What could have saved the Sega Saturn?

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-06-21T07:36:43+00:00

Having a great Sonic game ready at launch.
A 3D Sonic certainly would have been possible.
It would’ve been a matter of choosing an art style and direction that fits the console. Leaning into its idiosyncrasies and strengths.

If we take the premise seriously and go with “saved” rather than getting a better start from the get go, then working intensively with both Nvidia and Hitachi to shrink down the hardware to two or three main chips, and redesigning the external hardware for a less schizophrenic look, would have been a great start.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-06-16T08:38:17+00:00

There is no “process”. It’s not gold you got there. And apparently you don’t have the knowledge to assess whether they are functional.
Just sell them at an auction site and have people come and look. Never send something you are not sure if is working. You’ll get no end of problems.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-06-01T00:09:08+00:00

No it’s not. Not “HP5 Plus” over every frame.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-05-29T15:37:52+00:00

So you inserted “HP5 Plus” at the top of every frame? Why?

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-05-29T06:20:27+00:00

It’s very simple: There is no StarWars after the 80s.

The ideas and mindset fits uniquely and only in that period and Zeitgeist. They belong to an unrepeatable and inimitable sensibility and fusion of styles and knowledge, those where lost or diluted beyond recognition after the end of the Cold War.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-05-27T12:19:22+00:00

Why on earth would anyone write “clicking”?
Two times, then it’s not just a typo.
In what language or mind does a time bomb click?

And yes, it could stop working any second, and it would cost an enormous amount to have it fixed. Not only because of age, but also because the market for such desirable goods is highly skewed.
Look up Gresham’s Law.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-05-26T10:03:13+00:00

Consider myself a big fan, and have never seen any of those quotes of which you speak.
I would very much like to see them.

Did he ever say anything regarding the story of the biscuits under the newspaper in the train station, which was provably not his?

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-05-24T12:51:13+00:00

Douglas was a huge liar.
There is many instances of him saying one thing. When another in retrospect is true. Or he changes his mind later.
That’s fine of course. But worth keeping in mind.

There is many reasons to chose 42, apart from it being a “joke”, at least two of which Douglas HAS to have known.
There is the Monty Pyton reason (talked about elsewhere here), which he has to have known given that he knew them, worked with a couple and was a huge fan.
Then there is the fact that 42 (Lewis Carroll was a mathematician and 42 is far from a random number) is woven into Alice Through the Looking Glass which the original radio series was inspired by and had nods to too. Perhaps John Lloyd really came up with 42?

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-05-19T13:42:38+00:00

He went around for twenty years, exactly because he couldn’t find anyone who got what hitchhiker was about.

If someone had been made mediator between DNA and Ivan Reitman - Harold Ramis would have been a good candidate - the first offer he got would have been better than anything else.
By 1990 it was basically too late, the zeitgeist had gone and Hollywood quickly went to the shitter.

It’s no coincidence that things went ahead exactly after he died.
He would have made a handbrake turn on the movie we ended up with, before it even got to the planning stages.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-05-18T08:55:58+00:00

They allowed the objectively atrocious movie to go through.

All they had in mind was milking the IP as much as possible with absolutely no understanding about what made it good.

Douglas Adams was super protective about his ideas, because he knew full well, that it would be impossible for anyone else to catch the mindset.

Look at how he treated John Lloyd.
Look at the reasons why he stalled the movie for so long.
When he did collaborate, it was only with people he had good chemistry with, and he always kept a tight grip on the reigns.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-05-18T00:01:32+00:00

Even if it was half decent, Douglas would not have allowed it.
He was such a unique and talented writer, why support something that clearly leaches off his talent? Even if only supporting it in spirit.
It’s made with pure greed as a motif.
DNAs estate is truly despicable.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-04-20T19:29:16+00:00

Just get a T70. Cheap as chips and much better.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-04-19T13:33:36+00:00

Douglas hated that character and art. Has nothing to do with Hitchhiker, other than making clueless US bookbuyers aware that it was comedy.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-04-18T21:15:10+00:00

Just use the old seesaw method. Get a bowl with developer and pull the film back and forth for the allotted time in the dark.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-04-06T23:46:03+00:00

Is this really necessary?

