Some n00bish Saturn questions

[Darkman]

Hi everyone,

I'm now a proud owner of a Sega Saturn. Or so I hope - the machine won't be arriving until middle of next week. The thing is, there was supposed to be an MPEG card included, but since my father was the one doing the buying and didn't know any better, the seller "accidentally" left out the card�

So, my first question � is the MPEG card useful for anything these days, or is it just another glorified collector�s item?
We paid around $70 for an unboxed earlier model Saturn with a regular and NiGHTS control pads, SCART-RGB cable and 7 games(4 of them boxed with manuals; and no, NiGHTS is not on of them, sadly). Could be that the seller also omitted a memory cart. From my father�s description the Saturn itself has noticeable wear and tear. Definitely not mint condition. Was that a good deal or a total ripoff?
And lastly � what are the must-have games for Saturn? I trust your taste in games, guys. Anything goes, as long as it�s not an RPG.

[Midori]

The MPEG card is for VCD playback, nice if you have VCDs... I think a special version of one of the Lunar Games used it for its video sequences aswell.

[atom]

And it can be quite useful if you want to burn videos from your computer if you dont have a DVD burner.

[Guest]

don't forget unlike other peripherals VCD card is region encoded so if you have JPN card it will only work on JPN Saturn - though you can use the import cart to bypass that...

if your Saturn is PAL verstion then there's PAL VCD card released as well.
For US Saturn well tough luck - see my comment above for region bypass...

[Darkman]

Thanks for the answers guys. It turns out I'll be getting that MPEG card after all, so no problem. I have a different question now. Are backup memory and RAM cartridges also region-dependent?

[Midori]

No, not the ones I've used at least and I don't think any system has region protected memory cards or RAM expansions(hmm... ok maybe there aren't that many consoles besides the saturn here but...)