #saveshenmue !!!!
I still find it astonishing how they were able to push out the sort of graphics the PlayStation could only dream of on a console that came out a year beforehand, especially the facial animations and detail...simply astonishing.
This is amazing. I wonder how far through development on Saturn they got before moving to dreamcast? A lot of the footage shown here is fairly late in the game (not that development starts at the beginning of a game necessarily anyway),. I always wondered how much of their huge budget got wasted on developing a game for a platform that would eventually not get utilised.
Honestly.. some parts of this look as good as PS2 first generation games because the art style goes a long way to hide places where the poly count would be lower.
Yep because how it was not utilise it to its full potential. An example would destruction derby 2 a ps1 game that was going come out for the saturn but sadly did not there is a video of it being in the prototype stage you should check it out to get an general understanding. The saturn had so much potential but because of how hard it was to program. I believe this put off developers so they left the saturn alone and gave up. there are some exceptions obviously.
Its some texture trickery to make us feel like those lights are really causing the effects on the floor and walls. In reality, the textures themselves have the light and dark areas baked in.
The Saturn had impressive hardware at the time of its release, but its design, with two CPUs and six other processors, made harnessing this power extremely difficult for developers used to conventional programming.
Awesome , you see that the Saturn was able to do much more than the PlayStation . But see errors in various parts that were fixed on other consoles like the 64 ( hands - cube) .It was very sad that the Nintendo 64 was limited to cartridges.
Игры
I still pray that this gets leaked someday,it must exist somewhere
That and Virtua Fighter 3 for Saturn.
Every once in a while, I come back to this footage and I'm always amazed to see the Saturn could even render any of that at all. The character modeling and motion, and texture detail look phenomenal for the hardware (or any game hardware from that era).
Not to mention that the Saturn was created as a 2D power house, and the Playstation was built for 3D. This looks amazing when you consider the amount of polygons the Saturn could push compared to the Playstation, and this looks better than some of the best playstation games.
@@joelsinn9302 on paper it was a more powerful than the playstation, shame it was so hard to work on
@@joelsinn9302 Saturn was NOT created as a 2D Powerhouse. That is FALSE sir. It was planned as 3D Machine right from the start.
It did run tomb Raider didn't it ?
I don't see why it couldn't run this.
Games like panzer Dragoon are much more demanding graphically and they run smoothly.
@@goatintuxedo2206 idk, i see much higher polycount and also texture maps and pre-baked shadows (+ some realtime) together
This is crazy to which level the Saturn has been pushed. The render is incredible. My dream is a playable version of this Saturn build.
This is not running on a stock Saturn you m0r0n. Its running on a Saturn devkit with more RAM and an extra 3D accelerated board on top. This demo wouldve run at 5 fps on a stock Saturn you ignorant fool
For a Saturn 3D game that sadly never came out, it looks really nice. And that Japanese symphony is sublime.
as good as shenmue was on the Dreamcast, this for me is the more technical marvel and shows what the Sega Saturn was capable of in the right hands
Yes and it's little known but Shenmue didn't really push DC's hardware that much. They used the "straight forward" and fast way through Windows CE with a PC based devkit.
@@Malheirodsdo you know how far into saturn dev they got?
@@DJWhylafihya The very first scene of game one, and one of the very last of the second game are here... take a wild guess.
You clearly do not take the loading times and memory constraints into account. What we got IS the absolute max, even with the crazy constant streaming engine they pulled off... if anything, the Shenmue presentation clearly demonstrates to the public how graphical demos and actual games relate to each other on a system. What is possible in its rawest form is shown on the extra disc where the ultra definition heads give those speeches, while what is possible with a bunch of game logic, is the actual game we got. Shenmue II dares to state otherwise... with its ridiculously beefed up crowd shots mainly, and overall somewhat more complex environments, but was in serious need of further millions worth of optimization, and even then it wouldn't ever be perfectly smooth.
I'll never look at my Saturn the same ever agian
Again
I think blocky textures have so much personality
brokenSCART Agreed! It's as if they are not afraid to be...games!! 32bit era had the best style of 3d graphics.
I think that's why a lot of games nowadays have the option of a grain filter. Because HD textures look great, but not everything in real life looks so "clean". It's the imperfections that make stuff look good
You dont get irony do you ;-)
Totally agree.
