The more you get into Saturn the more you might end wanting a switch modded unit.
While the PAR is somewhat of a miracle product for sure, there are a few drawbacks to using it:
The two titles that come with a ROM cart aren't playable. These are KOF 95 and Ultraman. No big loss on Ultraman, but I quite like 95.
While the PAR has a huge ammount of save space, you can only copy to it from its own memory manager. You can't save directly to it in-game like you can with the official cart. This is a drag when you are playing games where you want to create mutiple save files since the internal Saturn memory is kind of small. There is one game, Warcraft II, where you can't even save mid-level since the suspend file is bigger than the entire save space in the SS. You either need a real back-up cart, or you can only save between levels. There is another game, one of the Tomagachi ones, that came with a save cart that had a special file on it and you can't run the game without that file. (Its an otherwise normal back-up cart)
The later versions of the PAR emulate the 4MB cart pretty well, and the 4MB cart emulates the 1MB pretty well. Because of this there is at least one 1MB game (maybe SamShow 3, or Real Bout, I can't remember) that produces graphical glitches with anything other than the original SNK 1MB cart (or the 3rd party version of it, or the 1MB PAR).
Basically, the PAR is fine when you are first getting into Saturn, but you might want the cart slot for something else eventually.
There are somethings you can ONLY do with a PAR though, mainly using Game Shark codes. There was one cool one that allowed air specials in Vampire Savior.
As for games, same thing with TG-16 versus PC Engine (although nowhere near as bad). Unless the game has a lot of text (and you actually care about that text) then you might be better off with JP versions of games. I think I paid $15 for my JP copy of Guardian Heroes...
Just look at the cover for Street Fighter Alpha\Zero. The US one is...so f*cking horrible, whereas the JP one has one of the best pieces of Street Fighter art ever produced (albiet, homoerotic as all get out)
