Saturday 8 September 2012

Sega Saturn Peripherals

Like every console, the Sega Saturn had a number of extra bits and bobs that you could buy to enhance your gaming experience.  So for those that didn't own a Saturn, I thought I'd give a bit of a mention to the ones that stood out.

Well the first one I never actually owned back when you could still buy Saturn games in the store.  It was known as the 3D controller, and as far as I know its main purpose was for playing Nights: Into Dreams.  The differences between this pad and the regular pad as the addition of an analogue stick and some changes to the shoulder buttons.  The reason it was made is because if you've ever played Nights on a regular pad, it can wear on the palms after a while, so it was made to make playing that game more comfortable.

The next peripheral I want to talk about is the Super Cobra light gun.  Light Guns are not exactly uncommon for consoles, even the NES had a light gun, but this thing was an absolute beast of a weapon.  It was heavier than any other light gun I had used up to that point, and constantly shooting outside of the screen in House of the Dead felt more like lifting weights than playing an arcade rail shooter.   Also it was cool as fuck, whenever you pulled the trigger, the lights down the side would light up, back when I was a kid, that was the coolest shit.  Also it was compatible with the Sony Playstation so I think you could play Resident Evil: Gun Survivor with it.

The final thing I'll be talking about is another peripheral that I didn't own at the time, and this little thing is known as the Sega NetLink.  A lot of people give credit to the Dreamcast for being the first console with online features, but they would be really wrong.  If we're just talking about Sega, the Mega Drive had an online feature that didn't really take off, and then the Saturn the the NetLink, and while it only worked for a few games at ran at a whopping 28.8kb/s, it still worked to get you playing games online before the Dreamcast and its fancy 56k turned up.  It also came with a browser and auto connected you to an IRC channel as far as I understand the information I found on the internet.  After giving the wikipedia entry a quick read as well, the reason I probably never owned the damn thing is because it cost a massive $200, something I or my family would not have been willing to buy at the time.

The Saturn had some other cool bits of kit, but these are the ones that stood out in my memory, a quick google search can get you a complete list of all the peripherals available if you care that much.




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