For the final day of Saturnalia, I wanted to show off this piece of hardware I own. Probably the... most useless piece of hardware I bought. Why did I spend a lot of money on this? Because I like garbage.
This is the Sega Saturn keyboard.
I also have the Sega Saturn Shuttle Mouse next to it, which is not a package deal, that's a separate product. I'll just probably bring it up, so I have it there, too.
So, the Saturn Keyboard was released in mid 1996 in Japan only. It never made its way overseas, probably because the Saturn had suffered a heatdeath by that point already, and no one wanted the damn thing. But hey, let's consider that you DID buy the thing, for some reason, because you saw a surprisingly cheap listing for it on Ebay and you collect nicknacks for your trashcan? Asking for a friend. Well, in that case, here's the many incredible games you can play on it.
Oh, I'm sorry. This is a completely unrelated picture of Doom. No, you cannot use your Saturn Keyboard to play Doom. You CAN use the Shuttle Mouse, but ah, it's.. not what you'd think. You move forward on the mouse to... walk forward. It is one of the most disgusting control schemes I can think of. That's not fully related, I just wanted to rant about this unfortunate port of a great game.
In fact, you can play NO FPS games on this console with the keyboard. You'd think it would be good for that. Segaretro.org DOES have Duke Nukem 3D (just the US version apparently???) listed as supported with the keyboard, but for the life of me I can't get it to register the damn thing. I'm not fully surprised the good people at Sega Retro can't test it, cause who the hell would own both the US version of Duke Nukem and also the Saturn Keyboard, except for MY weird ass?
Okay, enough goofing around. If you bought a Saturn Keyboard, what can you do with it?
I actually own this game! It's called Habitat II, and it's the game client for Fujitsu's "Habitat II" virtual world, itself a licensed version of Fujitsu's WorldsAway virtual world. Basically a little online community client, a really REALLY early Second Life. It came packaged in with the keyboard, which is why I own it, and unfortunately, as it requires use of the Sega Saturn Modem, it is unplayable today. So it's just a nice thing on my shelf. Quite a lot like the keyboard!
That's, shockingly, not the only MMO on this console. Dragon's Dream claimed to be the first ever console MMORPG ever made, when it released in December of 1997. It was ¥500 per month, and ¥10 per minute to play. So like, five bucks a month, ten cents per minute. Eventually it was reduced to ¥6 per minute, but it was ported to the Windows 95 shortly after, which kinda sealed the deal for this game. Though it DID have cross play. In 1998. Which is fucking astounding. We STILL can't manage to get this goin' today.
This game ALSO died when the NIFTY-Serve Saturn network died in 1999, so it is ALSO not playable today! But hey, you can look at that bomb-ass title screen. Someone make a private server for this, please, I want to play it.
The rest of the games that this is compatible with, except for one we will mention, are less games and more programs. Things like Sound Novel Tsukuru 2, which also came out for the PS1 actually, which uh... makes Sound Novels. I have no idea what that means. And trying to play it is so confusing, cause it looks to me like programming, but in Japanese. And I cannot program, and I cannot read Japanese, so both of these things together might make my brain explode.
You also have things like Game Basic for Sega Saturn, Sega Saturn Internet Vol. 1 AND 2, Sega Saturn-you Word Processor Set, Netlink Custom Web Browser, and the Pad Nifty internet service. All of these things are either uninteresting, or impossible to use with the collapse of the Sega Saturn internet infrastructure. So that's it, right? That's all you can play with this thing? Two menus for MMOs that died, a Sound Novel maker, a Basic emulator, and a word processor???
No.
Enter in, the savior of the Sega Saturn Keyboard.
Panzer Fucking Dragoon Saga.
Yes. For some INEXPLICABLE reason, this game can be played on the keyboard. It is the ONLY game that can. And it plays like traditional Japanese games usually did back then, with z x c being abc, and asd being xyz, and the arrow keys being the d-pad. I think q and e are l and r. Either way though, it's absolutely weird to me
This control scheme is... fine. It'd be fine if, say every game worked like this. Just convert those buttons and the d-pad naturally for the keyboard layout, no need to program in for every specific game, unless it wants to do something special with the keyboard. But no, that's not how this works. Which means someone PURPOSEFULLY programmed the Panzer Dragoon Saga to work with the Sega Saturn Keyboard, a peripheral that came out two years prior and had practically zero use or ownership. I have NO IDEA WHY.
And that is every game that works with the Saturn keyboard. I bet you could do some fun homebrew stuff with this, but no one's really done anything like that to my personal knowledge. If you have any additional fun facts about the Saturn keyboard, or any of the games mentioned here, let me know! And a very happy Saturnalia to you all. I'm gonna go play some Sega Saturn games now.
