One rather large third party developer (*cough... EA! Sniff*).
Product submissions from standard third party titles would have a typical two to three week turnaround as we all provided our feedback and any issues that might have come up during that time. On average we would juggle around four to six games between us with assigned projects.
An example would be my manager handing me a specific game or even a publisher (being a RPG nut, I got Working Designs!) to work with and get the game through a QA checklist but still needing a panel review, we would swap a game for a couple days and play through it adding our thoughts of what could be improved or difficulty balance etc.
Our standard projects were always pushed back when a EA title came in for QA. The difference? They got a three day pass on many games including the first Need For Speed (the only NFS) for the Saturn. Our checklist was essentially tossed out the window to rush that game to market. This was often the norm for all games from EA which I thought was shit and rather unfair to other publishers but since the same games often hit the PlayStation, we both wanted the Saturn games on the shelf the same day of release
It would piss me off to wait but due to the difficulties of porting to the Saturn were an issue, some games were given the green light despite a title not passing QA scores.
On a side note, the Need For Speed port was an easy one to the Saturn from the 3DO as both systems used quads. Looking at the original PlayStation port of the same game. (It ran faster but had a lot of clipping due to the translation to triangles. The same results also were seen in the original Road Rash port from the 3DO
Here I thought their handling of the James Bond franchise was more than enough reason to dislike EA....
Speaking of EA, have you ever played The Immortal for Genesis? It's an EA title. I know it was developed initially for the AppleII, but it was later ported to the Genesis/Mega Drive. My brother picked it up way back when because he heard it was extremely violent - same reason he picked up Night Trap, if I remember correctly - and....
Jesus Christ, this game's fucking HARD! First time I've played it in almost 15 years and I died in the very fuckin' room I started in! Damn!
Back on topic, it's amazing to me that certain publishers would get a pass. It shouldn't have been an option. Shit games not only hurt the publisher, but the console as well. They're off taking whatever time they need to correct those issues.
That's something that kind of bothers me with Nocturne of the Moonlight for Saturn. It had already been released for PlayStation, yet they took the time to expand on the castle a bit, throw in a new boss or two, etc; however, it doesn't look quite as good as the PlayStation original and the framerate takes a dip whenever there's more than a few cahracters and/or effects on-screen....
The Saturn was fuckin' made for this. Why didn't Konami take advantage of the hardware?
