Atari Unleashes Their Jaguar

[CAPCOM]

On August 18th,1993 Atari removed the wraps from its top-secret 64-Bit Jaguar game system and yours truly was there for the unveiling. I was able to spend a couple of hours playing two of the near-full released cartridges, and overall, the system had potential, however why did you feel like the Atari Falcon it did not succeed?

Answers on a Postcard.

Research thread for Tempest 2000 Zenith Aritcle..........



Name some titles that stood out and why you feel the Atari Jaguar mattered to you as a gamer in the 1990s intergenerational format wars from cartridge to CD..........

[endo]

All the games stood out, unfortunately for being ****. The Jaguar didn't matter to me at all as a gamer in the 90s either, I've got to say. Mainly because it was obviously **** and I was more than happy with my Megadrive and SFC, well until the Playstation came out anyway.

Did anyone really get into the Jaguar when it came out? I remember seeing it in bargain bins very quickly after launch.

[Arashikage]

I remember buying one for a fiver in EB when it was on clearance. I got rid of it not long afterwards.

[CAPCOM]

Alien vs Predator was an outstanding title and there are many others....

https://www.retrogamer.net/top_10/atari-jaguar/

You speak from too much SONY bias in my opinion....an underrated classic just like 3DO

[Leon Retro]

I chose the 3DO over the Jaguar, which I still think was a wise choice.

Of course, the Jag did get a few decent games. When I finally bought an import Jag, I got to experience AvP, Doom, Tempest 2000, Iron Soldier, Super Burnout, which are all really good games. Brutal Sports Football & Power Drive Rally are also decent games.

I only have around 10 Jaguar games, simply because there aren't many that appeal to me. I'd like Rayman, but I'm not paying silly money for it.

Maybe if the Jaguar hadn't had hardware bugs and Atari had offered a better dev kit, more coders would have been able to show the hardware off. Instead, those issues held the machine back, so you ended up with lots of simple 16-bit ports and some badly performing 3D games such as Club Drive and Checkered Flag. Only a few games manage to show how capable the hardware was.

Lots of hardware from that period failed -- such as the CDi, CD32, Jaguar and 3DO, so lots of gamers were very cautious and didn't feel overly impressed with what was on offer. Then when the proper next gen machines[PlayStation, Saturn, N64] appeared with cutting edge 3D games, gamers felt happy to embrace the next generation. What Sony did with the PlayStation was absolutely brilliant.

I'll never sell my Jaguar though. It sits alongside my 3DO as a curio machine that I have a soft spot for.

P.S. I wish I had a copy of BattleSphere.

[Asura]

Yeah, gotta admit, the Jaguar is one of the few machines that I look back upon with absolutely zero fondness. Like others here, I bought one when they were selling them off for pennies in the early 00s, with a range of the games, as something of a curio, and I honestly didn't get much out of any of them. Tempest 2000 was fun, I suppose, but none of the other supposedly good titles appealed to me.

People used to blather on about Aliens Vs Predator but, if I'm to risk sounding elitist, I just think that was only considered a good game to those who were playing perhaps their first ever FPS game; I'd already played a fair bit of games like Doom on the PC and just saw nothing particularly interesting about it.

[importaku]

Ah Jaguar, the wannabe fake 64 bit system that atari touted would be a N64 killer lol.

Everything about the jaguar is unappealing. never once had the urge to want to play one there's nothing in the game library that i'd ever be interested in. It goes into same pool as CDi & 3DO, a weird time in the gaming where mediocre consoles flooded the scene.

[Brad]

Cartridges when its contemporaries had CD drives.
Bugged to hell.
No in-house game development whatsoever.
Almost non-existant dev kit.
Bizarre architecture.
Terrible massive gamepad.
Atari hadn't been relevant since the 2600.

All adds up to be the disaster that it was. Tempest 2000 might have been awesome, particularly to retro gamers today but back then no one wanted that crap; games were moving on. Didn't want one then and no desire to have one now. What a steaming turd the jaguar was :-)

[teddymeow]

Alien vs Predator was an outstanding title and there are many others....

Name them. I thought the Jaguar was utter ****e!

[CAPCOM]

Did you miss the pictures, the retro gamer top ten or Leon's comments...apparently so!

http://www.8-bitcentral.com/images/atari/promo/jaguar/bestSystem.jpg

[importaku]

Even the logo is ugly

[teddymeow]

1. I saw the pictures. All those games bar AvP are rubbish.

2. I was responding to you asking you to name them as you're the one who said there were "many others"

[teddymeow]

Even the logo is ugly

It looks like the logo for a **** body spray that's used liberally by teenage boys to mask fact that they don't wash.

[importaku]

You can tell it was designed in the west, the console equivalent of this.

[jamesy]

To be fair to it had a good port of Doom for the time which was a lot cheaper than buying a pc to run it similarly. Luckily for me we had a pc in the house for work which was in turn used for games relentlessly haha.