SEGA's NiGHTS eagerly slipped into the dreams of Saturn gamers uneasy with the way the videogame scene was shaping up in 1996. The PlayStation launch was a success and Sony was about to roll out its first would-be mascot, Crash Bandicoot. Nintendo was about to launch Super Mario 64, the genre-defining 3D platformer that would remake the category and give the Nintendo 64 a launch day barn-burner. The Saturn had none of that buzz. Hardcore fans defended it mightily, but sales charts don't lie. SEGA was in trouble and the great equalizer of the 16-bit generation, Sonic the Hedgehog, was nowhere in sight.

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But even though Sonic was unable to rescue an impending holiday let-down, the development team that bears the icon's name was finalizing a brand new adventure for the Saturn. Lead by Yuji Naka , one of SEGA's top game makers with titles like Phantasy Star and Sonic under his belt, Sonic Team's NiGHTS would debut a brand new hero and hopefully stave off any premature death pronouncements for the Saturn. The whole of the game is hung on recreating the feeling of flight -- like a bird, not a plane. Using a new analog controller (something that would soon become an industry standard), players twirled and swirled through Naka's dreamland, collecting sparkling blue orbs and fighting off nightmares that threatened to upset the balance between good and bad dreams.Naka and the Sonic Team imagined sending players soaring through a series of colorful landscapes straight out of child's imagination, such as green prairies or watery underworlds. The goal is to stop the ruler of the Nightmare world, Wizeman, from stealing enough Ideyas from dreamers that he can burst into the real world. Ideya are physical representations of human energies, like intelligence, hope, and wisdom. This energy must be reclaimed to stop Wizeman and his minions, including the nasty Reala, the twin of the titular Nights Nights is a living dream that sports a purple jester-like outfit. Created to help Wizeman, Nights rebels and is punished with imprisonment inside an Ideya palace. The only way Nights can be freed is if a human child possessed of courage -- the only Ideya Wizeman cannot harvest -- frees him. (Or her. It's hard to tell at this point because Nights Once the player steers one of the kids into an Ideya prison and frees Nights, the game really takes off. Naka and his team really did a fantastic job delivering a free-flying experience, even if the game technically takes place in 2D. Nights somewhat fudges the 3D bit, something that Super Mario 64 nailed, by creating 3D worlds and bending Nights' path through the world to create the impression of freedom. The wild acrobatics you perform on this 2D plane with the analog stick also help the illusion. But if you unfurl the route, you see that Nights is surprisingly linear. Almost on a rail.Flying with Nights is both a breeze and breezy fun thanks to the Saturn's analog controller working exceptionally well. Gliding through rings on the paths and collecting swarms of Ideya is easily accomplished by circling the stick into little arcs. A simple press of a button rockets Nights on a straight path, twirling like gymnast on a 20 Twinkie sugar rush. But the most fun in Nights is performing the big paraloop. As Nights flies, he leaves a sparkle trail behind him. If you create a big loop, tying the trail together, anything inside the loops is captured. Any Ideya are added to your bank and nightmare enemies are collapsed into nothingness. Linking up loops, swirls, rings, and other artful moves boosts your score, which in turn raises your grade at the end of the stage.After completing the four sub-stages of each dream world, Nights flies into a boss battle with a heavy nightmare. These are traditional boss battles. You watch for behavioral patterns and weak spots and then rush in to attack when the coast is clear. The boss battles unfold in grim, grotesque arenas very different from the bright dreams worlds. For example, the first battle against a rotund nightmare is set in a bad trip to the Big Top.Flying around and collecting colorful sphere doesn't exactly sound terribly complex, and playing NiGHTS again on a Saturn confirms the rather simplistic mechanics. But like so many SEGA productions before the gaming giant abandoned the hardware business, it's the way all of the elements dovetail into each other while maintaining a unique atmosphere that makes NiGHTS so special. How many other developers would have looked at their flying game and then decided it needed an entire sub-system of lifeforms? The A-Life in NiGHTS are little creatures of the dream universe that grow and change depending on how you play the game, effecting not the main game, but plenty of ancillary measures, like music.Like many Saturn games, the vision of NiGHTS is occasionally betrayed by the limitations of the hardware. The machine was not necessarily created to be a powerful 3D machine, as it often performed in third-place behind the PSone and N64. But even though NiGHTS suffers from some warping and plenty of clipping, the charm of the game consistently shines through. Even with some rough edges and iffy textures, the game is still a pleaser thanks to the beautiful color schemes and design aesthetics.NiGHTS earned many accolades in 1996 for its soundtrack -- and it still deserves every one of them. The theme song, "Dreams Dreams," is something you would unlikely hear in a game today. It's a wonderful theme and worth listening to if you are a fan of SEGA's unique, quirky aural tendencies. Each stage soundtrack is quite good and the sound effects fit in perfectly with the dream universe.Special thanks to Planet Dreamcast for the NiGHTS gameplay screens.