Wooah! That's what you get for posting in the middle of the night! :lol: I meant RAIDEN, of course! Oopsie! :redface: Syndicate on the MegaDrive was extremely playable. Jaguar too.
I like my Jaguar. I play it regularly. I think that it does suck that most of the games for it are weak. Some of them are no better than 16 bit games. As a 64 bit system it had a lot more potential but Atari made so many bad decisions it was doomed to fail. Some of my favorite games are Tempest 2000, Raiden, Ruiner Pinball, Rayman, Zool 2. AvP and Doom are good games but are dated. I haven't played any of the homebrews yet but I hear they are pretty good.
The thing about AvP is that the game have an atmosphere which other game didn't at that time. I've also played Doom that time and never get scared. I would also add Cybermorph as a good game with quite a nice graphics effects.
After obtaining a Jaguar emulator and playing it for the first time, I can safely say that I am happy that I didn't miss anything important.
I'll die a happy man if I never have to play Cybermorph again. Flying through pea soup endlessly looking for pods with that fucking woman making bitchy comments about my flying abilities? There are plenty of real life analogies to this and they all suck. I don't mean to hate on the Jaguar specifically, there's nothing instrinsic about it that offends me, it's just that most of the games are really sub-par, even by the standards of the day.
Never have any of these problems people complain. And I nearly complete the game. As every game there are some weak mission, but most of them are good.
BattleSphere is a sweet game. It's a 3D polygonal space shooter running at 60fps with up to a 32 player network. It shows what the Jaguar is capable of and is an exclusive title. There has been a lot of progress on the dev side of the Jaguar in the last couple of years. There is new hardware and much better tools. I wouldn't be surprised in the next couple of years we get an impressive 3D game that most people would never have thought possible.
The skunkboard just came out this year. It was made for developers but you can also load ROM's on to it from a PC. It can also allow for multiplayer over the internet if it gets taken advantage of. Here is a video review of it. There is also the JagCF which is still a prototype. It uses CF cards for it's medium.
I had a Jaguar back when it was brand new. It was very hard to find anything for sale here in Winnipeg. None of the normal stores sold it, and the only way I was able to even get one was through this family that sold Atari ST stuff out of their basement. I ended up getting the Jag CD and most of my games through them, including some rare stuff like the Catbox. The system didn't do so well, but I still enjoyed it. There weren't many good games, but there were enough to keep me happy. I enjoyed the controller, and still consider it one of the most comfortable I've ever used. It was kind of fun being the only guy with an unusual console that most people hadn't even heard of. Any time someone came over and played it, they were pretty impressed. Of course, this was before the Playstation came out and blew away the Jaguar (and 3DO, and CD32, and all the other minor systems of the time). The Jaguar was able to do some truly excellent 2D graphics. Games like Rayman, Evolution: Dino Dudes, and Trevor McFur were beautiful... but things got a little dicey when it tried 3D games. Some developers managed some really excellent effects with the Jaguars hardware (like Iron Soldier)... but games like Club Drive, Supercross 3D, and White Men Can't Jump look like absolute shit and had atrocious framerates, and gave the system a really bad name. Sadly, I lost touch with the video game scene as the Jaguar was dying, and I just barely missed out on my chance to own Battlesphere (I think I was on 4Play's mailing list, and probably had a chance at the first run). About 4 years later, I started getting back into video games, and now have a complete collection of commercial Jaguar releases minus four cartridges (the two soccer games, Iron Soldier 2 (though I have the CD version), and of course, Battlesphere ). Funny thing is, back in the days, I was quite envious of some of the stuff that was coming out for the 3DO... especially Way of the Warrior. It wasn't until many years later that I actually played WotW and found out the game was awful... If I had known, I would have been quite happy with Kasumi Ninja! I'd say the main problems were lack of proper marketing, and lack of third party releases. Without quality third party titles, it fell to Atari to publish everything, and it just wasn't possible for a single company to keep a console afloat anymore. In order to get stuff out the door, everything was rushed, and it showed. Atari Karts was a great Mario Kart ripoff... but there were no offensive powerups and no battle mode, which it really needed (it's still pretty fun really, but it could have been so much better). Primal Rage has excellent graphics, but they completely botched the gameplay so that none of the combos that work in the arcade work on the Jaguar. Most of the third party games were straight ports of Genesis and SNES games