The world burns. Only Sega remains.

[Marc]

That's an atrocious way to launch a console, I didn't realise Sega had messed up quite so badly.

[Herr Schatten]

Most of those are horribly average at best.... The Chaos Engine doesn't belong in that list, superb game.

While I generally agree, cave hermit stated explicitly that he enjoyed Ultracore, which is a much more flawed game than any on that list, so I guess his tolerance for questionable game design is quite high. Personally, I couldn't stand it, even though it came free with my Mega SG. There's definitely some enjoyment to be had from those titles Udderdude listed. Back in the day I did enjoy MD Gods enough to play all the way through it, even though it's an experience I don't have any desire to repeat today. Flink is worth playing through once for the lovely Henk Nieborg artwork alone. (An even better choice would be its spiritual successor Lomax on the PS1.)

[Marc]

Funnily enough I picked up Gods Remastered on Xbox for pennies over Xmas. The remastered visuals are so ugly it's untrue. The original visuals are stretched and muddy and lose the style that made them stand out in the first place. The game... I've always been perplexed at how this one was rated so highly at the time... even when it came to consoles it got solid reviews.

[FinalBaton]

OP, wanted to say a while back (but totally forgot) that I also am in the same boat. I have this fascination for Sega that came later.

Well AKSHUALLY in the 16-bit era a good friend had a Genesis and I saw him play a ton of Shinning Force and Phantasy star, which completely blew my mind. And in Dreamcast era another friend had one and we spent countless hours 420-blazin' it HARD and playing Soulcalibur and others. so I guess I always had Sega in high esteem.

but 5 years ago or so I really gained another extra level of appreciation for them and now am kinda obssessed with them. lol. and I'm a Nintendo kid. but man. Sega are coooool...

[Udderdude]

Didn't have a Genesis growing up. My friend did. I would go over and play Sonic 1. Never managed to clear it over there, but was still fun times. Later on, I did own a Saturn and Dreamcast.

As an aside, if you're on Steam and have enough points, you can still buy the SEGA 60th Anniversary Frame for your Steam profile.

[BrianC]

I'm glad I have something that can play 50 Hz games, so I could try Flink out closer to the proper speed. Artwork in that game is amazing. It's also nice seeing a more recent game (Xenocrisis, which I bought the Genesis ROM of from the official site) with his artwork.

[Udderdude]

KenJu, unreleased Atomiswave arcade game now running on Dreamcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xw_hlJfI4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftct2bjXIt4

[Sengoku Strider]

KenJu, unreleased Atomiswave arcade game now running on Dreamcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xw_hlJfI4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftct2bjXIt4

That looks better than Fighting Ex Layer. Arika should've just bought the rights to that instead.

[Sengoku Strider]

You know, the Saturn gets all the talk about being the crazy expensive console to collect for, but the Mega Drive market has gone insane lately.

I was looking at what games are going for ¥10,000 & up right now, and this was the count:

Saturn: 42 + those real estate discs.

Mega Drive: 50
Mega CD: 8
32-X: 4

And keep in mind the Saturn saw twice as many releases in Japan as the Mega Drive did on top of that.

Alien Soldier? $500. Bloodlines? $350-400. Eliminate down? One thousand dollars.

I'm guessing it must be a combination of A) the global Mega Drive collector's market being larger than the Saturn's due to its success in multiple regions, while at the same time B) the Saturn had higher print runs for games in Japan than the Mega Drive did. You'd think the same would apply to the Master System though, but you can complete the Japanese library for that pretty easily. I guess it did have way fewer Japan exclusives. And nobody in North America cares about it.

I wonder if we're heading for a future where Japan has been sucked dry of this stuff by the global market. How many copies of Radiant Silvergun and Eliminate Down can there be left in that country?

[Udderdude]

The only people left are the hardcore collectors, so it doesn't surprise me at all.

[Sengoku Strider]

The only people left are the hardcore collectors, so it doesn't surprise me at all.

A guy at my local retro shop told me covid lockdowns were getting a lot of people to go back & pick up their old nostalgia consoles to have something to do. I'd imagine it's because there's something comforting in them during a crummy moment in time as well. Sales have been really strong. Looking at online retailers I can believe it, a lot of digital shelves are looking pretty bare.