(The only thing that gains personality from higher resolutions are naked breasts and genitalia in general)
True, though some of todays games would never be as immersive without modern graphics. But there's something about these oldskool 3D graphics that makes them special. Perhaps it's just nostalgia, but there's something almost artistic about it. When playing old games in emulation or some of the modern console ports I hate the crisp textures and edges. Whenever possible I'll always go for the original mode and preferrably with scanlines. It just looks so much more authentic. Anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going with this comment... bye now 😅
EDIT: I've recently become very tired of seeing the same polished realistic style of games everywhere. I love the day's when games looked a little rough around the edges, they were experimental, used workarounds to achieve certain things. I've dug up all my old consoles and am replaying my old favorites from scratch. God have things changed. No lenghty tutorials or bitchin's about some minor graphical flaws. Just good old gameplay focussed design, graphics that require some imagination at times. I haven't found any new games in the last couple months that interest me one bit. Yet Ocarina of Time, Mario RPG, the original Sonic Games, my large collection of GBA,N64 and Gamecube games are reminding me how great gaming used to be before all this online stuff.
wow, didn't know development was that far along on the sega saturn.
SuperJumpReviews It begin in 1993.
I can only imagine how different tha gaming landscape would be today if SEGA didn't botch the Saturn at nearly every opportunity they had, this looks absurdly impressive, and way ahead of what the PSone could do.
They really did shoot themselves in the foot every chance they got with the Saturn, if they had marketed it better and worked with devs by sharing their coding etc they would have captured more of the market.
all they had to do was not rush the launch and market it better. that's it. it would've been a down year compared to the genesis, but by having a respectable launch platform they would've attracted more third party developers and hell, maybe even shenmue is released which absolutely would've sold the system.
This is what the Saturn would have been capable of when programmed by someone that knows the console properly. Sadly nobody had the time to learn how to program it even though Sega documented it superbly. Sega themselves commented that only about 1 in 100 programmer would be good enough to fully make use of the Saturn's hardware without a lot of extra learning.
Amineo
Very true, but at the end of the day its foolish to develop a console THIS hard to develop on in the first place. PS2 was similar in this way, only it was so popular that it was worth it for developers to learn the machine. If it wasn't so popular, the other machines likely would have gotten more support just for being easier & more powerful to work on.
PS3 also had a bigger issue than the PS2. But Sega's machine specs were changed last minute which was likely part of the problem.
Hm the diffference is that PS2 and PS3 were really powerful machines, not just complicated. The Saturn was a lot weaker than the PS1 even with optimal coding. Sega had the best 3D coders of the early - mid 90s, Saturn was punching above its weight, there was no juice left.
Your speculations are "proven" by whom exactly? By yourself?. If anything you are desperately making lame excuses, well, keep on dreaming. The PS1 was way better with 3D than the Saturn could ever been - that has been actually PROVEN a 100 times. If the Saturn was better, Sega would have destroyed Sony with their 1st Party titles, that simply did not happen, so get over it.
@SG1984 Fully mapped and shaded polygons per second: PlayStation : 150'000 Saturn: 180'000. Case closed.
I expected faces to have 10 polygons at most, not this.
Marcuss2 Then there are people who say PlayStation was more powerful than the Sega Saturn.
***** Saturn is more powerful than PSX, but Saturn was like PS3 of it time, except even first party developers didn't know how to get that performance out, often it happened that only 1 of the 2 CPUs were used, also a lot of it was coded in assembly, which while more optimized, it took longer.
Marcuss2 That's a myth. The Saturn was bad, really bad for 3D. There is a video up there which explains it very well: the thing is what you see the background is rendered similar to mode7, watch?t=278&v=f_OchOV_WDg
The only advantage the Saturn had is the correct texture mapping, in all other 3D aspect the PSX was better. It still has awesome looking 3D games though....
feamatar I didnt say Saturn was good for 3D, it wasnt, however, fact that developers were coding in assembly for it instead of C (Most PSX games were in C), meant that they were several times more optimized.
This Saturn footage blows anything of its generation out.
Critical parts of the engines were written in assembly on both hardware, the difference is not that. What you don't understand that they use here a technique to render the backgrounds with VDP2, which is fine for some cases, but useless for games like GT or Tomb Raider.
The polygon clipping is a staple of Saturn 3D. This wasn't running on a PC, it was captured from a real SEGA Saturn. Fucking insane. VDP1 working overtime. Imagine if the rom were leaked, oh my god...
Saturn RARELY had polygon clipping. PSX frequently suffered from it.
