Previously on Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog:
"Regardless of how 1994 panned out, though, 1995 will truly have to be the make-or-break year for the Atari Jaguar, as while it's one thing to compete with the (supposedly) weaker hardware of the Sega Genesis & Super Nintendo, or the fellow also-ran of the 3DO or even the CD-i, it's another thing to compete with brand new 32-bit hardware, namely the upcoming Sony PlayStation & Sega Saturn."
As of New Year's Day 1995, the Atari Jaguar has been on the market for a total of just 14 months, yet only has 17 games to call its own, or just barely over 1 game per month; that's not good, especially when the total official (cartridge) catalog would only hit 50. Also notable in said current catalog is that literally all but one game released on the Jag so far has been published by Atari Corporation, with said exception being Brutal Sports Football by Telegames; Virgin Interactive co-published Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story with Atari. However, 1995 will wind up being the most important year in the entire life of the Atari Jaguar, for a few reasons. First, it's the final year in which Atari Corporation itself actually would continue to actively support its final console, though the truth of that wouldn't be known until later on. Second, 24 games would see release on cartridge in this year alone, so literally 48% of the Jag's entire catalog came out in 1995; because of that, 1995 will take FIVE PARTS to fully cover here! Third, and most relevant to this part of this overarching series, we finally see third-party publishers start to support the Jaguar "en masse"... or, at least, whatever can qualify as that for this console.
In fact, Atari would have absolutely nothing to do with the first five games released on the Jaguar in 1995, making this the only part to not feature an Atari-published game whatsoever... at least, the only part in which "Atari" itself more or less still existed. So, after a bit of a hiatus, let's finally start the Atari Jaguar's most pivotal year with Attack of the Third Parties!
We start off this cavalcade of third parties with Ocean Software, the UK-based developer/publisher that, at one point, was one of the biggest in all of Europe during the 80s & 90s, before eventually getting purchased by Infogrames (which itself would eventually become the Atari that currently exists today) in 1996, followed by being rebranded to Infogrames UK in early 1998. We're still a year out before any of that, though, and in this case we have Ocean publishing a Jaguar port of a PC classic, Syndicate. Originally released on June 6, 1993 for MS-DOS & Amiga computers, Syndicate was the brainchild of Bullfrog Productions, the studio the legendarily infamous Peter Molyneux helped found in 1987 that went in to achieve great success with titles like Populous, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper, & (well) Syndicate. Right around the time of this Jaguar port's January 27 release, Bullfrog would be acquired by Electronic Arts (back when "EA" actually stood for something), while Molyneux would leave Bullfrog in 1997 to co-found Lionhead Studios; Bullfrog itself would eventually be merged with EA UK in 2001. Prior to the Jag port, Syndicate had already been ported to console in 1994 for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive in North America & Europe, as well as a Mega CD version exclusive to Europe, while ports to the SNES, 3DO, & Amiga CD-32 also would see release throughout 1995. Unlike the Sega & Nintendo ports, which had to be scaled down to work for their weaker hardware, Jag Syndicate is apparently more of a direct port, much like the later 3DO version, so while a real-time tactical strategy game isn't really my thing, let me see if the original's quality still shines through on Atari's hardware.
All cards on the table, this entire series about covering the Jag's catalog in chronological order doesn't involve me playing through every single game to completion. Instead, I give each game enough play time for me to good feel for it (which changes, depending on the game), and then I give my immediate thoughts on it. Taking that into consideration, Syndicate on the Jaguar is just beyond me. However, I can certainly see the idea behind it and why it became so beloved, what with you controlling a quartet of cyborg "Agents" to accomplish missions in order to slowly take over the world, and it's not just assassination missions, either. The keypad on the Jaguar controller is taken full advantage of here & is essential to playing, from Agent selection to camera resetting to weapon selection & even temporarily improving statuses via various drugs; you even use the numbers in correlation with C for even more options. Agents can also be assigned to different jobs, like persuading instead of simply killing, which in turn makes you want to balance your crew for each mission, depending on the objective. Permadeath is also a factor here, as any Agents killed during a mission are gone forever, and you can only replace them if you have any in cryo-sleep that you persuaded. If all of this sounds awesome then Syndicate is a must-play for the Jaguar, though the d-pad is certainly no replacement for a mouse, and the game speed here is honestly really slow, even verging on being glacial; AI pathfinding is also sometimes weird & results in your Agents going away from where you selected. Visually, everything is decent & easy to figure out, though the mini-map doesn't match the angle of your in-game camera, which can get disorienting, but the audio is honestly not really all that good. Still, while I can't properly judge Syndicate on the Jag, I can definitely see the idea behind it; just make sure to check the manual before giving it a real go.
