10 Best Sega Saturn Games With High Replay Value

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The Sega Saturn was the fourth major home console released by Sega, and the second-to-last home console the company would produce before its last hurrah with the Dreamcast. It’s no secret that the Saturn had a bit of a bumpy launch, with Sega intentionally releasing it early to beat the PlayStation with a positively paltry launch lineup. It’s a shame, because once the Saturn finally got all of its games, it was actually a pretty excellent console.

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What the Saturn lacked in the bountiful libraries of the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, it made up for with a combination of strong first-party support and excellent port jobs, both from arcades and other platforms. Yeah, you had to make your Saturn games last a little longer, but there were plenty of engaging and addictive titles you could do just that with. And if you didn’t, Segata Sanshiro would break into your house and beat the stuffing out of you! He was a little more intense about being a console spokesman than his son.

10 Die Hard Arcade

For The Sheer, Hilarious Audacity

In the vast majority of circumstances, games based on movies don’t turn out so great. In a few rare instances, though, something magical happens, and we get a game that’s incredibly fun and wild, if not especially faithful to the movie it’s adapting. One particularly amusing example of this is Die Hard Arcade, a game with the Die Hard license and Fox Interactive’s blessing, though very little commitment to that movie’s actual story.

Die Hard Arcade is a 3D beat ‘em up, where you and a buddy battle your way through a terrorist-infested skyscraper to rescue the President’s daughter. It sounds like Die Hard on paper, but then you add all the sumo wrestlers, luchadors, and killer robots, and it diverges a smidge. Who cares, though, it’s fun!

Die Hard Arcade is an absolute hoot to go through with a friend, especially since the game has unique team-up specials you can only perform with two players. This was a must-have game for any two-player household with a Saturn, whether you’d seen Die Hard or not.

9 Wipeout

Feel The Speed

If I asked you to name a video game about hovering machines blasting down futuristic tracks at high speed, what would you think of? Probably F-Zero, right? Good answer, but not the one I was looking for. Nope, I was thinking of Wipeout, originally a 1995 launch title for the PlayStation before being ported to the Saturn the following year.

Wipeout is kind of like a midpoint between F-Zero and Mario Kart. There’s a big emphasis on straight speed and machine performance, but you can also pick up weapons and power-ups on the track like shields, rockets, and turbo boosts. It’s a bit more of an intense experience than your average racing game, and requires a decent amount of practice to get a feel for the floating handling.

Admittedly, the Saturn port doesn’t run quite as well as the PlayStation original, but if you had a Saturn rather than a PlayStation back in the day, you wouldn’t know the difference. It’s still a fantastic racing game and a certified crowd pleaser, and that’s the only justification you need to boot it up.

8 Saturn Bomberman

Classic Multiplayer Chaos

One of the uncontested kings of highly-replayable, multiplayer friendly games from the retro age is Konami's secret boss, Bomberman. While his singleplayer endeavors have been a little hit or miss, I’m hard-pressed to think of a multiplayer Bomberman match that wasn’t a barrel of fun. Sega knew Bomberman had the right stuff, which is why it secured a Saturn-exclusive entry in the series, appropriately named Saturn Bomberman.

Saturn Bomberman has both a story mode and a multiplayer battle mode. The story mode, which can be played solo or co-op, has you running through a series of mazes and blowing up targets to open up an escape door to clear the stage. It’s cut-and-dry, nothing wrong with it, but it’s not what we’re here for. No sir, we’re here for that multiplayer battle mode, and all the four-directional bomb-blasting chaos it brings with it.

Saturn Bomberman introduces a variety of new power-ups to the mix, including dinosaur helpers that you hatch from eggs and raise in the midst of a match to take hits for you. On its own, the game could only support two players, but with the help of multitaps, you could have a battle match with up to ten players simultaneously. So long as you had the hardware for it, it was the perfect party game, ensuring nobody would be left out of the fun.

7 Panzer Dragoon

Everything’s Better With Dragons

While the Sega Saturn’s launch lineup wasn’t exactly bursting at the seams, it wasn’t empty either. Sega had some of its brightest minds on the job of cranking out launch titles for its new console, and one of the big winners that came about was the very first Panzer Dragoon, launching alongside the Saturn’s western release.

Panzer Dragoon is a 3D rail shooter game, similar to Star Fox or Space Harrier, but with a much greater degree of control and presentation. You play as a dragon-mounted rider flying your way through a ruined world, shooting down other flying foes as you go before eventually confronting the stage’s boss. A neat feature is that you actually have full 360 degree sight even though you’re on a rail, so you can look over your shoulder and see what enemies are coming before they’re actually in shooting range.

Panzer Dragoon, like most shoot ‘em ups, is a pretty punishing game, but that’s part of what keeps you coming back to it. Every attempt gets you a little closer to the ending, teaches you a little more about ideal flight control. It’s the kind of game you’d expect to see in an arcade first and foremost, but it was a Saturn exclusive from the start.

6 NBA Jam Tournament Edition

From Downtown

If we’re talking about classic arcade games, it doesn’t get much more classic than NBA Jam. Released in 1993, this two-on-two baller-fest remains one of the most fast-paced and fun sports games ever made, putting more emphasis on fun and ease of control than realism. The game was a huge hit in arcades, and when it got its Tournament Edition upgrade, it also made its way to the Saturn.

The broad strokes of the game were the same, giving you a variety of two-man teams from across the NBA’s teams of the time, with strong playing and consistent scoring powering up your players and allowing them to perform wilder, flashier shots and dunks. The Tournament Edition also added a titular Tournament mode, which increased difficulty and required more skill, as well as more opportunities for special shots and dunks via special spots on the court.