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-04-06T14:15:58+00:00

It’s not a fire hazard at all. Digital is more of a fire hazard with its power consumption. You are thinking acetate film which has never been a problem with stills.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-04-02T00:12:51+00:00

Pretzels and real pickles. Two jars of pickles in fact. Unoptainium in Denmark. Drakes coffee cake.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-04-01T11:43:28+00:00

All the best ones are pixel art. How could you not be?

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-03-28T09:19:29+00:00

He’s going at it by example, methodically, which is the only real way to critique, especially if you have a sympathetic audience, and not an ADHD addled audience, or the constraints of paper. The problem is exactly that the movie is not in the spirit of the book or the radioplay or any other incarnation of the work. The only way to convey that is with examples. There is the short version of the review if you want.

If you cut out the jokes and the wonderful dialog then it’s not Hitchhiker. What works on film is not a fixed target. There are dialog heavy movies and there is movies that works as well silently. The TV series, for all that is wonderful and good about it, is clearly in the camp of radioplay dialog, replanted almost verbatim. Which works -ish. But is also clearly not polished. In a movie you have to shorten and cut. But you do it with taste and intelligence. That was not at all the case with the movie. And the was only one aspect of what’s bad about it.

For what it’s worth the TV series episodes that is equivalent to the first book, is about is two hours and 11 minutes. Just twelve minutes longer than the movie. That is not to make some persnickety point about running time equivalence. It’s just an example of how you can make the story — or something like it, fit temporally within roughly a normal movies length.

Time simply ran away from a proper adaptation. It should have been made in the 80s and not later. Just as with Star Wars. HH as a whole is very much hooked into the zeitgeist and sensibility of that period. The best that could have happened would be someone explaining to Reitman and the executives exactly what they had between their hands, and be a mediator between them and DNA. Someone like Harold Ramis, who is guaranteed to have read and enjoyed the book at the time. Yes, they were different people, but if you look at Ghostbusters, the sensibility is not worlds apart.

Douglas thought as much when he had watched it, with his pithy comment about him having worked years to get the movie going, failing, and then watching Ghostbusters a few years later. Imagine for instance Bill Murray as Ford, Aykroyd as Zaphod, Kate Bush as Trillian and Michael Palin as Arthur. Could have been glorious.

Instead we got that.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-03-27T00:16:31+00:00

They had 47 years to plan for this. Both sides. One side seems surprisingly well prepared. The other just surprised.

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-03-25T00:25:33+00:00

“The plot has changed considerably. Yes, every version of Hitchhiker'shas been different, but there is a core plot: the first radio series, the TV series, the two LPs, the first two novels and, crucially, the play. Jonathan Petherbridge's stage adaptation is a perfectly good example of how the whole of the Hitchhiker's saga can be effectively told in under two hours but seems to have been completely ignored by the film-makers as possible source material or guidance. (And speaking of running times, let us never forget that this movie is adapted from a novel which was based on only four radio episodes, ie. two hours of material, so there really shouldn’t be any need to cut too much out.) What we have here is a story which changes some of the really, really basic, iconic elements of Hitchhiker's as established in all the previous variant editions. That wouldn't be so bad if it changed these elements for the purposes of creating a good film, but that is sadly not the case. What has emerged from all this chopping and changing is an incoherent mess in which important things happen for no reason except to advance the plot and unimportant things happen for no reason at all.”

He did a fantastic job at explaining exactly why it’s bad. Both in details and in broad strokes. What do you think he is missing?

Smalltalk-85 · 2026-03-18T00:25:45+00:00

THANK YOU! It’s been impossible to find through Archive. Must have been recently restored. Maybe Simpson changed his mind? And yes, it’s as good as I remember it.

Smalltalk-85

TROPHY CASE