[Udderdude]

You'd think they would just buy the SEGA Classics on Steam or something. They're certainly not the ones shelling out hundreds for relatively obscure titles.

[Sengoku Strider]

You'd think they would just buy the SEGA Classics on Steam or something. They're certainly not the ones shelling out hundreds for relatively obscure titles.

I'm sure plenty did. But the lesson with that stuff is always that emulation doesn't fully replace the original, it just leads to a bunch of people wanting the actual physical thing.

[JohnBooty]

You'd think they would just buy the SEGA Classics on Steam or something. They're certainly not the ones shelling out hundreds for relatively obscure titles.

I'm sure plenty did. But the lesson with that stuff is always that emulation doesn't fully replace the original, it just leads to a bunch of people wanting the actual physical thing.

I'm not surprised that PC emulation has failed to replace the sensation of playing these games on the original hardware, with the original controllers. Not everybody cares about playing on the original hardware... but I get it. The nostalgia, the original controllers, the zero-lag experience on a CRT, etc.

What does surprise me is that flash carts and optical drive emulators have failed to put a damper on the insane collector's prices for some games.

I mean, there was a time when paying through the nose for a physical copy of Dragon Force or MUSHA or Cotton or whatever was the only way to play it on original hardware and it made sense that some people would be willing to pay the necessary megabucks.

But I figured that the market would cool off once all of the flashcarts and ODE's proliferated and matured. Nope!

[Gamer707b]

I grew up with Sega. I remember playing Hang on, Space Harrier and Shinobi in the arcade. Actually a few years befor that, an older player (1982 ish?) asked of I can help him on the first level of Zaxxon. I said I can beat it just to play a few credits, which he provided. Then had A Master System. Just knew two other kids with one. After had a Genesis and Loved playing all the EA sports stuff. Had my first experience with a turn based rpg being Phantasy Star 2. Funny thing was that every time the game would transistion to the battle mode, I thought my game was busted cause I only experienced real time battles up to that point. Lol.

Thankfully skipped out on the add-ons and The Saturn. Years after bought a Saturn to play Panzer Dragoon Saga and loved it. Now though, my Saturn serves as a mainly shump console. Bought me a Dreamcast around 2000 and had my first experience with on line gaming. Loved Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia, Crazy Taxi and so on. Man was that system ahead of its time! If Sega of Japan and the American branch were as one, they may have still been in the console game.

[Sengoku Strider]

I mean, there was a time when paying through the nose for a physical copy of Dragon Force or MUSHA or Cotton or whatever was the only way to play it on original hardware and it made sense that some people would be willing to pay the necessary megabucks.

But I figured that the market would cool off once all of the flashcarts and ODE's proliferated and matured. Nope!

I mean, why are people paying tens of thousands for a third edition Cervantes when Don Quixote is public domain and they can legally read it for free on their Kindle? Why did the last copy of Action Comics #1 that was put up for sale go for $3.2 million when you can just type "read Action Comics #1 free" into Google and have Superman throwing a car in front of you in seconds? Hell, why do people buy old stamps that aren't even valid anymore? At least Action #1 still functions as a comic book.

Aside from the nostalgic, haptic & aesthetic value of the tangible thing, a large part of it is that the collecting is a hobby in and of itself. It involves planning, a chase, the excitement of landing a rarity, and the anticipation that comes along with hunting for the opportunity that doesn't involve paying *checks price* $1008.15 USD for Eliminate Down.

Plus, no self-respecting Youtuber can stand in front of shelves full of HDDs marked "ROMs." I really think the ubiquity of the huge, fully stuffed shelves in gaming videos plays no small part. Seeing Shmup Junkie have the case for Blazing Star behind him while the intro for Pulstar also loops on the TV beside him, and then the pile of PCE rarities...Soldier Blade, Sapphire, etc...made me think damn, I never should have sold my copy of Space Mega Force. I need it back.

[Sengoku Strider]

Speaking of gaming Youtube videos...