It'd only take another five days for the Jaguar to receive its next game, and this would mark both the return of the original third-party Jaguar company & the debut of another. Namely, February 1 marked the release of the Jaguar port of Troy Aikman NFL Football, featuring the titular two-time Football Hall of Famer (Pro & College), the first team-based sports sim for the console (there'd only be one other), and the second "football" game following Brutal Sports Football half a year prior. Originally released for the SNES in August 1994, Aikman NFL was developed by Leland Interactive Media & published by Tradewest, with a Genesis port coming out later that October. By the time this Jag port was released Williams Entertainment had absorbed both companies & phased them out, before eventually becoming Midway Home Entertainment in 1996, and the porting duties for Atari's console comes by way of Telegames, the first ever third-party company to release a game for the Jaguar; we'll see the team of Williams & Telegames one more time near the end of this part. The SNES & Genesis originals didn't seem to receive exactly stellar reviews, though they weren't terrible either, while the Jag port actually replaces the original hand-drawn sprite work with digitized graphics, so let's see if the Jag's first (& only) American football game can at least score a single touchdown.
Much like with Syndicate, sports sims aren't exactly my bag, I'm more of an NFL Blitz guy, but I have at least played stuff like NFL GameDay on PS1 back in the day, and I think I've at least played a little of a Madden back in the 90s. Because of that, I actually did know what I was doing while playing a game of Troy Aikman NFL Football, and the overall experience was... fine. Gameplay is rather straightforward, with C, B, & A being more than enough to get by (the keypad looks to switch to specific players, from what I could tell), both passing & running are simple to get a hold of, playing defense is easy enough in concept, & even kicking uses a simple timing system for strength & pressing left or right to adjust angle. The game kind of throws everything at you right away after the title screen, though, as everything is selectable on one screen: Teams, # of players, difficulty, what kind of season you want to play in (pre-season, regular season, 94/95 season), the kind of field to play on (grass, turf, rain, snow, etc.), & even turning off music & effects, both of which are very basic but get the job done; at least the voice clips at the end of plays are in decent enough quality. Visually, the digitized graphics actually look OK & I didn't mind them at all, though playing it on a modern TV lets you see that Telegames didn't program the field to go all the way into the overscan on the sides, so players & on-field objects can often appear on top of blackness, which is amusing but unfortunate. You also have the option to let the CPU play itself ("Demo Mode"), and even to play as a coach instead of a player, which is admittedly a neat idea for the time; you can even change player salaries during halftime, even if you're playing the team directly!
Overall, Troy Aikman NFL Football is a decent enough sports sim for the Jaguar, and I could see someone who actually owned a Jag back in the day, & was a fan of football, having fun with this, especially since it would wind up being the only "real" American football game on the console. It certainly won't stack up against something by EA or Sega back in the day, I'm sure, but much like Babe (which came out in theatres later that same year), "That'll do"... especially on a console where you have no other options.
Up next we see the return of Virgin Interactive, though this time the company published a Jaguar game on its own. Originally released for the Commodore Amiga PC in late 1993, Sensible Software's Cannon Fodder would go on to become one of the studio's most iconic games, right up there with Sensible Soccer. An overhead, squad-based, tactical shooter, Cannon Fodder would go on to achieve a fair bit of notoriety upon release, partially because of its dark humor take on decrying war, but also because of its use of the remembrance poppy, or at least something close to it; Sensible still had to clarify that the game was not endorsed by the Royal British Legion. Still, the game would go on to be a notable success for Sensible & Virgin, receiving ports to MS-DOS, Atari ST, & Acorn Archimedes PCs, as well as Mega Drive, SNES, 3DO, Game Boy Color(!), & also the Atari Jaguar, which came out on February 17. There's also a sequel from late 1994 by Sensible that apparently wasn't as well received, while a third game actually came out for PC in 2012 but had nothing to do with the original devs. Out of the five games covered in this part, Cannon Fodder is easily the one that I'm the most interested in, as I have played it a little way back in the day, so I guess it's time to see how it fares on the Jag.
