Previously on Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog:
"Overall, the Atari Jaguar's starting line-up isn't spectacular, but at the same time it is just a test launch. I'm sure better games will be available by the time the nationwide launch happens the next year."
As Atari's "final" home console enters a new calendar year, the test market launch is still in effect, and will remain so for the next five months. Because of that, there really isn't much available for the console outside of those original four games, and do remember that one of them is a pack-in. Meanwhile, at the Winter CES show that January, SN Systems (which had experience creating development hardware for game consoles) secretly showed Sony a prototype dev kit, which helped push Sony forward with the eventual production of the PlayStation, which had been publicly announced the past October. Also at this same CES, Sega internally decided to create a piece of hardware in response to the Atari Jaguar... We'll get back to that later. Later, on March 20, the 3DO saw release in Japan, where it'd shockingly receive not only the largest overall number of game releases (close to 3/4 of the entire catalog), & even two exclusive console variants, but nearly half of the 3DO's entire catalog was Japan-exclusive!
However, on April 13, just a few weeks shy of the console's nationwide release in North America, the Atari Jaguar would see its first new game for the year, and thankfully it wound up becoming one of the console's most beloved.
Released in arcades back in 1981 & programmed by Dave Theurer, Tempest was the first game ever released for Atari's Color-Quadrascan vector display tech, and quickly became a big hit with its hectic shooting action & sense of actual progression from one stage to another, since each one was different from what came before. When came time for Atari's return to the console market with the Jaguar, the company held a gathering at a gaming convention with various developers, in which a list of old Atari games was shown & the developers could choose which one they each wanted to reinterpret for the Jaguar. Jeff Minter, an English designer who had his own studio called Llamasoft, volunteered to take Tempest, since it was one of his favorite games. When he attended the console's launch party in late 1993, the creator of the Jaguar told Minter that he felt that Minter's game was a poor demonstration of the console's capabilities, and while Minter was dismayed at the response, he still pushed through & finished the game. The end result is Tempest 2000, a game that's perfect proof that, in the end, gameplay is key, because this game is absolutely outstanding.
Much like the arcade original, Tempest 2000 has you control "The Claw" as it roams about a segmented field, shooting all enemies that crawl up the field to prevent any from reaching the edge you're on until you clear the stage & move on to the next one. The main appeal of the game, however, comes from the hectic nature you eventually come across as you advance through the stages. You can shoot anything that comes up the field, including enemy shots, but eventually enemies appear on segments that require you to move back & forth (or all around, if it the stage is a connected loop), risking running into a shot that you were either trying to avoid or simply shoot down for more points, and if an enemy appears on your end, it's very tricky to shoot it without just using your "Superzapper", i.e. screen-clearing bomb, that you only get one of for each stage. Not all enemies just crawl & shoot their way up, though, as there are also foes that create spikes that can kill you as you traverse towards the background at the end of a stage, as well as enemies that simply make a segment deadly upon touch for a few seconds. In general, the game is a high score title, where every 16 stages sees the field change color, you get new music playing, & the difficulty rises; there are 100 levels, in total. For replayability, you get four modes here: "Traditional", which plays like old-school Tempest; "Tempest Plus", which is a two-player co-op mode that even lets one person play with an AI drone (that's honestly pretty good); "Tempest 2000", which adds in power-ups like jumping, a powered up shot, & an AI drone, as well as bonus stages that can warp the player five stages ahead if completed; & "Tempest Duel", a two-player competitive mode where each player gets their own field (& the frame rates noticeably drops from 60 to 30).
Overall, Tempest 2000 is admittedly a simple arcade experience at heart, but the hectic action, vector-esque graphics that allow for some almost psychedelic visuals, & absolutely amazing electronic soundtrack all create a game that's infinitely replayable & much more than the sum of its parts. This is also reflected in the game's sales, as it wound up selling 33,393 units by April 1, 1995, making it the Jaguar's second-best-selling game up to that point (& likely overall). Also, the game would see ports to PC, Saturn, & PlayStation under the name Tempest X3, while Jeff Minter would essentially become the new master of the series, creating Tempest 3000 for the Nuon DVD system in 2000, Tempest 4000 for Windows, PS4, & Xbox One in 2018, and two "original" games with 2006's Space Giraffe & 2014's TxK. Without a doubt, though, Tempest 2000 is a must-own & must-play for the few who actually own an Atari Jaguar.