I was watching this one, which went through the top 30 best selling Mega Drive titles in Japan. I was surprised by a lot of it. By some of the titles that made the list, and the positions of some of the ones you'd expect:

1. Puyo Puyo
2. Shining Force
3. Sonic the Hedgehog
4. Street Fighter II’ Plus
5. Virtua Racing
6. Sonic 3
7. Shining Force II
8. Phantasy Star IV
9. Langrisser II
10. Sonic 2
11. Landstalker
12. Columns
13. Shining in the Darkness
14. Silpheed (Mega CD)
15. Super Monaco GP
16. Puyo Puyo Tsu
17. Shining Force CD (Mega CD)
18. Lunar: The Silver Star (Mega CD)
19. Streets of Rage II
20. Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusion
21. Phantasy Star II
22. Gunstar Heroes
23. Super Street Fighter II
24. Lunar: Eternal Blue (Mega CD)
25. Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
26. Golden Axe
27. Ghouls n’ Ghosts
28. J-League Pro Striker
29. Advanced Daisenryaku
30. Yuyu Hakusho

Like Shining in the Darkness being that big. (Also never noticed that the original title was Shining _and_ the Darkness). Or the fact that both Shining Force titles outsold the biggest Phantasy Star game (IV). Toss in Landstalker being the MD's Link to the Past for the Camelot crown. And was Virtua Racing that big in the West? How did it never become a series? And Puyo Puyo was massive, it sold more than #2 and #3 combined. It sold as much as all three Sonic games put together.

Also pretty surprised by the number of CD titles that made the list...while Sonic CD didn't even make it, meaning it couldn't even beat out Daisenryaku, a plain-looking super early game that was on shelves in the system's first 6 months.

Also, Silpheed. Huh. Somehow, with the massive shmup library the Mega Drive has, it was the only one to make the top 30.

[segasonicfan]

What does surprise me is that flash carts and optical drive emulators have failed to put a damper on the insane collector's prices for some games.

I mean, there was a time when paying through the nose for a physical copy of Dragon Force or MUSHA or Cotton or whatever was the only way to play it on original hardware and it made sense that some people would be willing to pay the necessary megabucks.

But I figured that the market would cool off once all of the flashcarts and ODE's proliferated and matured. Nope!

This ^^. It's never made any sense to me... I paid $100+ for JP MegaDrive shmups individually in 2002-ish... When the best flashcart you could hope for was the Tototek 64M which would hold about eight games at most, was hard to find, and required the most dodgy parallel programming software.

Flash forward to today, and people are paying 2x - 3x as much when everything is readily available on super well supported hardware that can store up your entire game library with no loading times on original hardware. Makes absolutely no sense to me.

Same goes for Cave games all now dumped on MAME, PGM boots, Xbox, PS4, etc....

To think there was a time when I sold a complete Eliminate Down for $150, and I had to beg people on here to buy my cotton collection (including the arcade PCB which sat unsold for...a year? at $150).

[m.sniffles.esq]

Astro City in the West

The cost is pretty much on par with the jp version, which is a little surprising.

[Marc]

I'm still looking longingly at the arcade stick, though there's no way I can justify it.
Also I did not know Cool Riders was a thing. I need to play this game.
Where's the sprite-scaler collection damn you Sega!?

[cave hermit]

I'm considering buying a MODE and replacing the clone GDemu currently in my Dreamcast with it. Basically just comes down to the ability to hook up a SATA drive to it for a full selection of games at once, and the drag and drop nature of drive prep on the MODE (as opposed to manually creating numbered folders and renaming gdi files to generic file names, prepping a third party menu system, being limited to a small selection of games per sd card if you don't want to deal with ridiculous loading times or reliance on a hard to find, janky, AV false positive triggering third party program, etc.). Plus I had some issues with games crashing at one point, and when I cleaned the power supply pin header on the dreamcast it didn't really seem dirty or oxidized, so I can only guess it had to do with the gdemu clone.

Of course there's that hefty price tag...

[cj iwakura]

Surprised MUSHA isn't in the top 10, much less 30...

Definitely the priciest CIB game I own. Still don't want to part with it. It's my pride and joy.

