I just got my hands on a Saturn. I hear X-Men COTA and Marvel Super Heroes are superior on Saturn (as opposed to PS1). Is this true?
And yes, I know about MVC:Origins, but I’m talking about 32-bit releases. =)
It’s been a while since I’ve played Marvel Super Heroes on the PS1, but I do remember hearing that back in the day as well.
My only real gripe with MSH on the PS1 back then was the lack of a training/practice mode.
But original CPS2 versions are even more superior! 
The saturn was a beast for cap com fighting games. You needed the 4mb expansion pack to make sure everything ran smoothly. Best versions of xmen vs street fighter, xmen cora, and marvel super heroes. The ps1 ports were really terrible. Of course the best way to play is cps2 but the saturn is definitely second.
Not arcade perfect, but better than PS1.
PSX versions were crap, though it did have a superior Symphony of the Night 
Saturn and PSX/1 were built very differently. As such, the Saturn required the 4mb expansion cart for some of the fighters. I don’t remember if COTA needed the cart, but I’m pretty sure MSH did. I know for sure that X-Men vs Street Fighter required it for sure. The PSX port of XvSF was BAD. You could only use one character with an “assist” attack from a “second” character. This was supposedly due to lack of RAM on the PSX. XvS and all the other games ported to the Saturn that used the expansion cart were roughly “arcade perfect”, or at least perfect enough for the home console.
The one case where the Saturn’s hackneyed specs actually helped it.
Mostly due to SOTN being developed for the PSX first and using effects that the Saturn had trouble with. That said, it did have a level not in the PS1 version.
Man…do none of these games have training modes? =(
I know MSH didn’t, so logically X-Men CotA wouldn’t as well.
I’m not sure about subsequent games, though (XvSF, MvSF, MvC1)…
Back then our opponent was the training mode. We were just happy to get a close enough arcade port back in the day. The best thing you can do is turn down the damage output on 2nd player haha.
I think Marvel vs Capcom 1 for the the dreamcast was when they started adding training mode for the Vs games.
I’m probably the oldest person here who STILL owns a Saturn bought back in the day.
Yes, I have my original, store-bought 18±year-old machines running! I don’t play with them a lot anymore but they STILL run!
The Saturn port of X-Men: COTA is excellent. For a game that allegedly had 33% of its animation frames cut to fit into the Saturn’s internal memory, at least it runs at full-speed and controls exactly like the arcade! The PS1 release is slow no matter what speed you set it to… As much as I didn’t like the load times on the Saturn port of COTA, I’ve read they’re worse on the PS1 port. To have bad load times AND run like molasses are killing points. It amazes that Acclaim bothered to continue PS1 development of X-Men: COTA… Capcom really didn’t want to spend effort porting that game and it shipped much later – around two years AFTER the US release of X-Men: COTA on the Saturn!
The animation on the original CPS-2 COTA game really wasn’t great, either. In fact, I don’t think outside of the Darkstalkers games that the animation on any of the CPS-2 games is spectacular… I’ve gone back and forth played the SF Alpha and Marvel games and the animation is inferior to a lot of the DS character animation. There was more attention and love poured into the character animation of those games, IMHO. The cuts to the COTA Saturn home release for me showed up more on the larger sprite characters like Juggernaut and Colossus. I’m presuming that’s because there were more cuts made there because larger sprites take up more RAM. IF all you have access to play with is the Saturn COTA port, you’re not missing much. The animation is generally just ‘okay’ on the arcade game and the frames cut don’t impact the gameplay on the home version. The game feels the same way to me regardless of the version.
Okay, as far as the pre-4MB RAM expansion cartridge games go, the Capcom ports to the Sega Saturn are better than the PS1 versions – for the most part. It’s kind of hard to beat ports from a 2-D arcade system (CPS-2) to a home arcade system (Saturn) that was originally designed to be the 2-D console king of its day. There’s nothing Capcom did on the CPS-2 that really couldn’t be replicated on the Saturn within the limits of the home system’s memory. That’s where issues like animation frame-cutting and game speed choppiness came into play but that affected both the PS1 and Saturn because they shipped with minimal on-board RAM. RAM was a lot more expensive in the mid-1990s than it is now and neither system really had enough RAM in retrospect… The Saturn had marginally larger memory capacity than the PS1. Where I think the memory affected performance was in slightly greater disk-access speeds and generally faster-loading games on the Saturn – that’s IF the developer-in-question exploited the Saturn’s advantages with its CD-ROM memory cache. The CPS-2 Saturn ports generally loaded faster on the Saturn than the PS1 and about half as often. That was true even before the 4MB RAM expansion cartridge was released for the Saturn.