too... and often crap games like Double Dragon V too. The Jag version sometimes had more colour, and a higher framerate... but no one noticed that kind of stuff in magazine screenshots. The Jaguar also had a serious lack of diversity in it's library... probably because the library itself was quite small. There were no worthwhile RPG's (Towers II sucks), no worthwhile fighters, only a small number of sports games, which were all crap (except maybe Sensible Soccer, Brutal Sports Football, and NBA Jam... if you count those). People have already mentioned most of the best games the system had to offer... there are only a few I would add to the list: Attack of the Mutant Penguins - This was a really original and unique game where you build and repair death traps to kill aliens disguised as penguins. You could probably compare it to the various "tower defense" style games that are available today (at least in concept... the execution is very different). Excellent graphics, with quite a bit of variety and humour. The only real problem I'd point out is that there's no music during the game. It's also quite rare these days. Power Drive Rally - An overhead view rally racing game. I think this was ported to some other consoles, but maybe only in Europe. The graphics are excellent, and the car handling works quite nicely (you even handle differently on snow and ice and such). The navigator voice gets a little annoying after a while, but otherwise I found it to be a lot of fun. Battlemorph (CD) - A huge improvement on Cybermorph, with a wide variety of objectives, EXCELLENT music, more variety in gameplay (tunnels and underwater areas), and a much-improved engine with better graphics (including some texture mapping). This is easily my pick for the best game on the system. Missile Command 3D - Two different three dimensional takes on the classic (both of which play COMPLETELY differently), plus the classic itself. Great graphics and lots of fun. It's a shame the main 3D game isn't longer (only three levels I think). Skyhammer - This is an after-market release from Songbird. To be honest, I haven't played this game for any serious amount of time, and probably shouldn't include it on such a list... but the graphics are at least as good as the Playstation, though perhaps a bit lacking in variety (then again, the game is aiming for a Blade Runner-esque dystopia, so call it a design choice). If you want to see what the Jaguar can actually do, then check this out. Regarding some of the games people have already mentioned: Alien vs. Predator - This game was AMAZING back in 1995. The engine is not much more advanced than Wolf 3D, but the atmosphere and storyline were of a caliber that were definitely not common in FPS's at the time. You didn't just collect keys and clear rooms. You went around and learned the fate of the space station by reading crew logs and exploring claustrophobic air ducts. You also got the chance to play as an Alien or Predator, which changed the game quite a bit (though the Marine game was by far the more involved of the three). Sadly, it hasn't aged well at all... every FPS these days has a storyline and at least some atmosphere, so everyone just takes this stuff for granted and sees that there are only three or four types of enemies and lots of reused textures. Sadly, I suspect that if you didn't play this game in 95, you won't be able to truly enjoy it. Doom - This actually isn't that good of a port. It's missing a lot of features of the PC version (most noticably, no in-game music, but it's also missing variable lighting, Cyberdemons, Spider Masterminds, some levels, some powerups, etc), and these days there are FAR better versions available... but at the time, this was the best version you could get on a console, and it certainly wiped the floor with the lame SNES, 32X, and 3DO versions. Wolfenstein 3D - I still consider this the best version of Wolfenstein ever made. The graphics are completely redone, and they look great. I only have two complaints about the game: you don't turn fast enough (this seems like a stupid complaint, but it feels really out of step when you move forward and back so quickly), and it has far less levels than the PC version... though I felt the PC version dragged on too long as it was, and got boring after a while. Hover Strike - Yeah, the framerate is pretty bad, but I had a lot of fun with this game. Once you get used to the slide show, the texture mapping is quite good and there's a decent amount of variety. The CD version is a nice improvement over the cartridge version by the way, with a better framerate. --Zero
Comparing shit with shit? :thumbsup: at least wotw had better graphics and a cool intro, but gameplay wise they were both horrible to say the least... only thing you missed out on with kasumi is a scottish dude that had fireballs shooting out of his d*ck :shrug:
Not in the same sentence, not ever. I can only think of one other scrolling shooter that has art direction so utterly horrific, and that's Shadow of Ganymede for PS2. They are both in a league of their own in terms of ugliness. Interesting post, though. You should post pics of your collection in the relevant bit of the forum.