[BrianC]

Also pretty surprised by the number of CD titles that made the list - and Langrisser II, a game that never even released outside Japan - being the Mega CD's biggest hit. I had thought the device was more niche than that. And Sonic CD not even making the list, meaning it couldn't even beat out Daisenryaku, a plain-looking super early game that was on shelves in the system's first 6 months.

Langrisser II is a cartridge game. It doesn't have a Mega CD version. I have it CIB.

[Sengoku Strider]

Also pretty surprised by the number of CD titles that made the list - and Langrisser II, a game that never even released outside Japan - being the Mega CD's biggest hit. I had thought the device was more niche than that. And Sonic CD not even making the list, meaning it couldn't even beat out Daisenryaku, a plain-looking super early game that was on shelves in the system's first 6 months.

Langrisser II is a cartridge game. It doesn't have a Mega CD version. I have it CIB.

I must have confused that symbol on the box next to the 1 player symbol for the Mega CD logo. I'll edit the list I posted.

[Despatche]

It's funny, Sonic is assumed to have not sold well in Japan, but as far as I know it always sold about as well as other Mega Drive things. It wasn't this bullshit "worldwide sensation" like it was in the US and the UK, no, but it doesn't need to be, and it's better that it isn't. Later, Sonic Adventure was, by all accounts, a serious cult hit in Japan, and Sega loves to remind people of it every now and then (which always leads to westerners losing their shit thinking Sega is about to announce "Sonic Adventure 3"). The Mega Drive itself was not this huge thing in Japan (and it only ever was outside of Japan because of Sonic anyway), but it was obviously big enough for Japan to have tons of exclusives, and a lot of people over there have pretty extensive memories of it.

It's kinda like how Metroid is often said to "not sell" in Japan, ignoring that the first two Metroid games sold very well there, and that the third game sold almost exactly as much in Japan as it did anywhere else. At least according to the numbers I've seen. Zelda is similar. It was never an issue with either series itself.

I don't know about the accuracy of the video, but I seem to remember that Japanese sales data is relatively easy to come by. Very interesting that Virtua Racing and Silpheed are considered to have sold well. The CE/HF port being that high is not surprising, pretty sure that game has sold too many copies everywhere. Also interesting to see Shining & The Darkness that high.

There are no Mega-CD versions of the Langrissers. However, there's a PC Engine CD version of the first Langrisser, and then there's a PC-FX version of the second, Der Langrisser FX.

What I want to know is how well that super-late Mega-CD Shadowrun game sold. It can't have sold very much.

Just gonna say, again, that the Sega narrative is bullshit, largely fueled by idiots at Sega of America trying to blame others for their own problems, and people very much not wanting to accept that success is entirely bullshit astrology. The 32X was never a blip on anyone's radar, it had no real positive or negative effect (other than having the godlike Virtua Racing Deluxe). The Saturn outside of Japan was 100% due to the lack of a "major" Sonic game, which the Americans and the British basically required in order to give a shit about Sega. The Dreamcast died overnight, entirely due to the sheer hype for the PS2. Very little of what happened was really in Sega's control, and not a single decision they could have made would have changed much about what happened. That is how it so often is when dealing with "success".

...Well, actually, X-Treme getting canceled is probably the best thing they ever did, though the story of that game is very sad and I feel like a decent game would have emerged if things went better.

I mean, yeah, you can look at that writeup by Sengoku Strider and go "wow! Sega messed up!". But then you have to confront how Sega kept making games for years, and all the Japan-exclusives. There was obviously such a sizeable Japanese base that it didn't really matter that Nintendo was going to rule the country a second time.

Please note that I did not grow up on Sega consoles and that I still do not have a Saturn. I just cannot stand what amounts to corporate sabotage combined with fucking Sonic fans utterly devouring that narrative. Sega was and is a good company. They made and continue to make good stuff, repeatedly, over years and years. They largely executed their consoles about as well as anyone could... have you seen the PC Engine launch? The Family Computer launch (it was basically ports for years, an entire two years before SMB1, there was a fucking recall, etc)? Most console launches are kinda barren actually, it comes with the territory, and that is still true today.