Saturn had atrocious polygon clipping and due to using quads it was much harder to cull them on the view frustum.......and BTW THIS IS NOT RUNNING ON A STOCK SATURN YOU FREAKING M0R0NS.......this is running on a Saturn Dev unit with much more RAM and an extra 3D accelerating board on top.....ignorant fools, the stock Saturn barely can run Burning Rangers at 15fps and you think is going to run this? Clowns
This is was most likely alpha and looked like it could do with more optimisation.
@@segaunited3855Saturn definitely had polygon clipping, but it didn't have nearly as bad issues as the PlayStation, especially with regards to texture warping and just general precision.
if this game ended up releasing it definitely would probably be more expensive then panzer dragoon saga by today
I'm trying to imagine what it would have been like to play this on the Saturn. It's mindblowing that they could get graphics like this out of that machine, especially compared to something like Metal Gear Solid for the PS1, where every character has about two polygons in their face and a 3x3 pixel texture map.
This is why Shenmue cost '$70 million' dollars to make. Becuase they essentially made Shenmue 1&2 twice. For both the Saturn and Dreamcast. Plus the Saturn was a bitch to develop for. Costing time and money.
Nikyle McIntosh And Yu Suzuki said it was closer to $47 million and that was the whole project. As you can see Shenmue 1 & 2 was split in parts later on the Dreamcast.
Nikyle McIntosh I think Shenmue 3 is going to cost so much less than that. There are better development kits and games like The Witcher 3 made a great job with 33 million dollars of budget.
+Jeipi59 and bungie did a shitty job with a 500 million budget
+Nikyle McIntosh Yeah it must have cost them so much to make it for the saturn. Also, a lot of the money is the marketing which I believe Sony is paying for when Shenmue III comes out.
+Jeipi59 33 million is more than we could dream of for Shen Mue III. At the moment they do not even have 7 millions at their hands. If you want to change this, and contribute to a better game: shenmue.link/order/
if shenmue 3 came out like this, i wouldnt mind
The best comment i saw so far! :D Yeah i want it too!
kamoteQ Well, I'd say the Unreal Engine 4 has a bit more...punch than this, don't you agree?
The story of Shenmue is not "typical revenge". Its story is genius, unlike all those crappy kung fu movies.
Speaking as someone who spent way too many hundreds of dollars in the Shenmue 3 KS, I feel the same way. They're already getting a huge amount of flak about the graphics in their work-in-progress clips, but with the budget they have they simply can't compete with modern AAA titles in that area.
The graphical style of Shenmue 1 and 2 sits right on the line where there's enough detail to create a vivid, believable world and characters, without dipping into the uncanny valley. I'd prefer Shenmue 3 to have the same vibe, rather than pushing for photo-realism they simply won't be able to achieve.
+マロ the story is _alright_ at best. Take off your nostalgia goggles, otherwise you'll be disappointed when the new one comes out.
Damn, this is extremely impressive for the Saturn...
Best looking game of the entire generation. Hands down.
Yea but this was never released so its just a tech demo
@@xtr.7662 Yeah, kinda disappointing. It's good that it released on the Dreamcast instead, but imagine what the audiences reaction would be had this come out on the Saturn.
I remember hoping MGS to be like this but being disappointed at the nodding heads, which still had a charm to it. With this level of quality in face expression and overall graphics, I would have bought a Saturn in an instant, definitely killer app material!
There nothing on playstation that looks close to this
+Vampirerockstar Or the Sega Saturn.
OwtDaftUK what do you mean? this game running on a sega saturn
Vampirerockstar I mean the game didn't come out on the Saturn and nothing else on the Saturn looks close to this.
OwtDaftUK gotcha
+Vampirerockstar chrono cross? tekken 3? mgs1? i also doubt this game would have ran decent on the saturn
Nobody is better than Yu Suzuki
say that to Shenmue III
@@innocentzbat Shen Mue 3 sux, I created my own spin off 3 years ago. I did a Tokyo Xtreme Racer X Shen Mue crossover-
I call it Shen Mue ZERO
only yu suzuki knows how to pushed the saturn to its limits.
With this, it is clear to me that the Saturn could meet and even exceed the PS1's capabilities, with about 100 times the effort to develop when compared to a typical PS1 title, lol. The people behind Shenmue for Saturn were clearly masters of the craft. This makes me wish we could have seen more of what the Saturn could do.
