April 21, 2000
Here it is, folks, Thief ZERO's Atari Jaguar page. Here you'll find info on all things Jaguar!...well, at least things that I own or have extensive knowledge on, such as games and even some hardware.
Okay, so to get things started, I guess I'll tell you a bit about the Atari Jaguar 64-Bit Interactive Multimedia System, or Jaguar for short. Atari, good ol' Atari, released this system near the end of 1993, hoping to dazzle the world with its brand new technology, but only received luke warm response from the general public. This was mainly because the games launched with the release of the system really weren't system showcases. Read on, if you dare.
Cybermorph - the Jaguar's pack-in 3-D shooting/exploration game had you flying around a bleak landscape in your shape changing mega ship collecting pods and blasting angular enemies all the while having to listen to this green bald headed women scold you because your driving sucked. Read the review.
Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy - a 2D shooter in the spirit of R-Type, Trevor McFur had you take the role of a cat thing piloting a little space craft around various worlds shooting bubbles and enemy craft with a few measly weapons. Apparantly, from a visual standpoint, this game looked pretty cool - prerendered backgrounds, but lacking parallax (that stuff that makes the backgrounds have multiple layers that scroll at different speeds, to create the illusion of 3D). So think of it this way...take the backgrounds from Resident Evil and turn them into a shooting game, a substandard and very cliche shooting game at that. Sound like fun?
Raiden - The classic arcade shooter Raiden...the perfect game to take advantage of the Jaguar's power? That's what Atari claimed, but Raiden just turned out a decent port of the arcade game. Fly around from a bird's-eye view perspective shooting shit up with bombs and guns. You can't go wrong with this formula, but it wasn't the arcade perfect port people were expecting. It was still fun. Read the review
Evolution Dino Dudes - A weird-ass puzzle game, similar to Lemmings, that has you taking control of a party of cavemen in the search for fire, the wheel, and other handy prehistoric items. You could control one caveman at a time, get him to do something, then switch cavemen and do something else with that one, then switch cavemen...and so on and so forth. Dino Dudes is really just a souped up version of Humans, a somewhat popular PC game, not that anyone really cares...
So there you have it - the legacy known as Atari Jaguar is born. It wasn't a breathtaking birth by any means, but you shouldn't judge the stuff you see here to be the Jaguar's only offerings. Sure, the Jaguar had some really bad games, and usually they got more coverage than the good ones like, say, Wolfenstein or Ultra Vortek.
The Jaguar is a personal favourite of mine...not just because it's fairly obscure, not because it's Atari, but because many of the titles I've played for the system are actually pretty good, and I think Atari had a good thing going for them. But you know Atari - they screwed up. Due to lack of advertising, false release dates, and failure to help out software developers who were stumped when it came to programming for the damn system they bragged was near omnipotent, Atari eventually gave up on the Jaguar, since it wasn't bringing in the kind of money to keep the company afloat.
In fact, in 1996, it was thought that the Jaguar had a user base somewhere in the thousands, so even if Atari had some sort of brilliant plan to bring the life back into their malnourished cat, it wouldn't have had much of a chance in hell of succeeding, with the PlayStation and N64's well established fans. Because let's face it, even though I seriously enjoy what the Jaguar had/has to offer, the Playstation and N64 run circles around it...better luck next time, Atari, if there ever is a next time.
