The other thing the Saturn is famous for (asside from Sega games of course) is the near perfect conversions it recieved of SNK and Capcom's arcade games particularly near the end of it's life-span, when they took advantage of the 1 and 4 megabyte memory upgrades. Examples: Radiant Silvergun, Soukyugurentai, Shienryu, Donpachi, Dodonpachi, Strikers 1945 (& II), Thunderforce V, Thunderforce Goldpack 1 & 2, Sexy Parodius, The Game Paradise, Silhouette Mirage, Assault Suits Leynos 2, Batsugun, Battle Garegga, Arcade Gears: X-Multiply and Image Fight, Arcade Gears: Gun Frontier, Layer Section, and lots more.
The Saturn may not have Gunhed, or R-Type, but if you want a system with a lot of shoot 'em ups, I'd say it's easily on par with the PC Engine. Colours: 24 bit palette, 32 000 onscreen.CD-ROM: 2x JVC mechanism, 320 kB/sec transfer rate.DSP: Yamaha FH-1 11.3 MHz (FM, PCM, 32 voices).
Thats why the Dreamcast can actually run Windows CE: there is now no reason for game publishers not to port to the Dreamcast. Why was Saturn's user base small? No third party games! Why no third party games? User base is too small to warrant the extra time! Vicious cycle eh? ::sigh::
Why take a lot of extra coding time to reach the Saturn's small user base when a game can be published simultaneously to the PSX and PC with ease? The PSX has a huge library of fast cheap mass-market games with no inherent value besides marketability. The Playstation on the other hand was extremely easy to publish games to alongside the PC.
Yu Suzuki and Sega's first party development teams did some amazing things with the system, but no third party developers thought it was worth the time to code specially for the Saturn. This made the Saturn hard as hell to program for. The Saturn actually has TWO chips, each only a bit slower than the Playstation's single chip. The Sega Saturn is actually, from everything I've read, even PSX fans, technically superior to the Playstation. The Sega CD and 32X certainly hurt Sega as well, and perhaps without an already doubting public the Saturn would have achieved the necessary third party support. I payed a lot of attention to the Saturn, trying to figure out why it failed, and I think the best answer, in the end, was the lack of third party support.