[AdmiralAsshat]

The fact that the next-console's Sonic Adventure 1 still felt like an also-ran Mario 64 makes me think that it probably wouldn't have made a difference.

Much ink has been spilled and fingers pointed over the failures of Sonic Xtreme and other attempts to make a fully-3D Sonic game on the Sega Saturn, but I think it fundamentally comes down to the fact that the creators didn't know how to translate the core gameplay loop into 3D.

[tombert]

Well that’s what I am saying though; clearly the 32x (and probably the Saturn) were capable of running something cool like SRB2 as evidenced by the tech demos, and I feel like SRB2 really does feel like a proper translation of the 2D games to 3D.

But I broadly agree; it wasn’t a hardware thing, it was a “we don’t know how to do it” thing; SRB2 came like a full decade after the 32x’s relevance.