The later Capcom “Vs” games series were not able to be translated well to the PS1 because the system just didn’t have the memory to deal with all the character animations and large stages in those games. The PS1 also didn’t have a communication port with high-enough throughput speed to make upgrading the system practical – that’s why it didn’t have a RAM cartridge made for it. Look at how slow the PS1 is at reading its memory cards! There’s no way a RAM upgrade cart would have worked on that system unless it had a dedicated high-speed cartridge slot like the Saturn did.
The Saturn really didn’t have enough built-in memory for the “Vs” games, either, but had the advantages of actual built-in 2-D hardware for generating sprites and running 2-D effects with less RAM useage AND upgradeable capabilities through its top-loading cartridge slot. At the very least you could upgrade the Saturn’s main work memory (RAM) for things like storing more animation, extra RAM for better sound reproduction, and reduce the number of times and length of data loading from the CD-drive.
One of the few valid points the Sony fanboys could hammer some Saturn ports on was poorer sound quality on some of the pre-4MB RAM cart ports. This was a case of there not being enough RAM dedicated to audio on the Saturn. [details=Spoiler](That’s a theme with Sega consoles in general. They don’t have the best audio quality of their generations. Sega cut it too close for audio RAM on the Saturn, the Genesis was saddled with inferior 8-bit sound, and even the Dreamcast sounds tinny next to the PS2 which was otherwise a comparable system with few advantages over the DC itself.)[/details] Character voices sounded muffled and sometimes slightly shifted in pitch on the Saturn ports. That was definitely true for Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. The Saturn had a fine sound chip but it didn’t decode compressed sound as well as the PS1 sound chip did. In a couple of pre-4MB CPS-2 releases, the lack of extra RAM didn’t make a difference – SF Alpha 1 sounds excellent on the Saturn and Nightwarriors had fantastic sound reproduction. After the debut of the 4MB RAM cart, there’s no question sound reproduction of CPS-2/Saturn ports was excellent if not arcade perfect. The only instance I can remember where this wasn’t so was in the Saturn port of Street Fighter Alpha 3 (also a 4MB RAM cart game) – that was originally cancelled in the middle of Saturn development but later restarted and finished as a ‘parting gift’ to Capcom fans. That’s the only Capcom 4MB RAM game I own that has messed up sound… obviously there wasn’t the largest priority to optimize the sound for the Saturn release of SFA3.
The PS1 wasn’t built for handling 2D that well, and some 2D items had to be handled as 3D objects, PS1 excel at 3D, sound and video play back.
The Saturn had better 2D acceleration and the expanded memory port.
Now that said the SNES had the best version of Street Fighter Alpha 2 over the PS1 and Saturn, it used a hardware chip (S-DD1 chip) for on-the-fly decompression
With the exception of the Neo Geo AES and CD, we didn’t get perfect/near perfect arcade ports until the Dreamcast (as the Dreamcast has nearly identical specs to the Naomi)
I remember my Saturn with the imported games and 4 mb cart for ram. Visually, the games mentioned in the first post seemed much better on Saturn than ps1. The key I remember, as has already been mentioned, were the amount of frames of animation dropped in the ps1 versions of some capcom games.
Also, and it may just have been placebo effect/rumors at the time, but it seemed as if marvel super heroes also ran better with the ram cartridge even though it didn’t require it.
I really recommend the action replay 4 in 1 for the Sega Saturn, Its a 1-4 mb ram cart and import enabler
there also something about cheat codes but what ever
Yup i still have my Saturn, its an awesome system(Fire Pro Wrestling & Bomberman)…Last year i bought a Japanese Saturn that can play burn games & man there are a lot of Japanese games that never got imported.
As for action replay 4 in 1, its a must have but just a heads up, you can’t actually direct save while you’re playing on it. Its more of a storage to put your save files on it. So you have to load up your game on the internal memory.
Training modes only started getting implemented during the 32-bit era. It was something new and not every game implemented it at the start.
One of the earlier games that I recall playing significantly that had a training mode was Street Fighter EX Plus Alpha on the PS1.
Plus the “Training - Expert Mode” that (I believe) became the staple of all modern fighting games’ “Challenge mode”.
Though more curiously, SF EX+alpha came out on the PS1 before X-Men CotA and (obviously) MSH, both of which had no training modes…
And surprisingly, the Naomi game Akatsuki Denkou Senki (Akatsuki Blitzkampf Ausf. Achse) appears to have a training mode at the arcades… Weird. Never seen that before.
COTA seems fine on Saturn, but MSH is so slowwww! I guess if I want to play that game I’ll have to go arcade/PS3/360…
Are you using the Ram cart? I dont remember it being slow, there some slow downs on some stages but other then that it was pretty good speed.
RAM cart is coming in the mail. From what I’ve read online though the RAM cart adds more animation frames but makes the game lag even MORE =[