Previously on Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog:
"With the Jag now having actual major competition on the North America market in the form of the Sega Saturn, even with the console experiencing its own rough (& unintended) start, Atari needs more games like this bunch if it wants any chance at being able to stand next to Sega & Sony (as well as Nintendo, though its next console it still a year away) as a legitimate competitor, even if only to a limited extent."
It's July of 1995, and the North American video game market is in a bit of flux. While the Sega Genesis & Super Nintendo are still strong sellers, with the SNES on the verge of finally surpassing the Genesis in yearly sales come the Holiday season (for a multitude of reasons), Sega of America's early launch of the 32-bit Saturn (a decision forced by Sega of Japan, though it was due to SoA's own financial mistakes costing the entire company dearly) hasn't really managed to make much of any impact because of a slow & staggered roll-out nationwide, alongside a slow trickle of new releases due to the surprise launch screwing over SoA's development & publishing partners' initial plans; meanwhile, the Sony PlayStation is still set for a September launch. This gives the Atari Jaguar a little bit of a theoretical opportunity, but in the two months following our last title covered (Super Burnout) there will only be five games released for the Jag. For comparison, even the 3DO saw nine games during that same time period, nearly twice as many, and that console wasn't doing too much better by mid-1995. Still, the prior five games covered last time were all good games, with some even being great games, so let's see if the Jag can continue that momentum right up until the launch of the PlayStation.
Something that the Jaguar has had a bit of a dearth of are puzzle games, with launch title Evolution: Dino Dudes (a.k.a. The Humans) being the sole example of the genre on the console up to this point, and even then that was more of a puzzle-platformer. In terms of "pure" puzzle games there would only be two released on the Jag, with the first one being FlipOut!, released on July 7, just two days after Super Burnout; it'd also receive an MS-DOS port in 1996, but only in Europe. One of the very first games ever developed by Gorilla Systems, a studio that would be known mainly for developing licensed IP titles (Barbie, Disney, etc.) & porting games to other hardware, FlipOut! is a tile-matching puzzle game that actually saw video game journalist Michael Price from Electronic Gaming Monthly work as a tester on the game, playing prototype builds & giving feedback & suggestions that he felt would help improve the game, which he'd later admit was developed on a low budget. Interestingly enough, Atari didn't actually publicly reveal FlipOut! until E3, just two months prior to release, so one has to wonder if the game was simply developed in secret until it was ready... or if Atari Coporation simply decided to toss it out ASAP just so there'd be two new games for the Jag in July, as the next game wouldn't come out until August. Guess there's only one way to find out...