What was so good about the Atari Jaguar? I've never used one, but I know it has a lot of very devoted fans, and I'm interested to learn more about the machine. So I thought I'd ask why the Jaguar is so popular. I'm certainly not trolling, by the way, I'm just curious, and I'm making a similar post to this in a couple of other forums about consoles I've never used (the Neo-Geo, and the Sega Saturn), and I've posted this here as there's no Atari specific forum (there was for the Neo-Geo and Sega Saturn), and if someone asks, I'll make similar threads about the consoles I do know about (such as the N64, XBox 1, and Gamecube). I think I'm right in saying that there weren't many games released for the Jaguar? And I've read that there was a CD drive made for it too; were the same games released in both formats (presumably with enhancements for the CD version) or were different games released for the two media? What were the best games for the Jaguar, is there any homebrew, or fan modded games for the Jaguar*), etc?. How many consoles were sold, and did you prefer it to it's peers (N64, PSX, Saturn, etc), and if so why (or why not?),why didn't the Jaguar achieve more prominence in the console wars, what genres was it good/bad in, and what was the machine's strengths and weaknesses, etc. I know I could google for the answers, but I thought it would be more interesting to get a discussion going, especially if it results in my looking for another machine to add to my collection. * I'm sure I've read that there is Atari Jaguar homebrew (I think I read it in the Everdrive forum?), is that homebrew games, or ports of ex-commercial games (like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D), and I take it you needed a CD addon (and a CD-R) to play this homebrew. If so, did the Jaguar have to be modded to run homebrew?
I owned a Jaguar for a little while. I like retro games and enjoy my atari 2600, psx, atari lynx, dreamcast, etc. These are all systems that have many obscure and overlooked yet fun and good quality titles. In contrast, the Jaguar simply has a lot of obscure titles - many of which are poor quality, not particularly unique, and not fun to play at all. The game selection on the Jag is very limited, and many titles were available in better formats on other consoles. Many of the exclusive titles were very poor quality - numerous Mortal Kombat clones such as Kasumi Ninja with choppy animation, minimalistic midi sounds, sluggish controls, and just generally non-fun gameplay. The controller isn't so much innovative as it was just simply bad and non-ergonomic. Many other games in the library are clones trying to play catchup with what was popular on other systems in the time - Cybermorph was a clone of starfox, Checkered Flag was a clone of Virtua Racing, Blue Lightning (CD) was a clone of Afterburner, Fight For Life was a clone of Virtua Fighter, Kasumi Ninja was a clone of the early MK games. In the vast majority of these cases, these clones significantly failed to live up to the games they were trying to emulate. It's not like they were maybe 75% as good, they were just all around bad and played bad, and had bad sound. I think it says something when the game widely hailed as one of the best titles on the system is a movie tie in. (Alien vs Predator).
IIRC, you need to install a debug bios - then you can run unsigned code. But I dont keep up with jag developments.
Err, what?! Sure, there were only 60 odd titles on cart and a handful on CD, but there were some good games! AvP, Tempest 2000, Rayman, Doom, Wolfenstein, Syndicate, Cannon Fodder, Worms, Theme Park..... and on CD the likes of Dragon's Lair, Myst... umm, yeah lol! As for your clone comments, I think you need to get your facts straight. Checkered Flag was a remake of the Lynx game, which was released in 1991. Virtua Racing appeared in arcades in late 1992. Star Fox came out in February 1993 in Japan, March in America. Cybermorph came out in November 1993. If it was a clone, it was done pretty quickly! In fact, it is said that it was originally developed for the Panther, which was abandoned before its planned 1991 release date to concentrate on the Jaguar. It makes it unlikely, therefore, that it's a clone. Kasumi Ninja is no surprise - everyone was making side-on fighting games and even Mortal Kombat is a clone if you want to see it like that! Fight For Life was made by one of the Virtua Fighter programmers so yes that was intentional. As for Blue Lightning, again it's actually a remake of one of the original Lynx games from 1989. Considering After Burner was only around in the arcades from 1987, it's not surprising.. but then again, there were a lot of games where you flew a plane and shot things. As for your comments about movie tie-ins, I find that rather naive. There have been some excellent movie tie-ins - the SNES had games like Aladdin, Lion King and Jurassic Park and many would say that one of the best Nintendo 64 games is GoldenEye 007. It was a groundbreaking game, and one of the best games ever made. So what's so bad about movie tie-ins? It would seem from your comments that you didn't experience the Jaguar when it came out. Back then, the controller was considered pretty interesting and there were no ergonomic controllers, really. The console was considered a bit of an elite console, being rather expensive and "64 bit", it wasn't really one for the younger player but more the serious older gamer with spare cash. In its day, it was a good system. And it had a lot of exclusive titles. To answer the original question more, there were a couple of games that were re-released on CD, but they were mostly exclusive titles. And there's a special encryption used in the Jaguar that I don't think has been cracked still, but the developers had special carts and CDs that would disable the lockout. I think there may be another way to do it now via modification, yes.
http://console5.com/wiki/Atari_Jaguar_CD#The_BIOS_and_homebrew_titles Apparently tools are available to sign code correctly - no mods/hacks needed. Older stuff might still need the bios.
