 The Saturn 's design elicited mixed commentary among game developers and journalists . Developers quoted by Next Generation in December 1995 described the Saturn as " a real coder 's machine " for " those who love to get their teeth into assembly and really hack the hardware " , with " more flexibility " and " more calculating power than the PlayStation " . The Saturn 's sound board was also widely praised . By contrast , Lobotomy Software programmer Ezra Dreisbach described the Saturn as significantly slower than the PlayStation , whereas Kenji Eno of WARP observed little difference between the two systems . In particular , Dreisbach criticized the Saturn 's use of quadrilaterals as its basic geometric primitive , in contrast to the triangles rendered by the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 . Third @-@ party development was initially hindered by the lack of useful software libraries and development tools , requiring developers to write in assembly language to achieve good performance . During early Saturn development , programming in assembly could offer a two @-@ to @-@ fivefold speed increase over C language . The Saturn hardware is considered extremely difficult to emulate . Sega responded to complaints about the difficulty of programming for the Saturn by writing new graphics libraries which were claimed to make development easier . Sega of America also purchased a United Kingdom @-@ based development firm , Cross Products , to produce the Saturn 's official development system . Despite these challenges , Treasure CEO Masato <unk> stated that the Nintendo 64 was more difficult to develop for than the Saturn . Traveller 's Tales ' Jon Burton opined that while the PlayStation was easier " to get started on ... you quickly reach [ its ] limits " , whereas the Saturn 's " complicated " hardware had the ability to " improve the speed and look of a game when all used together correctly . " A major point of criticism was the Saturn 's use of 2D sprites to generate polygons and simulate 3D space . The PlayStation functioned in a similar manner , but also featured a dedicated " Geometry Transfer Engine " that rendered additional polygons . As a result , several analysts described the Saturn as an " essentially " 2D system . 
