Is it worth starting an Atari Jaguar Collection?
- Thread starter White Devil
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The Atari 50 showed me just how awful and what a wasted opportunity Jag was. I wanted to like it…but damn. So busted.
Atari misread the assignment, by not just having a system that played all their AAA coin-ops of the day, at home.
-Blasteroids
-STUN Runner
-RoadBlasters
-Pit Fighter
-The Driven’s
-The Gauntlet’s
-720•
**perfect ports of adjacent gfx intensive games, like Rampage, Iron Man Stuart’s Off Road, etc.
What the hell happened? A let down on PC•FX level proportions.
Atari misread the assignment, by not just having a system that played all their AAA coin-ops of the day, at home.
-Blasteroids
-STUN Runner
-RoadBlasters
-Pit Fighter
-The Driven’s
-The Gauntlet’s
-720•
**perfect ports of adjacent gfx intensive games, like Rampage, Iron Man Stuart’s Off Road, etc.
What the hell happened? A let down on PC•FX level proportions.
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The perfect answer.Yeah, it really is a horrible console. Damn, I love it.
My version:
'It's okay to like Prometheus. It's not okay to argue that it's a good movie.'
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Ugh. Jaguar. I tried so hard to like that system. Bought Towers 2 when it came out and legit spent so much time TRYING to enjoy it. Common theme on that system....trying to enjoy it.
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I got a Jaguar GameDrive about a year ago, and sampled some of the cartridge and CD libraries that I hadn't before. It was even more dire than I thought. Talk about some of the lowest budget Western-developed tripe from one of the most awkward eras in gaming. There are a few gems for sure, but it's almost a total wasteland.
That's not fair to the PC-FX. The PC-FX has plenty of competently-made games that obviously had reasonable budgets and efforts put into them from competent developers. Whether or not the majority of those games are your cup of tea is a separate question. If you're only comparing the level of failure, okay fair enough.
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I like the 'Prometheus' metaphor, Taiso. And I'll even take it an uncomfortable step further. The Jaguar is like the ladies of Chief's XXXL thread. Most guys take a look at those chunky broads, and their dicks shrivel up like frightened turtles. Running for the exits. But to Chief, well he's rock hard, dreaming of laying some serious pipe. So you see, for some [few] of us, the Jag is our loveable husky gal.
Spoiler:
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JoeAwesome
I survived Secret Santa, It wasn't Easy.,
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Johnny16Bit
Sakura's Bank Manager
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Yeah, it really is a horrible console, and no one should buy one. But damn, I love it.
That. It's like an N64 that would make you giggle.
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Level of failure.
After what the heights that PCE reached, a 32-bit successor was expected to rock worldwide. It went over like a wet fart in church. And that’s from someone that *likes* PC•FX.
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There is no better game than Rayman on the PC-FX. I still prefer the Jaguar version.
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There were two unrelated companies calling themselves Atari at the time. Those arcade titles came out of Atari Inc., whereas the Jaguar (and Lynx) came out of Atari Corp. These two companies had split out of the original Atari, but by the mid 80s they were two separate companies with separate owners and management, they were not part of the same corporate group. Anyways, that's a long way of saying, that Atari Corp. didn't own any of the IP or code or anything related to those Atari Inc arcade titles and would have needed to pay Atari Inc a bunch of money to port them over to the system, or give them permission to do it themselves or through other contractors. Atari Corp did this for the Lynx, which is why a bunch of those Atari Inc games made it to the Lynx, but stiffed people on payments for some of the contracts (they did this a lot for a variety of contracts related to game and hardware development), so there was bad blood there. Atari Corp, was also very poor by the time of the Jag and didn't really have the money to finance great ports of these games anyway. All the games Atari Corp financed, such as Trevor McFur and Kasumi Ninja, were done with ludicrously small teams on shoestring budgets, and what was initially planned to be placeholder art or sfx typically found its way into the final games because Atari Corp wouldn't provide more time or money for the games to be worked on.