Following Tempest 2000's release, the Atari Jaguar would finally see nationwide release sometime in May, right around the same time NEC, Hudson Soft, & Turbo Technologies finally discontinued the TurboGrafx-16 in North America, where it was always a far-behind third place in comparison to the Sega Genesis & Super Nintendo. The following June would see the 3DO & Jaguar both see release in the majority of Europe, and July would pass without anything new for Atari's shiny new "64-bit" console. Yes, the Jaguar literally only had five games upon becoming widely available, but on August 1, the same day the Jag came out in Australasia, the seemingly elusive sixth game finally saw release, but at least it's a big one: Wolfenstein 3D. On May 5, 1992, a small little game studio called id Software released "Wolf 3D" for MS-DOS, and while it wasn't the original "first-person shooter", it was the game that laid the groundwork for what the FPS genre would build off of. It became a massive success, and in 1994 would see two ports to home console. The first was for the SNES that March, ported over by id Software in a bit of a rush due to their work on Doom at the time; also, due to Nintendo's censorship policies, it was hilariously butchered in terms of content.
Afterwards, on a literal whim, John Carmack tried porting the SNES version to the Atari Jaguar, and managed to make good progress. id then contacted Atari Corporation, which gave the "OK!", and with help from Dave Talyor the Jaguar port of Wolf 3D came out a few months later. When compared to the SNES version... Well, there is no comparison to be made, because Wolf 3D on the Jaguar is so far beyond the SNES game that it's almost impossible to believe that they're even related. In comparison to the MS-DOS original's 60-stage full campaign, split evenly across 6 "missions", the Jaguar game (& SNES version before it) feels a bit paltry, as it's "only" 30 stages, split (mostly) unevenly across 6 missions (3, 4, 5, 5, 6, & 7). However, if I have to be perfectly honest, I think this version of Wolf 3D is better than the original, and it's because it's just the more polished release. The 60 stages in the original very quickly become absurdly maze-like & vacuous, and without a map feature it can be maddening to play at times. In comparison, the modified stages in this version are smaller & faster to get through, resulting in a much faster playing game, on the whole, and the controls are honestly quite good. The face buttons handle shooting, opening doors & strafing/running (even though "walking" is pretty fast, to start with), while the keypad allows for instant saving with three save slots, a map function with 5, & even the ability to soft reset with the combo of * and # (that's "pound", not "hashtag"); this would also be a standard for most Jaguar games. You even get two new weapons, the rocket launcher & flamethrower, though they don't really change the gameplay in any major way; still a fun addition. Combine all that with audio that's essentially the same as the original (no "Mein Leiben!", though), visuals that have "four times more detail" (Carmack's own words), and none of the ridiculous censorship from the SNES version, Wolfenstein 3D for the Jaguar is seriously one of the best damn versions of this iconic game you can play, bested only by the ports that used this as its base.
Yes, following this release would be ports for Mac OS a few months later & the 3DO in 1995, which not only feature the same exact visuals & stages as the Jaguar version, but also adds in the original 60 MS-DOS stages (now with the updated visuals), resulting in 90 total stages!!!!!!! But, yeah, Wolf 3D on the Jag is outstanding, and the sales for it matched (relative to the console, at least) that level of quality, with 27,666 units being sold up until April of 1995, making it the 4th best-selling game.
Contrary to popular opinion, third-party support for the Atari Jaguar was, shockingly, not as non-existent as you'd expect, with 19 of the 50 games officially released (or literally 38%) being published by a company that wasn't Atari Corporation, with an additional four being essentially co-published releases with Atari (bumping it up to 46%). The third-party that was most prevalent on Jaguar, though, was by far Mabank, Texas-based Telegames, which released seven games for the console (& one for the Jaguar CD), though most of that came after Atari effectively died out in mid-1996; Telegames was also a supporter of the Atari Lynx, releasing 11 games for that. Still, Telegames got its start on the console early on, with August 22 seeing the release of Brutal Sports Football, the first third-party release for the Jag. A port of 1993 Commodore Amiga game Brutal Football that was originally developed by Teque London & published by Millennium Interactive, the game makes no attempt at being a sports sim, ala EA's Madden Series. Instead, this is more along the lines of Mutant Football League, in which you choose from 11 fictional teams (with names like the Slayers, Demons, Warlords, Huns, Lizzards, & Rhinos) & engage in games that only vaguely resemble actual American football, as there are no breaks between plays, first downs, touchdowns, field goals, safeties, quarterbacks, linebackers, or anything at all, really.