Sega actually tried to stand up to Nintendo countless times, from the beginning, and did not vanish without a trace after a few years like so many others. They even still exist, they still make good games, and they're also a very strong publisher/Developer Devourer. Everyone wants them to make a new console "like the good old days", but the only good old days we're getting are a possible return to the one-console market. I truly do not understand why the Sega diehards are so self-hating, even into 2021, entire decades after Sega has given up on the console war bullshit. You wanna wax poetic about your Saturn, go right on ahead, but please leave the "if only" garbage out of it.

Here's an if only for you: if only Sonic was a fucking failure and Sega consoles remained low-key, so that we would never have to put up with this garbage. Man, if only.

[FinalBaton]

The Saturn outside of Japan was 100% due to the lack of a "major" Sonic game, which the Americans and the British basically required in order to give a shit about Sega.

I think it's more than that : Bernie Stollar stopped supporting it prematurely, and straight up dissed it in the media (!).

[Despatche]

That happened specifically because of what happened with X-treme. Even Sonic fans will all claim that X-treme is the big name target when it comes to Saturn discussion. Sadly, for them, it is.

Stolar was hired to hype up the Dreamcast. Not only was he a former PlayStation head, but his job was explicitly to make the Saturn look like a huge mistake to Americans.

[null1024]

Just gonna say, again, that the Sega narrative is bullshit, largely fueled by idiots at Sega of America trying to blame others for their own problems, and people very much not wanting to accept that success is entirely bullshit astrology. The 32X was never a blip on anyone's radar, it had no real positive or negative effect (other than having the godlike Virtua Racing Deluxe). The Saturn outside of Japan was 100% due to the lack of a "major" Sonic game, which the Americans and the British basically required in order to give a shit about Sega. The Dreamcast died overnight, entirely due to the sheer hype for the PS2. Very little of what happened was really in Sega's control, and not a single decision they could have made would have changed much about what happened. That is how it so often is when dealing with "success".

The 32X is pretty famous for pulling an awful lot of developer time and effort away from Saturn games.
The fact that the 32X releases of Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing are more polished products than the Saturn versions is appalling.
There's no reason Chaotix should have been rushed out the door to hit the 32X. Probably was still doomed because the ring-tether mechanic is just kinda hard to work with and rather awkward, but it could have at least had enough time to have had actual level design.
Doom 32X is, apart from the miserable soundtrack, batting quite above average vs a lot of ports, and the Saturn absolutely would have done way better with a good release of Doom right out the door.
Star Wars Arcade was a big-name license that again, could have pushed the Saturn instead of an addon for a system that Sega was going to abandon entirely within a year. I remember reading that it sold a surprising number of 32X units.

The Saturn, at least in the US, wasn't exactly a salvageable situation with the hilariously botched early launch, too. I'm not even sure if a Sonic game could have saved it.
Few stores carried the machine, so glhf getting it if you wanted it. The initial shipment was tiny. Few games at launch, few on the horizon for months, your competitor just undercut your price by one hundred dollars, and many comparable games on the competition's machine looked better -- Tekken 1 is something I would objectively consider ugly, but it still looks leagues above VF1 on Saturn, which stops drawing polygons that are only like 6 feet from the player; Daytona on Saturn actually looks decent but runs at 20fps with alarmingly close pop-in vs the somewhat smoother and further drawing Ridge Racer].
All of the hype Sega had, gone. Sega was absolutely on top of the world in 1994 into 1995, and they managed to lose every bit of that overnight.
IIRC, there was also some shortage getting Super-H CPUs around the US launch?

The machine's shortcomings didn't help either -- VDP1 on the Saturn is kinda slow and is much worse at drawing large textures vs the PS1 GPU, you have more video ram than the PS1 except you end up being able to use less because of the three way split between the framebuffer, VDP1, and VDP2, the dual-CPU setup salvages a few things because you can run game code on one CPU and then handle your drawing lists and 3D transformations on the other but it's still complicated to work with and the PS1 has a block of silicon dedicated to handling the transformation and lighting calculations.