Saturn Bested PS1 even in 3D.
@EightBit Man Saturn's 1994 SDKs were notoriously flawed and riddled with confusing language and badly translated coding instructions, that's because SEGA released the console incomplete. Saturn's overall design was only 80% finished and its Documentation was completely UNFINISHED.
N64 had the same issue in 1995, SDKs weren't fully ready yet, With Saturn and N64 BETTER more versatile SDKs arrived 2 years later, Saturn in 1996 and N64 in 1997 showing BOTH consoles as being FAR more superior to PSX and more advanced and POWERFUL.
Quake for the Saturn had ONLINE CAPABILITIES that alone is already ABOVE the PS1
@@Dash120z Online Capabilities are bad?
@@segaunited3855 wrong wording I meant it that it was far superior than the PS1
amazing this this was made, but happy it came out on the dreamcast
One thing I did like about the Saturn, especially when applied to 3D fighting games, was it's ability to use a scaling and rotating background playfield to generating the fighting rings (similar to the old Mode 7 effect on the SNES) hence saving on the polygon count. On the PS1, everything had to be constructed via polygons. It's a trivial point now, but back then it was fairly significant :)
Last Bronx and Fighters Megamix used it. And on RPGs, Grandia did the town grounds like that
Wait, I had no idea that Shenmue was on the Sega Saturn!! It actually looks great!!!
This is insane.
This video still blows me away. It really shows what the Saturn was capable of. The Saturn was tough to program for but with more time more developers would have learned it. its a shame really
Funny, I was pretty much going to post the same comment.
I wish they would have pushed games like Burning Rangers or Panzer Dragoon Saga to the Dreamcast. Imagine what those would have looked like.
Apparently, by the time Sega made the monumental blunder of claiming that "Saturn isn't our future", they had released new devkits for the system, which made it much easier to utilise the power.
Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Dreamcast would have been awesome. Tons more people would have been able to play it. This Shenmue Saturn footage is amazing but I'm so glad they pushed it to the Dreamcast. If it had come out on Saturn it would just be a game most people have heard about but never played. It would probably go for $600 on ebay now.
Jakob Holgersson yeah I heard that the 2nd revision of the devkits were superior and much easier to utilize.
@@MetalHorrorGamer They were. The First ones were unreliable. So were N64's.
Between this and Hellslave, it's proven that the Saturn had so much untapped potential
This completely blows away the PS1, and even rivals the N64. If any proof is ever needed that the Saturn is more powerful than the PS1, this is it.
*****
Perhaps, but that seems like just an excuse to me. The PS2 was just as difficult to work with as the Saturn was, yet most developers were willing to overlook it and try to push the PS2 despite it.
Sega learnt from its mistake and made the Dreamcast a lot easier to program for, yet that made no difference, as most developers instead supported the much more difficult-to-program PS2 instead.
Sony was able to get away with it, yet Sega wasn't. And the main reasons are because of financial power and marketing muscle, which Sega was lacking and Sony had in abundance.
*****
Nope the Saturn is more difficult to develop for than the PS2. The PS2 doesn't have its RAM separated like 15 times.
...but the PS2 isn't far behind. On the scale of hard to develop for:
Saturn = 8/10
PS2 = 6/10
N64 = 5/10
PS1 = 2/10
Dreamcast = 2/10
If you're still curious:
PS3 = 7.5/10
360 = 4/10
Wii = ?/10
Original Xbox = 2/10
siIvermate
Not really. The Saturn and PS2 both have their RAM separated in the same manner: Main RAM, Video RAM, and Audio RAM.
You're under-estimating the difficulty of the Sony systems. I'd rate it as follows:
PS3 = 9/10
Saturn = 7/10
PS2 = 7/10
The PS3 is definitely more difficult to develop for than the Saturn. Developers were complaining about the Saturn's dual-core setup, yet they have to deal with up to nine cores with the PS3. Despite the complaints, many third-party developers have been supporting the PS3 regardless. The difficulty thing is just an excuse. The real reason is marketing, which Sony has been doing better than Sega.
*****
Believe me, I agree %100 that people wouldn't be complaining about the Saturn's architecture if the console actually sold good.
The Saturn's processors share the same memory bus, thus screwing over the whole dual-core setup unless you do some really tough programming.
siIvermate
The PS3's Cell cores all share the same memory bus as well. It's not something unique to the Saturn.
