Interview: Mark Cochrane, former producer and worldwide acquisitions manager at Psygnosis

From PC World comes an interesting interview with former Psygnosis producer Mark Cochrane. Saturn fans should recognize Psygnosis, they developed Destruction Derby and Wipeout 2097.  Mark sheds a bit of light on porting the games to the Saturn:

Games such as Wipeout and Destruction Derby were initially released and found success on the PlayStation before they were later ported to the Sega Saturn and PC. What challenges did Pysgnosis face in porting the games to the other two platforms?

MC: The PlayStation and Saturn platform hardware was very different, and the way code needed to be written for each made porting challenging. For example, when making PC ports we needed to have a decent minimum spec and graphics card support for the games to be enjoyed.

Games such as Destruction Derby and Wipeout 2097 were ported to the Sega Saturn, but games such as Formula 1 and Destruction Derby 2 were notably absent. How and why were certain titles selected for porting to the Saturn and some weren't?

MC: From memory, I believe most would make it over eventually, but the porting challenges remained and finding teams capable of doing the work in a timely manner contributed in largish delays between releases on the formats.

Check out the full interview here!

Saturn VS Playstation

Whilst browsing the lovely Stage 6 site (which is some kind of higher quality YouTube) some videos catched my attention. Saturn versus Playstation comparisons. Whereas YouTube has the greater amount of Sega Saturn related videos, Stage 6 has the advantage of providing an actually great videoquality and thus enable us to actually recognize the slight differences between Saturn and Playstation versions of different games. Which brings me right to the bright side of this post: The Saturn versions are in some cases only a little bit inferior and sometimes even on par with the Playstation versions. Not that we always knew it anyway...

I think the comparison videos are highly interesting and make you also feel a little bit better about the Saturn's 3D capabilities. Go check them out right here.

Oh and btw, every now and then there's also a non comparison video between the search results, so you may have to browse all those pages.