Ported to the Jaguar by The Dome Software Developments, Cannon Fodder is a perfect example of a game having two faces to it. One face is the general gameplay, which sees you control a squad of 2 to 5 (the # is dependent on the skirmish), with the general idea being to kill everyone on the map, destroy every building using explosives (with grenades or rockets), etc. Using an on-screen cursor to move your squad is simple, even with a d-pad, and since your basic machine gun has infinite ammo you can just hold attack to spray & pray; you also have more complex options, too, like splitting your squad into up to three groups & letting the AI control some units. Sensible Software's original game is a very arcade-y experience, where everyone dies in one hit, so you're simultaneously acting on your feet & thinking out strategies to keep as much of your squad alive, and the end result is quickly addictive & fun; with 72 levels spread across 24 missions, & the option to save between missions, you have plenty of gameplay here. However, there's also the other face to Cannon Fodder: The meta aspect.
Simply put, Sensible Software created a game that truly shows how mindless & contradictory war can be, especially when it comes to the "grunt" soldiers. While your soldiers are named (starting with the lead devs themselves), they all die in one hit, and these deaths are permanent, so if you fail a level you restart with brand new characters. However, the names are nothing more than flavor text, since every unit is exactly the same, and each overall mission ends with a screen mourning the deaths of the units who died in that mission, while the screen between missions (where you can save & access the options) shows an ever-growing line of fresh meat new potential units who are more than willing to fight (& die), as they all line up in front of hills adorned with the graves of all the units who you lead to their deaths, all while the sidebar shows a "Heroes" section listing who the most deadly units you ever had were & the top of the screen shows a sports-like "score" displaying how many total units you've had access to so far & how many have died to the enemy. The enemy is also never identified, with each mission instead giving a vague indication as to where you're sending your soldiers to fight/die, like Vietnam, Scandinavia, & the like. When combined with how missions only get harder & harder as the enemy becomes progressively stronger, it becomes quickly obvious that the name of the is truly apt, as everyone fighting these battles are just mere "cannon fodder". You can also literally juggle the dead bodies of enemies with gunfire after killing them, emphasizing how ridiculous all of this is. Even the addictive theme song is meant to whittle a thing like "war" down to something silly & fun.
Still, there's simply no denying just how good Cannon Fodder is, and considering how the only other console option for this game in North America was on the 3DO, that made this Jaguar port honestly a strong contender for a legit "system seller", or at least that's how I see it today. But, yeah, if you're interested in trying out some Jag games, make sure that Cannon Fodder is one of them.
The Bullfrog/Ocean duo would return to the Jag a little over a month after Syndicate's release with the March 1 release of Theme Park. Originally released in mid-1994 for MS-DOS & Amiga PCs, Bullfrog's iconic "construction & management simulation" game, & the first in the "Designer Series", would see a wide variety of ports, including the 3DO, Genesis, Mega CD & CD-32 (both Europe only), SNES (Japan & Europe only), Mac OS, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, & even later the Nintendo DS & iOS; there was even a Japan-specific version, Shin/New Theme Park! As for the North American-exclusive Atari Jaguar port, this looks to be nestled right in the middle of all of these various ports, which makes it no surprise that it would become lost in the fray, more or less. Still, this looks to have been ported over to the Jaguar by Bullfrog Productions itself, which is nice to see & hopefully bodes well for the overall quality & accuracy of this version of the game. So while a business sim is absolutely not my type of genre, even less so than Syndicate, let me see if I can still find the appeal in Theme Park, and if the Jaguar controller is a way to play the game.