I wish this version was released, it would've been so interesting :o
And people say that the saturn couldn’t do 3D games. Seriously, I couldn’t imagine anything like this being on the PS1.
Vagrant Story bro
@@Naitoraven951not comparable to this level of detail and polys. This look much better than any PS1 game i ever seen
GOD bless Saturn. Graphically blasts every game on PSX! Ultra detailed faces, evinroments, detailed extras, lighting, additional stuff, ... very optimum fps ! That clearely show Saturn was poverfull, but saddly hard to program :((
TRUE.PERIOD
You gotta have Balls of Steel to program for Saturn.
Yeah, due to the Saturn having 2 processors, it was very tedious to program games so that they could operate optimally using both processors without complications coming up with the code. If you knew the hardware inside out, and took the time to study how the Saturn works, then you could become a great Saturn developer... but that would only pay off in making games for the console late in its life, which was cut short, unfortunately.
Just like the Real Saturn, Difficult to get there.
but yeah, just imagine we got a brand new Saturn game...
The Saturn was a wacky system, you could pull resources from every corner. They even used the sound chip to help process some of the 3D. The PS1 couldn't do that. With an arsenal, including the kitchen sink, the Saturn was more 3D capable than the PS1 could ever be, even though the ps1 had a dedicated 3D chip. The saturn used brute force.
This looks insane, blowing out the other two consoles. My mouth is just agape watching this, never realizing the Saturn could really have that kind of power. I would love to see this become playable someday.
It is superb but you can't say its blowing N64 out.
This definitely looks better than anything the N64 ever gave us. It's not really a fair comparison though. This is just a video, might have not even been running on native Saturn hardware, so who knows if it could even run well.
In this video itself animation seems quite choppy for instance.
Alex P.
Banjo tooie?
Zelda?
Perfect Dark?
Golden Eye?
Linus Magnus Yeah, I think it looks better than those, and it certainly helps that it isn't a cartoony game. It's just my opinion friend.
Alex P.
Yea, no problem. I understand what you mean.
It really looks great.
2:59 Just Wow. the lighting here is impressive.
I think it's more art direction than actual lighting, still impressive though
@@RenegadeCthe lamp is lighting very basic but considering most games that gen had none its a feat
psx would have disappear if more games like this was made on the saturn.
I Would give anything to see a playable version, the Saturn had much more to offer than many gave it credit for, it was an outcast in the 32bit era because of the success of the PlayStation, and the hardware was so odd that really only sega themselves knew how to develop for it, but if they had released shenmue for Saturn though, it probably would have changed a lot of people's minds about the system, but still wouldnt have been enough to save it, the Saturn had far worse problems than competing graphically with the Ps1, but the final game on the dreamcast is still a masterpiece and the Saturn was and still is a great console, long live the Saturn and shenmue!
hopefully one day the code and all the work that had been done is released and a small team butchers something together that is somewhat playable. Definitely would be pretty epic to play just the very start and watch the entirety of the lan di vs father fight on the saturn.
I am in awe that this was going to be a Saturn game. The graphics and detail for a Saturn is amazing.
2:02 really like how this area is lit, it looks a lot more like how Kowloon looked in real life while still being traversable with Shenmue's tank controls
I am learning so much about this series tonight. Wow.
Tears down my face...my soul has left my body 🙌🏿
I had no idea they got this far on the Saturn- these are scenes from Shenmue I and II! Very impressive for this era.
This looks amazing!
Crazy they made part 1 and 2 for Saturn
Crazy how good this looks. It looks 100 times better than ANYTHING on any other console of the time. Shame it didn't happen but we got it evetually so its all good.
the cancelled N64 version of Eternal Darkness looks way better than this.
This footage covers the first two games from start to walking through the forest with Shenhua at the end of Shenmue II. Makes me wonder how complete this was. It even includes fairly minor cutscenes, like when Ryo and Ren bring the cassette tapes to Ren's hideout. Fingers crossed for a leak sometime!
I reckon there was probably footage from future instalments but they had to cut it for obvious reasons, they really planned it all out huh
Bro they literally had shenmue 2 completed long before its DC and Xbox release. Thats crazy.
Wow! The graphics are amazing!! Better than any PSX or N64 game!! Complex geometry and animation!!
Not better than Crash 3 on PS1 or Turok 3 on N64.
@@MoonSarito this version its much better than Turok 3 or Crash 3, the polygon count its superb.