NBA Jam is one of those ideal sports games in that you don’t need to have any particular interest in or working knowledge of the sport in question to enjoy it. Anyone can pick it up and play it almost immediately, so it’s perfect for both skilled players and newcomers to enjoy at any time.

5 The House Of The Dead

Worth Buying A Lightgun For

One of the definitive series for lightgun rail-shooter enthusiasts, and a series I sincerely wish Sega would do more with, is The House of the Dead. Since 1997, these games have been certified classics, with their cool environment and boss designs, crunchy graphics, and cheesy voice acting. The original game started in arcades in 1997, but it made the jump to homes with a Saturn port the following year.

The House of the Dead is a co-op lightgun shooter with a very simple objective: shoot the zombies and zombie-adjacent creatures, don’t shoot the people. There are lots of zombie and monster types constantly coming at you, requiring snap aiming and trigger reflexes, though if you just spray and pray, you’ll inadvertently shoot the occasional innocent and lose a life. The game has branching paths depending on your success or failure in saving people in danger, so no two playthroughs are completely identical.

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Of course, we can’t talk about House of the Dead without highlighting the bosses. They were excellent standard-setters for the series’ vibe, and fun to fight besides. No matter how many times you gun them down, it never stops being fun, especially when you get to Magician at the end and get to hear his awesome theme song.

4 Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo

Stackin’ Gems For Shoryukens

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo

In the late 90s, Street Fighter mania was in full swing, with players flocking to arcades around the world to experience the latest iterations of Street Fighter II. Capcom had a real golden goose on its hands, which is why just about every console got a home port. Naturally, this included the Saturn, though that’s not all the Saturn got. It also received a port of its puzzle game spinoff, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo.

Puzzle Fighter was a competitive tile puzzle game, in a similar vein to Sega’s own Puyo Puyo 2, though unlike Puyo Puyo 2, Puzzle Fighter had a western release. It’s pretty simple, you’re just stacking up gems into tight bundles, then dropping correctly-colored Crash Gems in to set off massive chain reactions, racking up points and dropping junk blocks on your opponent. While this is going down, you have Street Fighter and Darkstalkers characters in the middle acting out a fight, though this is just a cosmetic thing.

Puzzle Fighter has some solo modes that are fun for pick-up play, but the real draw is in head-to-head multiplayer. You get some puzzle-minded friends together, you’ll be battling each other till the sun comes up with a similar ferocity to actual Street Fighter.

3 NiGHTS Into Dreams…

The Saturn’s Signature Game

Something that the Saturn still gets some flak for is that it didn’t have a definitive, original Sonic game. Sonic 3D Blast was a port, Sonic Jam was just a tech demo and game collection, and Sonic R… was Sonic R. While there wasn’t a Sonic game, though, Sonic Team was working on something, a game that would become the Saturn’s signature title: NiGHTS into Dreams.

NiGHTS is a little difficult to categorize, genre-wise. It’s got the vibe of a platformer, but rather than running and jumping, you’re flying through stages with full control on a 2D plane. You need to quickly lap around the stage, collecting points and defeating enemies as you go, and clear the whole thing before time runs out. The flying controls have a bit of a learning curve to them, but once you nail it down, you can pull off some absolutely ridiculous stunts and speedruns.

NiGHTS is also just a joy to experience in general, with incredibly colorful environments, fantastic music, and some cool boss fights. It’s a shame it only ever got one sequel on the Wii, I’d totally play another. Though, perhaps it’s that monkey’s paw wish that got us saddled with Balan Wonderworld…

2 Theme Park

Developer

Platforms

Release Date

Krisalis Software

Sega Saturn, MS-DOS

December 1995 (Saturn)

The Sega Saturn wasn’t just good for porting arcade games to home TVs, it also got a few ports of PC games. Given their generally higher complexity, PC games didn’t typically fare too well on consoles back then, but the Saturn managed to turn out a couple of surprisingly solid ones, chief among them being Theme Park.

Originally released for MS-DOS in 1994, Theme Park was the original amusement park simulator game, allowing you to design and build your own park from scratch, then manage its growth and goings-on, including super nitty-gritty stuff like business logistics and investments. The Saturn port, which came out a year later, was noted as one of the most faithful to the original PC version out of the many home console ports that were released.

Getting to play such an in-depth game on a home console could keep you engaged for hours on end. Considering one of the game’s goals is to open up additional parks elsewhere in the world, you’ll never completely beat it, so it’s always just begging to be booted up again.

1 Dead Or Alive

Arcade Fighting Excellence At Home

1993 saw the release of Sega’s first Virtua Fighter game, and from there, it was an industry-wide rush to take the burgeoning 3D fighting game crown. More than a few noteworthy, long-lived franchises were born in this era, one of which being the very first Dead or Alive in 1996, developed by the Tecmo team that would go on to become Team Ninja. Following the successful arcade release, it jumped to Saturn a year later.

Compared to Virtua Fighter, Dead or Alive was a much more fast-paced, reflexive fighting game. Besides the usual punches and kicks, the addition of a dedicated hold button allowed you to mix up your playstyle on the fly with two kinds of grapples. You could grab on tight and pummel a helpless foe, or grapple them out of a combo and knock them out of your personal space. Also, in lieu of ring-outs, the edges of the ring were lined with explosives, which is just hilarious.

Technically, the Saturn version of Dead or Alive didn’t actually release in the west, though it was a good enough game that word got around, and it became a surprisingly popular import title. That’s how it was for fighting games back in the day; you went the extra mile for the games you knew you had to play.