Similar to other sim-type games, like SimCity, there really isn't any "end goal" to Theme Park (outside of simply running a profitable theme park in each of the areas of the world you can operate out of, I guess), but rather just a general goal of building, maintaining, & slowly growing your own theme park for people to visit & have fun at. Newcomers can activate a guide to help get you started, but after only a few minutes you're essentially left to your own devices, outside of the little chap at the bottom of the screen giving you a general idea of what to focus on next, whether it's building a new attraction or shop for guests to visit, increasing or decreasing the cost to enter the park (you're trying to make money, after all), and various other things that can go wrong (or right) at a theme park. As I said, this kind of game really isn't my style (I can only get into SimCity for so long, too), but it very quickly becomes easy to see that the way to truly become a master at Theme Park is to plan ahead & make clever use of path construction, so that you can slowly expand out & create more & more attractions/shops (& hire more and more employees to work for you) so that you can handle the continually growing scale of it all. As for using the Jaguar controller, you can press C to bring up a selection menu, but each of those options are mapped to the keypad as well for quick access, though sadly Theme Park did not come with an overlay (in reality only 7 cartridge games included one!), so actually using the keypad can get a little confusing once in a while; at least the Jaguar community have since made their own overlays.
Despite this being a game that is honestly a bit beyond me, I can see the general appeal in Theme Park, and the Jaguar honestly isn't a terrible place to play it, at least for the time; if you really want to play it today, just go with PC. Still, a game like this helped give the Jaguar a little bit of extra variety, as there wasn't really anything quite like it on the console prior, and there wouldn't be anything like it afterwards, either.
Nothing else would come out for the Jaguar in March of 1995, but there were a couple of interesting little developments happening. First, on March 13, Atari & Williams announced that Mortal Kombat 3 would be coming to the Jaguar in the second quarter of 1996, due to a timed exclusivity deal that Sony had inked for the PS1 port, with the announcement even predating the original arcade release by a month. Unfortunately, the port never wound up seeing release (a similar fate to that of the allegedly completed 3DO port), though I imagine here it was a mix of the Jag's poor sales & the fact that releasing a port of "vanilla" MK3 after the greatly improved Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 from late 1995 had already been out in arcades for months made absolutely no sense; also, just imagine playing MK3 using the keypad. While I don't want to focus on Jaguar games that were announced but never released (as there are too many of those), this was an especially interesting one to bring up. Meanwhile, eight days later on March 21, Atari Corporation released the Atari Jaguar "Core Set", which sold for $149.99, a solid $100 price drop, but included no game. Along with this, Cybermorph saw its proper retail release, though this was a 1 MB cart instead of the pack-in's 2 MB, with the intro & ending sequences (plus some voice samples) being removed as a cost-cutting measure; I'm sure "Where did you learn to fly?" survived the cuts, though. It's this retail version that wound up being the last game we know any actual sales numbers for, as Cybermorph would go on to sell 1,813 units by April (i.e. in just 11 days). Due to the lack of any further sales numbers, we can't tell if anything sold "worse"... but you honestly can never tell with this console!
Finally, we end the first part of the Atari Jaguar's 1995 with... Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls; damn it. Released on April 1 (April Fool's?), this is the other Telegames/Williams collaboration, and is a port of the 2D fighting game released in mid-1994 for the SNES & Genesis. Despite marketing itself as the "fifth" entry in Technos Japan's iconic beat-em-up franchise, DDV actually has absolutely nothing to do with the first four games released between 1987 & 1992. Instead, this game is based on the animated series that ran for 26 episodes from 1993 to 1994 & was co-produced by DiC, Bohbot Entertainment, Italian studio Reteitalia, & Spanish network Telecinco. Said TV series has barely anything to do with the video games, outside of featuring Billy & Jimmy Lee, Marian, Abobo, & Wild (neé Machine Gun) Willy, with the latter two actually only appearing the first two episodes! If you are truly curious about the show, Discotek Media actually released all of it on SD-BD this past May, but we're here to go over the video game based on said show... so let's just get it over with already.