This looks pretty impressive for the Saturn, I'm glad they moved the game to the Dreamcast, but it's amazing what the Saturn could do.
Saturn was clearly the best machine in its era,this video prooved it.If only how developers knew how to utilize its power,the gaming map today would have been different.SEGA was gaming itself the most important company,they set new standards each time they created a console.Video games just werent the same after SEGAs downfall.
Yes, but it was very difficult to develop for and many developers chose not to bother with the Saturn for that reason. It was much more powerful then the PS1, but the PS1 was was a breeze to work with compared to the Saturn. That's why the PS1 had such a huge amount of 3rd party support. The N64 was apparently also hard to develop for and didn't have a ton of 3rd party support, but Nintendo's very strong 1st party titles helped to make up for that. Then they had Rare who made things even better still. The Saturn didn't have a Rare or that many great 1st party titles (only a few). Sega also had Bernie Stolar in charge who decided not to allow rpgs to be released on the console outside of Japan (although a few somehow managed to slip by.) Honestly, it's no wonder PS1 came out on top by such a long shot.
I've always thought that the Saturn was by far the best console in regards to the transition from 2D to 3D games though. While the PS1 and N64 were both plenty capable of running 2D games, they were definitely not made with 2D gaming in mind. The Saturn was, and it was better suited for 2D games then the PS1. It also seemed to have almost an equal amount of 2D and 3D games. The other consoles definitely had FAR more 3D games then 2D (especially the N64 which only had a scant few 2D games.)
the game that used the sound chip to aid in 3D graphics processing xD
Man, it's a good thing this game was released on the DreamCast instead of Saturn. I don't think Saturn can handle this much detail.
This footage is running on an ACTUAL Saturn it was confirmed... so how do you figure that the Saturn couldn't handle it?
DaveDoc1984 Well, for one thing the Frame Animation looks slow.
DaveDoc1984
Because it is not running on a stock Saturn. This demo is actually running on dev kit with more memory. The stock Saturn could not run this, another reason development was shifted to Dreamcast.
Yes, it was a better decision to release on the Dreamcast due to the Saturn's age and the DC's release schedule. That, and that there was no way to run this on a stock Saturn. Sorry.
No reason to weep, I stand corrected! What a great find, thanks! My sources were US Sega, apologies. Great to know that this was done stock!
I think this could have been possible, even with the hardware. Let's not forget, Resident Evil 2 required two discs for the story but Capcom managed to fit the entire game into one cartridge for the N64 even without the expansion pak.
Port Resident Evil 2 for the N64 wasn't quite Capcom, but the port is still amazing.
This game shapes how GTA 3 world rendered. You can see people outside the building when you are in the building in Shenmue 2, suggesting if all of the area isn't separated or bonded together. In GTA VC, you can see the same evidence as Shenmue 2 by exiting the building improperly.
I love my playstation. But wow. The saturn was hard to develop for but if this is what we could have expected from this game. Wow. The saturn had some serious untapped potential.
Sometimes, I whish, the Saturn had succeded. But then, the Dreamcast would have become somethign different...
Shenmue was a masterpiece even on the beta version.
honestly this looks really graphically impressive for the saturn!
The characters' expressions look pretty amazing for the time and hardware.
Mindblowing! Oh God this looks godlike.
uau, great work, it actually looks much better...
i have really stated to appreciate the saturn for its capabilities. It was such an underdog system that had a lot of potential. Just seeing the facial features and how smooth they are is amazing. Especaily from 2:05 to 2:10 and 2:55 to 3:00 I the shadows and lighting look good.
It looks so high-poly! If I didn't know, I would have assumed this was for the 3DO M2.
1:23 - A somewhat less cryptic entrance to the secret basement.
If this made use of the Saturn 3D controller I would have bought it for that. That shit needed more applications.
Also is this supposed to imply Shenmue and Shenmue II were once a single game?
SolidSonicTH
If I remember correctly Sega originally intended to release the game in episodes covering a few chapters of the story with each release. This is also what 'modern' Saturn games might have looked like, because they were using a new version of the dev kit.
sdmayday Did any game that used said new version of the dev kit get released?
+Manjoume Maybe Panzer Dragoon Saga or Burning Rangers. Those were originally released in Japan at least a year earlier, but were brought to the US and Europe in 1998 and boasted impressive 3D visuals.
+SolidSonicTH At 2:01 you can clearly see the player is using an analog stick. So yeah.
