Well, it's my favorite console and needless to say it has some amazing games, in fact when thinking of my favorite top ten games of all time (everybody loves to tout their own top 10), invariably it's going to have probably 3 Jaguar games on it.
Everyone knows Atari at the time wasn't the same Atari that brought us the 8-bit consoles, so too many bad decisions were made, probably one of the biggest was to not have a working relationship with Atari Games. What do you think of when you think of Atari? You think of Atari arcade games at home, that is what it always was, and the Jaguar largely ignored that. Although, funnily enough, but not obvious enough apparently for Atari Corp, was that the 'actual best' games for the Jaguar probably were the arcade-style games Tempest and Defender 2K. And Iron Soldier, being looking like a lumbering plodding 3D game, actually would have worked as an arcade game in it's own right.
The absence of Atari Games also lost the Jaguar for opportunities to bring home compilations of classic Atari hits. All those hit arcade ports on the LYNX, yeah...no logical reason to avoid bringing those to the Jaguar, especially when SNES and Genesis had some small compilations on cartridge. I don't really get into the nuts and bolts on the specs of Jaguar, my eyes glaze over at arguments of a 64-bit wide buss. To me it's a system of missed opportunities and what seems like common sense games that could have been released. I also understand Atari Corp didn't do anything to help developers with good tools and all that, plus the money wasn't really available to secure exclusives I'm sure. Which just makes me ask again, how in the heck does Atari Corp not have a working relationship with Atari Games at this time? Good grief. Atari Games was making headway with fully 3D arcade action games at this time as well, remember War: Final Assualt?
No real solid numbers on how many people have actually played the Jaguar either, that's another problem. The best guess is 250,000 consoles sold. So, what you have is far fewer people have even played this thing rather than who have read stuff about it on the internet. I think the Internet has in a sense 'won' against the Jaguar in ruining it forever, and it's not really a situation that is recoverable for the reputation.
It's not the greatest system of all time, but it's my favorite just because of a handful of games. What's not fair is the ridicule it gets, mostly from people who never actually played one and/or played the best games on it. People need to understand that there are worse controllers out there, way worse actually, and far worse game systems to find than the Jag.
1994 was a weird time for the game industry in general. An experimental time with bad 3D games, and no company was really doing anything quite right.
Everyone knows Atari at the time wasn't the same Atari that brought us the 8-bit consoles, so too many bad decisions were made, probably one of the biggest was to not have a working relationship with Atari Games. What do you think of when you think of Atari? You think of Atari arcade games at home, that is what it always was, and the Jaguar largely ignored that. Although, funnily enough, but not obvious enough apparently for Atari Corp, was that the 'actual best' games for the Jaguar probably were the arcade-style games Tempest and Defender 2K. And Iron Soldier, being looking like a lumbering plodding 3D game, actually would have worked as an arcade game in it's own right.
The absence of Atari Games also lost the Jaguar for opportunities to bring home compilations of classic Atari hits. All those hit arcade ports on the LYNX, yeah...no logical reason to avoid bringing those to the Jaguar, especially when SNES and Genesis had some small compilations on cartridge. I don't really get into the nuts and bolts on the specs of Jaguar, my eyes glaze over at arguments of a 64-bit wide buss. To me it's a system of missed opportunities and what seems like common sense games that could have been released. I also understand Atari Corp didn't do anything to help developers with good tools and all that, plus the money wasn't really available to secure exclusives I'm sure. Which just makes me ask again, how in the heck does Atari Corp not have a working relationship with Atari Games at this time? Good grief. Atari Games was making headway with fully 3D arcade action games at this time as well, remember War: Final Assualt?
No real solid numbers on how many people have actually played the Jaguar either, that's another problem. The best guess is 250,000 consoles sold. So, what you have is far fewer people have even played this thing rather than who have read stuff about it on the internet. I think the Internet has in a sense 'won' against the Jaguar in ruining it forever, and it's not really a situation that is recoverable for the reputation.
It's not the greatest system of all time, but it's my favorite just because of a handful of games. What's not fair is the ridicule it gets, mostly from people who never actually played one and/or played the best games on it. People need to understand that there are worse controllers out there, way worse actually, and far worse game systems to find than the Jag.
1994 was a weird time for the game industry in general. An experimental time with bad 3D games, and no company was really doing anything quite right.