Sonic X-Treme was a total doomed project. Every single time a consistent vision started to develop, they were told to change shit.
still kinda miffed that Sonic R exists -- the game is a technical marvel for the machine despite being a rushed mess made entirely to fill the release calendar with some Sonic game at all, and the idea of a real Saturn Sonic game with graphics as nice as Sonic R's will haunt me forever

The DC died almost entirely because Sega didn't have a healthy amount of cash post-Saturn to just weather the storm and take the hit that the oncoming PS2 was absolutely going to bring. People liked it, it sold okay overall and had an amazing launch that pushed a ton of units, it had a decent amount of games both at launch [but like, it's hard to see it doing worse just by virtue of SA1 and SoulCalibur] and in the pipeline.
It wasn't ever going to hit PS2 numbers, but in a vacuum devoid of Sega's immediate past, it didn't seem like a machine that was likely to just die.
Sega didn't have the money to burn to give the machine a comfortable footing immediately post-Saturn, while Sony was operating from an already strong position and could force sales away just by virtue of the possibility of what was to come [which was something they already had managed with the western PS1 launch, but now they didn't have to do it on the spot].

[Sengoku Strider]

It's funny, Sonic is assumed to have not sold well in Japan, but as far as I know it always sold about as well as other Mega Drive things. It wasn't this bullshit "worldwide sensation" like it was in the US and the UK, no, but it doesn't need to be, and it's better that it isn't.

I'm unclear why it's better that it wasn't a great success, as it massively broadened the whole Sega brand's appeal in other territories.

Just gonna say, again, that the Sega narrative is bullshit, largely fueled by idiots at Sega of America trying to blame others for their own problems, and people very much not wanting to accept that success is entirely bullshit astrology. The 32X was never a blip on anyone's radar, it had no real positive or negative effect (other than having the godlike Virtua Racing Deluxe).

I wouldn't say that it wasn't a blip, they put out a LOT of advertising for it, in magazines and television. I remember after it stumbled out of the gate it became a schoolyard punchline at the time, and has had the "failed terrible console' title hung around its neck ever since.

I mean, yeah, you can look at that writeup by Sengoku Strider and go "wow! Sega messed up!". But then you have to confront how Sega kept making games for years, and all the Japan-exclusives.

I do see what you're saying, but I don't think those are contradictory. The Mega Drive launch in Japan was bad - a combination of worldwide ROM shortages meaning games like Osomatsu-Kun needed to cut half the game out, and Sega generally running a cheap operation that churned games out on a 3 month dev cycle.

However where they later benefited was in the off the shelf parts they used. The 68000 processor was the main high-end personal computer CPU of its day, and because of that it became the de facto cpu for arcade dev platforms as well. That meant a combination of familiarity and relative ease of porting for 3rd parties, a cohort Sega seem to have largely ignored during the SG-1000/Mark III days.

By '91, when Genesis took off in the West, 3rd parties could see a viable overseas market for Mega Drive developed titles which allowed the Japanese market to punch above its weight, so to speak.

They largely executed their consoles about as well as anyone could...

Unfortunately, this one's demonstrably untrue. I'll confine observations to the 1990s:

Mega CD - the Mega Drive's major weakness vs. its competitors was that it could only display 64 colours on screen at once, vs. 256 for the Super Famicom and a whopping 482 for the PC Engine. This meant a lot of games ended up being dull looking or had to use dithering for colour gradients.

For some reason Sega didn't address this weakness with the Mega CD. Sega of America were, like seemingly most other US execs at the time, enamoured with the idea of becoming Hollywood part 2. So they launched the Sega CD in the West with a ton of FMV games, just like controlling a Hollywood movie! Except with only 64 colours on screen - far lower than the number of shades in even your average old black & white photo - they looked like oatmeal. So while the Mega CD seems to have done fairly well in Japan, the Sega CD bore the stigma of being the overpriced crappy FMV platform from launch.

What makes this even worse is that the Mega Drive had one other significant limitation: it couldn't do sprite scaling in-hardware. This was killer, as their sprite scaler arcade games comprised most of their biggest name titles. Early ports like Super Thunder Blade ran atrociously. Ironically, the core feature the Mega CD added was - you guessed it - sprite scaling. The Sega CD could have been running excellent ports of games like Outrunners, Super Monaco and (finally) a proper Space Harrier conversion. Core's Soulstar showed just how significantly powerful the sprite scaling on the Mega CD really was - it completely obliterated Nintendo's mode 7, and the SNES and Sega CD came out in the West at the same time. Had Sega put their money behind the hardware features they actually implemented, that platform would have come out looking much better and taken some of the wind out of Nintendo's sails. But, the execs didn't think that would be as enticing a differentiating factor as Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch FMV.