The trouble is a lot of people watch the AVGN video and take his exaggerated opinion as a factual unbiased assessment. I bought a jaguar myself recently, but it all seems pretty solid so far as a machine (bearing in mind that I've only played about 5 minutes of troy aikman football). But I'm willing to give it a fair chance before writing it off as trash. I told a friend that I had ordered cybermorph and he goes "Cybermorph? Where did you lean to buy"
I like how all of the titles you listed outside of AVP and T2000 were readily available (often in better versions, and often available first) on other platforms. The majority of these (rayman excluded of course) weren't even initially on the Jaguar, so it is hard for me to consider them as titles that make the Jaguar a notable system worth owning. I think you are twisting things with your comment on Checkered Flag. Checkered Flag may have been distantly related to the lynx title in that it used the same name and had indy cars driving on tracks - but calling it a remake and implying it does not have any significant influence from the blockbuster arcade hit Virtua Racing is ignoring an awful lot. The lynx game is a sprite racer that looks and plays nothing like the Jag title. In contrast, here is a side by side of Virtua Racing on the left, and Checkered Flag jaguar on the right Looks like we pretty much agree on all the other clones. Cybermorph was my conjecture and I don't have anything circumstantial or otherwise to back that up. I certainly did not. No one owned one and no one bought one. KB Toys was still trying to liquidate them years and years later, having them NIB in the cut out bins even in the late 90s years after the system was canceled. I am aware of the 16bit and 32/64 bit era of gaming and the quality of game software available at the time. Considering the jaguar at its place in time, the console's game library still lacks hard in comparison to almost any other system. As I've already mentioned, and you pointed out yourself with your list of good games on the jag - many games were readily available on other systems, oftentimes in better versions. And several of the unique jag games are clones and are notorious for playing terribly (Kasumi Ninja, Fight For Life, Checkered Flag, Club Drive, etc). I recognize that the console itself is kind of cool in that it is obscure, it was atari's last hurrah, and sort of but not really the first 64 bit console, and the plastic shell looks like an alienware computer. But the gaming experience on the device is really not great at all in comparison to almost any other console I can think of.
The Atari Jaguar isn't obscure, nor was it ever. It was readily available, even in the UK (the chain store Rumbelows had a Jaguar display in every store) and PLENTY of people bought them. Your small circle of friends hardly qualifies as "no one bought one" - fact dictates that Atari sold about 100,000 in the first year. And I really don't expect you to understand the appeal of a console that you didn't play when it was new - you're just not going to get it. What you're basically doing is the equivalent of giving a 10 year old a Pong machine. Does it really matter what system most of those games appeared on first? Many, many games appeared in the arcades first so weren't on ANY console first - even best-selling games like Street Fighter 2. The point is they're good games and they were good on the Jaguar. Checkered Flag came out on the Lynx first, that's also fact. Yes they are very different games... but then so are Checkered Flag for the Jaguar and the Sega 4 player arcade game Virtua Racing. You're basically saying that Atari copied it from Sega because it's a driving game using polygons. Guess what? Sega weren't first with that idea! Actually, there was Winning Run from Namco in 1988, then Hard Drivin' in 1989, Race Drivin' in 1990 and Hard Drivin' II in 1991 - all from Atari! Oh, and there was this.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54SMMvbWAkY LMFAO! I notice you chose not to answer my question as to what is so bad about movie tie-ins after I mentioned some excellent movie tie-ins
Hey guys, Marty Goldberg here, co-author of Atari Inc. - Business is Fun. We're actually at work on the second book, Atari Corp. - Business Is War, recounting the company that released the Lynx and Jaguar. So I thought I'd just pop in and comment on some of the things being stated. First off the Jaguar, when it was on the market, was victim of a number of issues that severely stunted it's chances. First and foremost, it was released during the decline of Atari Corp., which had just shut down it's computer division to focus purely on this console. That meant very little cash flow. Second, it was rushed to market before some serious bugs in the GPU (causing some bottlenecks) and the development software could be fixed. Third, the third party development license and dev kit came at a premium, which meant it scared a lot of developers away. With the bugs and poor documentation, this meant that many of the people who did develop games in the early stages of the console, simply used the 68000 microprocessor as a main CPU instead of as a bootstrapping device as it was intended. (The Jaguar is a multiprocessor system with 5 processors and a 64-bit memory bus. The 68000 was just meant to start up or "boot" the initial code to the other chips - which each run their own code - and has the lowest priority of processes against all the other processors, which means using it as a main processor creates even more of a bottleneck). As a result, very few games during it's on market time approached it's potential (with some of the aftermarket games more showing off the system's capabilities). It also didn't help that when SEGA lost Atari Corp.'s lawsuit and provided game licenses as part of the payment, that 16-bit Genesis titles were simply just ported over to run directly on the Jaguar's 68000. Games like Cybermorph and Trevor Mcfur were actually ports from the earlier Panther system, also developed by Flare. You can read a bit more about the genesis of all that here: http://www.konixmultisystem.co.uk/index.php?id=interviews&content=martin
Actually had a few great games so I have fond memories of the jaguar. Check out my write up at http://dreamcastgaga.blogspot.jp/2013/05/atari-jaguar-do-math.html
