Today is Sega Saturn Day!

Why is today of all days Sega Saturn day? Because Father Krishna says so, that's why! His blog The Saturn Junkyard, has been up and running for a whole year today, and unlike this place it updates very often with great content like interviews with the creator of Radio Sega, and info all the latest remakes/ports of Saturn games to pop up in Japan a lot recently. He even has a little chat box thingy on the side of the blog, which is nice. I've drawn up a quick Segata Sanshiro in it's honor:

I still remember when I got my Saturn. I got it on my 10th Birthday in November 1996, if I remember correctly. This was probably the most Sega induced time of my life as soon after this Birthday me and some school mates went up to visit the newly opened SegaWorld (see the previous articles about that). It came from Argos and was £200 with a bunch of bundled games: Sega Rally, Manx TT Superbike, Sega Ages, Sonic Jam and Bubble Bobble Collection. I still remember soon after a mate telling me of a rumor that the Saturn could play Mega CD games, which I tried out and ended up having to get the system replaced! Doh!

Being a Sonic nut at the time (my birthday cake that year had Sonic Pogs sitting on it, for petes sake!), Sonic Jam was a dream come true: All 4 mega Drive titles, which had already given me hours upon hours of fun, all on one disc with lots of added options, modes, difficulty settings and best of all: a time attack feature. It was, and still is, the best collection of the original Sonic games ever made: far better than Mega Collection which was just a bunch of ROMs slapped on a disc.

Sega Ages also filled me with mountains of joy: finally I could play After Burner just like the cabinet they had down the theme park along the seaside at home. I didn't have any interest in the Playstation: as far as I was concerned it didn't have Sonic or any of Sega's arcade games which, living by a seafront full of arcades, were something I would alway want to blow my pocket money on, so owning them at home was just what I wanted.

This is my collection at the moment. Most of these games were bought back when the console was out, many of which were being flogged off as the Saturn was slowly fading from selves. Outside of Ebay the games are pretty hard to find now, but a few have popped up at Car Boot Sales from time to time, including Guardian Heroes, Street Fighter Collection and House of the Dead.

Oh, and make sure you check out the latest issue of Retro Gamer, it featured an article on one of the saturn's defining games NiGHTS, as well as a great article on the Official Sega Saturn magazine, all the issues I bought of which I still own and is my all time favorite game magazine.