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Man, fuck you.
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That's the key here. It was 1993, SNES was flying high, Sega had their CD system on the market, the gaming world was marching towards 3D but still had a foot in the 2D world, mainly because the systems available on the consumer market weren't powerful enough to handle polygons without extra chips or hardware add-ons.
The Jag had some design flaws that made it difficult to use its 3D capabilities to the fullest without workarounds, it took dev'ers a while to get a grip of the system but it was already too late, the 32X, Saturn and finally the PSX came out only a year later so basically, the Jag had a grace period of about 12 months but failed to deliver.
Just look at the launch titles, it was Raiden, Cybermorph and one or two others, hardly the stuff of legends. Cybermorph also shows some of the problems the system had, the game looked quite good for its time and also was more or less open world which was uncommon but in the end, most people found it boring to play.
However, it would be wrong to blame it on hardware bugs and bad business decisions alone. Development of the Jag hardware started in 1990/91 and its specs looked impressive but when it was finally released in 1993, 3D hardware development had taken a huge leap forward in terms of systems that were affordable for most people. For example, the basic capabilities of the PSX were available on various 3D computer systems as early as 1985 but it wasn't until the early 90s that it became available for consumers at a reasonable price. Markets and tech were highly dynamic at that time, software and hardware developers were creating new stuff on the fly and were learning on the go, what was big six months ago was old hat today, new graphics chips were released left and right but only a few of them actually made it, it was very easy back then to walk into a hardware dead end and get left behind. Happened to Jag, 32X, 3DO, some say also the Saturn, basically any system that wasn't the PSX. They all sort of placed their bets and Sony won. That's life.
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I'd take a dozen pics of fat, sad goth Scarlet Johansen before I'd look at one more of these heffers.At least it’s not another Billie Eilish pic…
Jesus, we get it. Some of you are into hoggin'.
But keep it in the appropriate threads.
This is an Atari Jaguar thread.
SAD!
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JoeAwesome
I survived Secret Santa, It wasn't Easy.,
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Do the math on deez
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I owned nearly the whole library of carts and CDs. Of those, I played these the most:
Hoverstrike CD
I-War
Attack of the Mutant Penguins
Power Drive Rally
AvP
Doom
Wolf3D
Missile Command 3D
Tempest 2K
Iron Soldier
Highlander (ambitious, but unplayable...I tried to like it)
Baldies
The rest sat there until I lobbed the garbage heap at someone else years ago. It was like having an Amiga with less games.
Hoverstrike CD
I-War
Attack of the Mutant Penguins
Power Drive Rally
AvP
Doom
Wolf3D
Missile Command 3D
Tempest 2K
Iron Soldier
Highlander (ambitious, but unplayable...I tried to like it)
Baldies
The rest sat there until I lobbed the garbage heap at someone else years ago. It was like having an Amiga with less games.
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I also had a Jaguar collection. After the novelty wore off, the only things I really had fun playing were:
-Raiden
-Wolfenstein 3D
-Rayman
... And non of these are exclusives, so there you go.
It was fun to check out some of the other games to get a better sense of what the hardware could do, but so many of them were very rough around the edges or otherwise extremely limited in content or gameplay. Then there were some that were legitimate complete games that just didn't age well, like a slow low res version of Doom, or the various slow low detail 3d vehicle games like cybermorph or the hover tank game. Ultra vortek, a mortal Kombat clone was ok as a product of its time, but was it fun to play 20 years on? Not really.
-Raiden
-Wolfenstein 3D
-Rayman
... And non of these are exclusives, so there you go.
It was fun to check out some of the other games to get a better sense of what the hardware could do, but so many of them were very rough around the edges or otherwise extremely limited in content or gameplay. Then there were some that were legitimate complete games that just didn't age well, like a slow low res version of Doom, or the various slow low detail 3d vehicle games like cybermorph or the hover tank game. Ultra vortek, a mortal Kombat clone was ok as a product of its time, but was it fun to play 20 years on? Not really.