Instead, this is more like a manic fusion of rugby, football, & downright barbarism. All you get is one solid block of time to get more goals than the other team, done by either tossing or running the ball into the opposition's entryway, which acts as a goal that's worth only one point. After each goal, the ball is brought back to the center, where the teams scramble for the ball & play resumes. Beyond that, there's honestly no such thing as "rules", because this game is truly at "brutal" as the name says. Weapons like swords & axes litter the field, players can pick up literal shields as well as a rabbit for a massive speed up (or a turtle for a speed down), and the only way to get the ball from your opponent is to either catch a thrown ball... or literally any other way you want. Tackling is usually the most common option, but you can also punch, stab, & slice anyone on the enemy team, beat them down after they've been knocked down, and even decapitate a player once their health's low enough. The end result is a very fast paced & intense game, one in which the ball will constantly go back & forth around the field at any given moment, and it's honestly really fun to play; I've been curious about this game for a good while, and I'm glad to have finally given it a try. The game even gives you various options in regards to letting you or the game control which player you're in control of at any given moment, and letting the game choose is actually surprisingly decent. Alongside three main game modes (League [with password saves], Unfriendly [ha], & Knockout), as well as two-player support, Brutal Sports Football may not be a definite must-play for Jaguar owners, but it is a fun little arcade sports title, and aside from the Amiga CD32, this is the only real console option for it.
Unfortunately, being a third part title from a time before that started becoming a little more common for the Jag, Atari kept no sales records for Brutal Sports Football, and to be honest I doubt it blazed up the charts for the console, seeing as it's not all that well known. If I had to make a wild guess, I imagine it sold maybe a few thousand copies back in the day, maybe ~10,000 at best.
Every console, no matter how poorly it sells, tends to have at least one "killer app", i.e. a game that makes owning the console worth it. While Tempest 2000 is definitely a great example of that, it would eventually see release on other hardware, so what the Jaguar really needed was a 100% console-exclusive game that could attract potential buyers. Luckily, after a two-month drought following Brutal Sports Football's release (& over a month after the console saw release in Germany), the Jag would get that true "killer app" on October 21 with Alien vs. Predator, a crossover based on the iconic film franchises Alien & Predator that had first come to be via a Dark Horse comic book series in 1989. This game would only be the second production from Oxford-based developer Rebellion Developments, after 1993's Eye of the Storm for Amiga & MS-DOS, which had made a deal with Atari UK to develop a couple of games for the Jaguar as a way to get an investment that the studio could get a proper start with. Still, Atari knew that getting the AvP license was a major get, so the hype machine was in full effect for this title, and the commercial made for it is easily the most memorable Jaguar commercial of all time (at least, in regards to being actually good); also, yes, that is indeed a young Vin Diesel (age 27) doing the narration in the ad. But for all the hype, is Alien vs. Predator as good as it's generally touted as?
To start, AvP offers three different campaigns: Alien, Predator, & Colonial Marine. The Marine campaign puts you in the shoes of Private Lance J. Lewis, who was put in the cryogenic prison brig for striking an officer & now has to be activate the self-destruct on the space base that's infested with Xenomorphs & Predators, before escaping via an emergency pod. The Alien campaign is all about needing to find & rescue the Alien Queen from the Predator base. The Predator campaign is about hunting down & finding the Alien Queen, so that you can claim her skull. In terms of how the overall game is built, it's very much in the vein of Wolfenstein 3D, so maps are very focused around 90° degree turns, though with some differences between characters in terms of controls. The Marine plays exactly like B.J. Blaskowicz in the Jag port of Wolf 3D, so holding C lets your strafe (though now 7 & 9 on the keypad are options, as well), B shoots, A is a general action button, & the keypad lets your swap between weapons, if you have any; 8 also brings up a real-time map, which is handy. The Alien plays the same, but each face button now also attacks (C=Tail, B=Jaw, A=Claw), and you can cocoon enemies with a combination of Claw-Tail-Claw. Over time, a cocoon will gestate and eventually become a new Xenomorph to play as, when you eventually die. The Predator is easily the most complicated character to use, as it has access to all of its various weapons (Combi-Stick, Shoulder Cannon, Smart Disk, Wrist Blades), both invisibility & five different multispectrum visual filters, & even the ability to hold on using a health pack until later, all accessible via the keypad. Not only that, but the Predator works on an Honor System, which requires you to kill enemies "honorably", or while visible, before you can get access to anything more than Wrist Blades.