Continuing down irony lane, Sega would finally make some of those (near) perfect super scaler ports a reality on the 32X, a platform which didn't support hardware sprite scaling (but could display lots of colours!). Just in time for nobody to care, as the games were ancient by that point.

Moving on to the 32X, there's just no getting around the fact that it's inexcusable that they abandoned a $160 platform ($280 USD in today's money) completely within a single year. There isn't a way to spin that one as it being as handled as well as anyone could have.

It flopped for a number of reasons, all of which were under Sgea's control. The first was that the hardware integration between the Genesis & 32X wasn't, y'know, integrated. It effectively created a lot of situations where the 32X would handle the main characters on screen, while the Genesis was still handling all the backgrounds (or occasionally vice versa). This led to a lot of bad ports in the library like Quarterback Club or World Series Baseball where the 32X was barely being utilized at all.

And remarkably some games like Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure & WWF Raw that were actually worse than the Genesis version, running at half the frame rate, because somehow the 32X had no dedicated hardware for scrolling 2D visuals.

None of that was even the fatal flaw, though. Ultimately, no matter what the 32X was doing or how powerful it was, it all had to be able to run through the Mega Drive's 16-bit bus from 1988.

Then there's the Saturn, another victim of decisions entirely under Sega's control. For some misguided reason the Saturn was initially developed as a Jaguar competitor (!), and Sega were caught flat-footed when Sony entered the market. They had to slap a second SH-2 processor (a chip used in hardly anything else because Hitachi couldn't sell anyone else on it) into the design late in development to compete, a decision which hamstrung the hardware throughout its life. Since the Saturn wasn't initially designed as a 2 CPU architecture, the master CPU had to handle instructions for the secondary, which would just idle until the master told it to do something. Even demoscene people say load balancing between the two is still not an entirely solved problem to this day.

On top of that, the dev kits didn't ship with any kind of meaningful API. It didn't even natively support the C programming language, programmers were expected to get things done in assembly.

This was the crippling problem for the hardware, one which 3rd party devs at the time couldn't overcome. Often, they'd just avoid the second processor altogether, since it would mean a serious rewrite of single thread code from other platforms into multi-threaded assembly and they just didn't have the dev time for it. This led to some crummy ports trying to load everything onto an overburdened main CPU. Saturn gained a reputation as a system that couldn't handle 3D, despite some sublime 1st party titles like Sega Rally. Unfortunately the number of games developed to that quality were comparatively few.

Then there were some key oversights like an inability to do proper transparencies - something the Super Famicom had been handling with ease for years. The ability was slapped into the second SH-2 after they saw it was a core element of the PSX's feature suite, but for some reason the Saturn's transparencies aren't transparent. Any sprites behind them vanish, making the feature essentially useless in many situations. This led to hideous mesh overlays in place of transparencies. Combined with the load balancing issues, games which appeared on both platforms frequently ended up looking much worse on the Saturn.

I could talk about other engineering fumbles like the Nomad - yet another instantly abandoned platform - and its 2 hour battery life on 6 AA batteries (or the Game Gear's 3 hours) - but we're getting into dead horse territory.

The upshot is that the untold Sega story is that they had engineers who made some really bad oversights - sometimes forced by hasty decisions in management - and a culture of cheaping out on everything. ROM sizes, dev cycles, and an utter refusal to raise costs by implementing enhancement chips, a standard in Famicom cartridges since 1986. (To my knowledge the SVP chip in the Mega Drive version of Virtua Racing is the one and only enhancement chip they ever used).

All of this stuff added up and did matter. You don't have to look much further than the fact that the Virtual Boy was a worse disaster than anything Sega ever did (not to mention the weird abandonment of the 64DD), but it's relegated to a footnote in Nintendo's history because they didn't make an established pattern of it.

have you seen the PC Engine launch? The Family Computer launch (it was basically ports for years, an entire two years before SMB1, there was a fucking recall, etc)? Most console launches are kinda barren actually, it comes with the territory, and that is still true today.

