paile said: Where is this amazing Saturn 2D I've always heard about and tell me why an N64 couldn't do it? Click to expand...

I'd say that the Saturn can just about match what the PS1 was doing during the Saturn's life. However, the PS1 lasted a lot longer than the Saturn, so there was a lot more time to master it... I mean, the Saturn, even in Japan, was winding down by 1998. In comparison, 1997-1998 was just when the PS1 was starting to enter its best period.Comparing games from both platforms released at similar times, the graphics are indeed very close. The Saturn's problem was that it died early, while the PS1 lasted years and years longer, and thus looking back Saturn graphics look poor because the Saturn died so early that very few development teams had time to master it as they did the PS1, and Saturn was ridiculously hard to program for too. Really, it was poorly designed, too-expensive-to-build hardware.As for differences from 1994-1998 PS1 and Saturn games, the biggest differences that I see are that PS1 games generally have better visual effects, because pulling off transparencies is extremely difficult on Saturn and almost no games do it, while on PS1 they're used all the time for nice explosion and lighting effects. This makes a real difference in games like Wipeout; otherwise Wipeout looks only slightly worse than the PS1 (you have to look closely to see the differences, and they're not all in the PS1's favor), but the effects look awful in comparison.On the other hand, Saturn games have slightly less texture-warping problems, because quads are less prone to that than triangles. It's got plenty of horribly ugly pixelated jaggy polygons, and there is some warping, but because of the use of quadrilaterals, it's not quite as bad. On the PS1 of course avoiding warping was impossible, essentially, and other problems required additional work to cover for too (overlapping polygons everywhere so as to cover for the edge problems, for instance).Really though, yeah, if you look at contemporary games, the difference isn't nearly as big as people generally think it's going to be, when they come in thinking "Saturn 3d is way worse than PS1!" Well, I DO think that it's worse, but only slightly, not significantly. And I rreally think that it's important to compare contemporary titles.Remember, the Saturn was only supported by Western development teams, first or third party, from 1995 to 1997. Japanese first-party teams only supported it from 1994 to 1998, though in 1998 the second half of the year had a pretty thin first-party lineup (the US didn't get any first party games from after May '98, but apart from Shining Force III parts 2 and 3, we didn't miss out on too much...). And while Japanese third parties did release a few games in 1999 and 2000, it was only a very few games, and they mostly weren't big titles. In comparison of course, the PS1 lasted all the way from 1994/5 to 2004-2005 or so. And while some late PS1 games were ugly low budget things, many looked good... but had the Saturn lasted as long, and been as successful, we'd have seen a LOT more good looking Saturn games, too. I think the PS2 is a good comparison -- remember how massively PS2 game graphics increased over time, as developers got better at that difficult hardware. The Saturn's kind of like that, but without any of the success pushing people to keep trying. And so a LOT of Saturn games never even USE the second CPU (yes, for those who don't know, the Saturn is a dual-core system). Lots of games just turn it off, because programmers couldn't handle dual-core development yet. If it'd been a hit, I somehow doubt that it would have continued that way.But even so, the PS1 DOES have advantages over the Saturn, such as easy transparencies and the advantage of much easier development. But otherwise, yeah, I'd say that they're about even, overall. The Saturn might even be better, though it never got a chance to show it.The N64 is a quite powerful 2d system, so I'm not sure if there's much that the Saturn can do that the N64 really couldn't... but I think that most PS1 and N64 2d actually is "3d" underneath, while the Saturn is legitimately 2d, or something... but otherwise, as far as what the player can see, yeah, I think the N64 could do it. And yes, I also would use Yoshi's Story as a good example of that.