Atari Jaguar
- 1 year 14 days ago
- Posts: 881
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The Atari Jaguar was Atari's final console as a console developper. Released in 1993, it was touted as 64-bit, and excessively stressed it during their commercials. It sold for around $250. 
The Jaguar was cartridge based, and had an add-on called the Jaguar CD. Similar to the Sega 32X, it fit right into the cartridge slot. It was released at the very end of the Jaguar's life and cost around $150.
The controller was equipped with many buttons, and games sometimes came with cards that would fit into the keypad, similar to keyboard stickers. It was heavily criticized for having too many buttons and looking like a telephone. In 2006, an IGN writer named it the worst controller ever.
The Jaguar had its fair share of great games, such as Alien vs. Predator, Tempest 2000, and ports of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. The Jaguar CD had a couple of ports, such as Myst, Dragon's Lair and Primal Rage. However, a large lack of third party support and a series of not-so-good games made the system a commercial failure. Still, it managed to list on IGN as the 24th best game console of all time.
Much of the information taken from Wikipedia
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- 1 year 7 days ago
- Posts: 2150
The jaguar controller is far from the worst ever. The keypad isn't even used in many games, so it's largely irrelevant. The rest of the control is comfortable & works well. Contrast that with the mattel intellivision controller, which also had a large keypad (which was needed in almost every game), and had a crappy layout that made it difficult to use or even just hold.
Granted, the jaguar's controller is by no means the best controller, but it's not a terrible one either. I would place it a little above an NES controller or a TG-16 controller (because it has 3 buttons to their 2, and fits non-child hands much better), and about on par with a 3-button sega genesis controller.
The games is where the system falls apart. There are far too few of them, and the ones that do exist are mediocre at best. It's difficult to see any difference between a game on the jaguar and a comparable one on the SNES.
Tempest 2000 is a prime example of one of the jaguar's worse games. The graphics would be perfectly at home in the 8-bit era (and only one step above the vector era), and the gameplay would be at home in the 2600 era. In fact, it IS from the 2600 era, it's just a port/remake of an arcade game from 1981.
1981:
jaguar:
They smoothed out some of the lines and added some colorfill. Ooooo... Wow.... Really effective use of the whole "64 bit" power. They could have done the same thing on the NES. (Hell, they probably could have done that on the atari 7800, or even the 5200.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the game itself is "bad" per se (I'm not fond of it, but I wouldn't call it "bad"). What I am saying is that in the context of a 64-bit console it's a terrible game. It's the same as if they put a direct port of the original pac-man game on the jaguar.
*WARNING: The above post may be highly opinionated, read at your own risk.
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