Normally, I'd start with the general gameplay concept of Double Dragon V... but there's essentially next to nothing, in that regard. You have eight characters to play as from the start, with only one character (Shadow Master, the final boss) being inaccessible normally, and they all play with your standard 6-button layout of punches & kicks, each of which have three strengths to them (Weak, Medium, & Strong), alongside special moves that they can perform. However, the actual gameplay itself is so absolutely lackluster, with no real concept of combos (so everything is about simply getting in a single hit at a time), and no real mechanics to anything outside of everyone simply having special moves & the ability to "Overkill" foes by finishing them off with a certain basic attack on the final round for your victory; yeah, they tried poorly imitating Mortal Kombat, too. Because of this, there's really no "strategy" to be found in this game at all, and it quickly just devolves into nothing more than a button masher, in the end. This is especially enforced when playing the single-player "Tournament Mode", with the AI being one of the most absurdly defensive I've ever seen in a video game, as even on Easy difficulty it blocks almost every single attack you make. When combined with utterly pitiful damage, even when you max out your offense stat before a fight (altering stats is literally the only thing I'll give the game that's somewhat unique), individual rounds become a chore of a slog to play. There's even a "Demo Mode" where the AI can fight itself (which bizarrely requires two controller inputs to make selections in, & the game reverts back to the title screen after the fight ends!), which just shows how absurd the AI is, as it will constantly defend against itself, if not simply continually jump around like a spider monkey. Simply put, Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls could very well be the worst fighting game on the Atari Jaguar, though we still have a couple to get to later on the console's life before we can truly make that statement, definitively.
However, we also have to talk about how the Jaguar port is especially bad, when compared to the Genesis & SNES originals, because it's actually kind of amazing in a head smack kind of way. First, as mentioned, DDV is a 6-button game, so in order to make it work on the default Jag pad, which only has 3 face buttons, all three kicks are defaulted to 3, 6, & 9 on the keypad! Unfortunately, while all six attacks can be remapped in the options... you can only remap them to C, B, A, 3, 6, or 9, which means that even the later Jaguar Pro Controller, which features three more face buttons (& two shoulder buttons) that all correspond to keypad buttons, can't be taken advantage of in this game! Second, just as with Troy Aikman NFL Football, Telegames once again didn't draw everything out into the overscan area, so while the foreground characters fight on does properly fill the entire screen space, backgrounds abruptly cut off into blackness. Finally, as a sort of sour cherry on top of everything, the Jaguar port is actually missing three characters, thereby making this not just the most awkward version to actually play, but it's also incomplete. So, yeah, we've truly come across a game that matches Trevor McFur, Checkered Flag, & Club Drive in terms of sheer absolute crap on the Jaguar; you can see why I tried delaying moving on to this part for so long.
Atari's history as a first-party hardware manufacturer has always been one where its relationship with third-parties was... mixed, to put it lightly. It's refusal to properly acknowledge (or even compensate) the people behind some of its most successful games on the VCS/2600 would result in the formation of Activision, the very first third-party video game company, and an attempt at suing Activision only resulted in a settlement that simply strengthened the concept of third-party development, which resulted in the uncontrolled deluge of games for the console that would help lead to the Crash of 1983. Meanwhile, the Atari 5200, 7800, & Lynx all had barely any third-party support (8, 3, & 2 companies, respectively!), so the Jaguar's chances of turning things around weren't high. On the one hand, the Jag would wind up being Atari's second-most appealing console for third-parties, with 10 different companies releasing games without Atari Corporation itself co-publishing. On the other hand, however, after the five games covered here, we've already seen the end of Ocean, Virgin, & Williams' support for the console, and aside from Telegames (who will wind up outliving even Atari in terms of supporting the Jag!) all other third-party publishers we'll be seeing in this series will literally only release a single game for the Jaguar, with only one exception that will publish two. It's only early April, & already things aren't looking much better for the Jaguar... and things will only get tougher in a little over a month.
Next Time: Atari Corporation attends the first ever Electronics Entertainment Expo in an effort to help promote the Jaguar, & some upcoming add-ons & accessories in the works, only for one of its biggest competitors to shock everyone with a surprise launch! The "next generation" is about to begin, so what does Atari have next to counteract with?
Admittedly... the next five games actually all look rather promising; not "You must buy this console now!" amazing, but rather "These all look really good".
*All in-game screens sourced from AtariAge*
Syndicate © 1994-1995 Electronic Arts, Inc.
Troy Aikman NFL Football © 1994 Williams Entertainment, Inc.
Cannon Fodder © 1993 Sensible Software © 1993 Virgin Interactive Entertainment (Europe) Ltd.
Theme Park © 1994-1995 Electronic Arts, Inc.
Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls © 1994 Leland Interactive Media, Double Dragon © Technos Japan Corporation (now Arc System Works)
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