Editorial

When Time Grows Short… 1998 would be remembered as one of the most fertile years for revolutionary gaming experiences… but not, at first glance, for western Saturn fans. With SEGA’s…

The US city of Atlanta played host to the 1996 summer Olympic games, a quadrennial event showcasing the pinnacle of human achievement in a variety of sporting events. This traditional…

Published July 2020; updated August 2023, June 2024 Show me Door #3! The Floppy Disk Drive remains one of the more obscure, misunderstood, and underdeveloped pieces of SEGA Saturn hardware…

… and quickly becomes Old News. The story of the Saturn’s launch in Europe isn’t nearly as dramatic as its American counterpart – there were no ‘$299’-style surprises – yet…

The First Console MORPG! Did you know that Phantasy Star Online wasn’t the first console MORPG? Dragon’s Dream (ドラゴンズドリーム) was an MMORPG jointly developed by Fujitsu & SEGA and published…

… and skids off the runway 11 May, 1995 marked the opening day of a brand new, annual industry event – the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3. Here, companies big…

Living off the Grid B-sides. In the days of records and cassettes, these were the lesser, lower-end, ‘secondary’ tracks of an artist’s album. The idea was to have the best…

We are now a quarter century past the launch and all-too-brief lifespan of our beloved SEGA Saturn. That’s long enough that, shockingly, there is a cross-section of Saturn fans that…

The Glory Days 1998 was simultaneously a grim and a glorious year for the Saturn’s fortunes. In Japan, the machine was going strong with just over 200 titles released during…

25 years ago, our favorite Japanese gaming giant launched what would end up being its’ most successful console in its’ native market, and it did so with five titles available…

Initially released in Japan in May 1995 and subsequently in the West, D is renegade studio WARP’s breakout title that put them and their maverick boss Kenji Eno on the…

In the lead-up to the May 1995 release of the Saturn in North America, it became clear that there would be no Sonic game to push sales of the new…

Panzer Dragoon. if ever there was a series that was synonymous with the Saturn experience, this is it. Keil Fluge and the dragon begin the journey to the Tower. Panzer…

In 1996 Capcom released what would go to be one of the most influential games of the entire 32-bit generation: Resident Evil. The title garnered immediate praise from critics and…

SEGA Saturn, Shiro! prides itself on providing our fans with coverage of not only the Saturn’s greatest and most memorable, but also the obscure and little-known – especially if the…

As a youngster, my parents didn’t approve of video games – I got the classic ‘games will rot your brain’ dose of parental sensibility. Getting a Nintendo NES or a…

Over in Japan, SEGA released a long and successful series of games for the Saturn under their retro SEGA AGES label: these were titles from SEGA’s rich back-catalogue of both…

Love him or hate him, Sonic the Hedgehog is synonymous with SEGA. Sonic was a force to be reckoned with during the 16-bit days, delighting players everywhere and striking fear…

It’s Tea Time, Witches! Great video games are often the kind that are quite easy to pick up, but soon reveal layers upon layers of depth that ultimately take a…

Hot on the heels of their worldwide hit Tomb Raider, Core and Eidos pushed out a curious little game titled Swagman. Being of a British software house, it made its…

Back in the mid to late 2000s, I (Peter) made a commitment to go for a North American Saturn full-set. Of course, this meant picking up all the filler games…

Originally published 2018-09-24. Updated 2022-01-29. The very first Tomb Raider, programmed by UK-based Core Design, started its life as a SEGA Saturn project – not a PlayStation game, as convention…

Say what you will about the quality and quantity of the two western Saturn game libraries, but it is widely accepted that the Japanese library is vastly superior, both in…

‘The Coolest Game on Earth’ was the National Hockey League’s late ‘90s advertising tagline, as they made a concerted push to promote the game of ice hockey. During the Genesis…

As we all know, Sony’s PlayStation secured a decisive victory over Sega’s Saturn in all regions in the 5th generation console war. There were many reasons for this; Sony’s stellar…

‘The Coolest Game on Earth’ was the National Hockey League’s late ‘90s advertising tagline, as they made a concerted push to promote the game of ice hockey. During the Genesis…

Greetings, racing fans! If you haven’t listened to the S2E2 ‘Rolling Start’ Shiro Podcast (and you should do, it’s GREAT!), it focused on racing games. In keeping with this theme,…

I sat down to play an hour or so of NiGHTS into Dreams… (NiD) the other day, and whilst flying around in Stick Canyon, I noticed that one of the…