2:54 this blow my mind. look the ligth the texture so amazing.
This game looks better than some games now, joking, but this game looks amazing
this would have blown people away on the saturn
You know... I grew up during the 90s, i was a ninty kid back in the day, although i equally liked every console..but if this game came out on the saturn at the time, i wouldve begged my dad to buy me one... I still regret to this day to buy a dreamcast when sega supported it.. Brought one 3 years ago just for this spellilbinding, long forgotten, gorgeous franchise...i sorta feel responsible for segas demise during the 00s as console manufacturer. And of course for this franchise.... I urge sega to bring it back, i would buy the third game within a heartbeat!!!!! #saveshenmue !!!!
The ultimate Yu Suzuki mic drop.
I'd be curious to play this prototype! Looks awesome!
my mind is blown by this
I wanna play this version so bad now. Still got my saturn.
Awesome, want this game to be released.
Wow. Just wow.
I liked Ren so much in Shenmue 2
Lets kickstart this demo!!!!
Shenmue on the Sega Saturn looked pretty good. I actually first saw this on Shenmue II on the original Xbox after passing the game
This was a great and unique game for the dreamcast. I never knew until today that it was on the dreamcast as well. And it still looks amazing!!
did you play it on xbox.
I had a Saturn....and this looks insane.
ditto damn you bernie stolar
goddessmodel abra gurah!
daniel cross
???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
Just, charge alright!?
Imagine how even more revolutionary the game would have been if it was released on the Saturn
I still find it astonishing how they were able to push out the sort of graphics the PlayStation could only dream of on a console that came out a year beforehand, especially the facial animations and detail...simply astonishing.
I know this is an old comment, but the PS1 and SAT were released within a few weeks of each other not a year.
Simple. Because the Saturn was SUPERIOR to PSX in everything. Including 3D.
For a Saturn game this is graphicly amazing!
Amazing
The Saturn probably wouldn't have been able to run this. But still interesting to watch the progress on the developers work station.
This is amazing. I wonder how far through development on Saturn they got before moving to dreamcast? A lot of the footage shown here is fairly late in the game (not that development starts at the beginning of a game necessarily anyway),. I always wondered how much of their huge budget got wasted on developing a game for a platform that would eventually not get utilised.
I wouldnt mind playing this
This is technically impressive, but I'm so glad about a number of design changes - not least getting rid of Ryo's campy run
This is nothing short of phenominal for its time. If only the Saturn wasnt so damn hard to develop on.
Saturn was less difficult to program than PS3. Its quite simple really, Developers only used one core of Saturn's Dual 32-bit CPU.
This would have been a 10 disc release surely
makes you wonder how much they had done on the saturn version. given that it goes right up to being in the forest with shen hua...
This is more impressive then the Dreamcast version. Imagine popping this in your Saturn.
Ugh no Shenmue on Dreamcast was *Insane* on the Dreamcast
Looks good (insane for the time) but Dreamcast is deffo better
This looks great for a Saturn
3:08 genial el salto del ciervo
Honestly.. some parts of this look as good as PS2 first generation games because the art style goes a long way to hide places where the poly count would be lower.
For a console that was very difficult to develop for, Sega-AM2 did very well with that game
how do the graphics look almost like ps2 quality at 2:55 wtf that looks amazing for saturn? how is that even possible lol
vinny460 it might because of the 2cpu's that the saturn has so they might have utilised it to its potential.
sendo san if that's true then they never made any saturn game to reach the saturns capabilities
Yep because how it was not utilise it to its full potential. An example would destruction derby 2 a ps1 game that was going come out for the saturn but sadly did not there is a video of it being in the prototype stage you should check it out to get an general understanding. The saturn had so much potential but because of how hard it was to program. I believe this put off developers so they left the saturn alone and gave up. there are some exceptions obviously.
Its some texture trickery to make us feel like those lights are really causing the effects on the floor and walls. In reality, the textures themselves have the light and dark areas baked in.
@@Rocky1138 The resolution of the textures is still impressive, though.
The Saturn had impressive hardware at the time of its release, but its design, with two CPUs and six other processors, made harnessing this power extremely difficult for developers used to conventional programming.
Perfect.
Awesome , you see that the Saturn was able to do much more than the PlayStation . But see errors in various parts that were fixed on other consoles like the 64 ( hands - cube) .It was very sad that the Nintendo 64 was limited to cartridges.