Even though the Playstation isn't technically as good, it LOOKS better.

Saturn models, and also in the case of Resident Evil, have a lot less jittery polygons and also manage to keep a better consistency at greater distances.
Admitedly, in Resident Evil character faces didn't do well on Saturn (and I think that's the one thing people tend to focus their mind on when they compare both games) but I believe this is more to do of a lack of effort in the porting process than on "the Saturn" itself. Some enemy models look amazing on Saturn however and in some cases I like them better than on PSX; and generall models just hold their consistency better in all circumstances on Saturn. I don't believe this rotating / zooming effect is something they would have done on PSX because it would be highlighting the flaws of PSX models.

Shame about the lack fo dynamic lights in the Saturn version indeed though, BUT despite having an amazing light sources system built into the game (the proto PSX versions showcase it, it's quite something) in the case of RE1 the use of such lights is rather mid, RE2-3 went a lot more wild with them.

Textures on the Saturn version are fricked on the model though, it looks janky.

>at the time a lot of pc games were 3d environments with 2d sprites or full pre-rendered 3d. it seems like sega took that as a que that full 3d was still a long way off.
This is a really interesting insight that I could see being plausible.

playing saturn 3D games, the lack of shading/lighting in the majority of games really sticks out. good thing it's great at 2D.

>at the time a lot of pc games were 3d environments with 2d sprites or full pre-rendered 3d. it seems like sega took that as a que that full 3d was still a long way off.
This is a really interesting insight that I could see being plausible.

Sega didn't understand that 3D was going to hit as hard and fast as it did until Virtua Fighter became a hit for them. And that was only a year before the Saturn launch in Japan.
I wonder how much of the PS1's architecture came from Namco pushing Sony to release a viable platform for its arcade ports.

seems like way more detail than necessary, I wonder if they loaded a highpoly version for that cutscene. In gran turismo 2 they show higher poly cars on the menu but in game they are lower.

>why the frick would devs push tech that's not even properly ready?
you don't understand. no matter how bad early 3D looked, it allowed for way more gameplay possibilities than 2D games. 3D platformers play very different from 2D platformers. 3D fighting games play very different from 2D fighting games. people wanted 3D because they wanted novel experiences, even if it turned out that novelty sometimes required sacrificing something else. this led to obvious consequences: the more 3D games were coming out, the less fresh they felt. eventually there was a shift back towards 2D games when people realized that gameplay styles that 3D games made possible were not necessarily better than their 2D counterparts, which is where we are now. I don't like using the excuse "you had to be there", but in this case you really cannot understand this well without being unable to play ANY 3D game for the first decade or two of your life and then coming across them.

Saturn is better in terms of some raw specs. More VRAM, two CPUs with only marginally lower clock speed instead of one. It's the 3D rendering parts that are lacking because Sega didn't plan for them to be 3D rendering parts at the beginning. VDP1 was supposed to be just a scaler and geometric transformation engine for 2D sprites. The Playstation threat forced them to completely rethink the purpose of their own console from something that was supposed to coexist with 3D arcade titles into something that would run those very same 3D arcade titles at home. Of course, late stage changes are expensive because an earlier design shoehorned into something it wasn't supposed to be is inherently inefficient. Saturn was expensive to produce. They had to price it higher than Playstation in the US and still lost money on every unit they sold at the beginning.