You may be thinking of some titles through the lens of Nintendo's VS. arcade platform, to which a number of early Famicom titles were later ported. Of the 9 games released in the Famicom's first year, only 4 - Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong jr., Popeye, Mario Bros. - were arcade ports. The others were developed for the home market like Mahjong, Gomoku Narabe Renju (a Go game) and Baseball, or educational titles like Donkey Kong Jr. Math & Popeye No Eigo Asobi.

1984 was far more home-development oriented: of the 19 games released that year, 5 were proper arcade ports. There was also Wild Gunman, a digital reworking of an ancient Nintendo electro-mechanical arcade game. Significantly, 1984 was when 3rd parties entered the Famicom market. The smash hit of that year was Hudson's Lode Runner, a port of an Apple II game, a title still revered in Japan.

1985 is when you really do start to see a lot of arcade ports, as 3rd parties like Jaleco and Konami entered the market and began porting their back catalogues.

I think it's more than that : Bernie Stollar stopped supporting it prematurely, and straight up dissed it in the media (!).

While Bernie handled that one poorly, I actually can't fault him for it. At the time he said that, the Saturn's price had been cut so aggressively by his predecessor (down to half the launch price within 18 months) that every Saturn sold in North America was losing money for the company, and software sales weren't making up the shortfall. SoA's choice was either bleed millions for two years until Dreamcast hit, or get the Saturn off shelves ASAP, which isn't really a choice at all. I do think they should have continued to trickle out easily localized titles as a good will gesture to fans throughout 1998.

All that said, Bernie pulled the very same dumb stunt ahead of the Dreamcast launch, dropping what was supposed to be a $249 price tag to $199 without Japan's permission - a dumb stunt which got him fired a month before the launch. This meant the DC hardware was a loss leader from day one, fortunately one with a better attach rate. But it meant they were still swimming upstream from the beginning.

[null1024]

one thing I do keep seeing is the Saturn transparency issue getting mentioned in exactly the same way by dozens of people and it's wrong

The Saturn's transparency ability is basically on-par with the SNES.
You can apply per-layer blend modes just like the SNES, and sprites can additionally have per pixel blending done against the background [this is how Sonic R does the background fade]. This per-pixel blending is kinda dumb -- VDP1 overwrites these pixels in the framebuffer, it doesn't blend them. You know how the transparent Boos in Super Mario World look? The Saturn works exactly like that. Nicole's cape in Guardian Heroes is a good example, too.
All of this is handled by VDP2 when it combines all the layers to produce a final image.

There's also an extremely half-assed VDP1-based transparency mode, which is only useful if VDP2 isn't doing anything, and is implemented in a dead stupid way. Pixels are blended against the VDP1 frame buffer immediately. For plain or scaled sprites, this is fine, but for polygons, you get ugly artifacts because VDP1 is terribly wasteful with how it draws pixels, so many pixels are blended over and over and over.
Also, all of this is opaque to anything drawn by VDP2. IIRC [and I really do not feel like trying to muddle through the Saturn dev manual again, it's the worst fucking migraine from hell to read], you can't specify pixels to be blended on both VDP1 and VDP2, which would otherwise hackily solve that issue.

In a half-assed effort to ignore the issue, there's the 50% mesh mode, which was apparently implemented so lazily that it's not even faster even though it's literally drawing half the pixels in a sprite. Still, this works fairly well with three caveats.
a: if you're using anything better than composite, it's not a particularly strong blend effect, and if you're looking at the clean final output before it gets munged by video encoding, it's not a blend effect at all
b: you can only do 50% transparency
c: transparent sprites still can't blend against each other since they're drawn against exactly the same grid of visible pixels

Burning Rangers does the absolutely absurd thing of rendering the whole screen twice, the second time being in lower resolution and copied to a background layer. Everything is additively blended on VDP2 in the end. Most geometry is re-drawn in black so that non-transparent things block transparent things, and anything that needs to be transparent is colored.