To put it simply, Alien vs. Predator is one of the most complex FPS-es ever released on console at the time it came out, and it's not like there was real competition on that front. While built off of Wolf 3D's mapping system, it's really best to play this game in a slow & methodical fashion, which when combined with the relative lack of any music (it's instead just ambiance), definitely creates a tense & gripping mood. You can't take any of the three campaigns guns (or jaws) blazing, because you'll just die quickly; without a doubt, this game is a challenge from the very beginning. Also of note is how all three campaigns utilize a shared overall environment, made up of multiple floors for the Marine base, plus two labyrinthine areas for the Alien & Predator bases. Yeah, the frame rate isn't too hot (maybe around 20 fps, at best), but at least it's generally consistent, which makes it very playable. To no surprise, AvP would become THE BEST-SELLING GAME FOR THE ATARI JAGUAR, selling around 52,223 units by April of 1995, and by the time the console was declared dead it might have even sold somewhere close to 80,000, or ~64% of every Jaguar owner had the game! This game would also mark the start of Rebellion's tenure with the AvP franchise, which would result in three more games from 1999 to 2010. Without a doubt, if you own a Jaguar, then this is a game to play ASAP; it might have aged a fair bit, but it still delivers where it counts.
A month following AvP's release, the Atari Jaguar would see two new challengers enter the console field... And both form Sega. November 21 would mark the North American debut of the Sega 32X, a 32-bit add-on for the Genesis which was Sega of Japan's response to Atari, and the very next day would see the Japanese debut of the Sega Saturn, Sega's proper 32-bit successor to the Genesis; yes, this makes no real sense, but Sega of Japan & America's relationship made no sense, at times. Regardless, the following week would see something new for the Jaguar: Three games coming out at the very same time!
We end Part 1 of our look into the Jaguar's 1994 with one of three games that came out on November 28, a month following Alien vs. Predator's release, and since that game was developed by Rebellion, we might as well follow it up with the other game the studio made in its deal with Atari UK, Checkered Flag. For all intents & purposes, this Jaguar game is a sequel/remake of the 1991 Atari Lynx game of the same name that was even a pack-in with the handheld in Europe & Australia at some point; it was even originally unveiled publicly as "Checkered Flag II". However, between the Lynx original & this new Jaguar game, something big happened: Virtua Racing. Sega AM2 & Yu Suzuki's debut game for the Model 1 arcade architecture was a game changer for the industry, and while its use of 3D polygons wasn't exactly novel, they were easily the most advanced visuals found in the arcades at the time, and other game companies wanted a slice of the 3D polygonal racing pie. I bring this up only because it's plainly obvious to see that Atari wanted Checkered Flag to be the Jaguar's equivalent to Virtua Racing, right down to the F1-styled vehicles (and you can even select a "Red/White" color scheme that's a dead ringer for VR's vehicle), though I will give credit for this game offering more overall content. You get 10 courses, the option of single race, practice, & a full tournament of 10-lap races, the ability to choose between three weather options (Sun, Rain, & Fog), dry & wet tires, how many other racers are on the course (1-5), and if you want a high or low airfoil; you can even set the # of laps from 1 to 99!
Unfortunately, that's literally the only real good I can honestly give Checkered Flag, because this is an absolutely terrible racing game; it doesn't even offer multiplayer, as per Atari Corp.'s request! While there are a decent number of tracks, they're all made up of the same types of turns, and most of them all average out to ~40 seconds/lap, which is really bizarre. Unfortunately, the biggest problem is with the performance, or rather the lack of it. Simply put, Checkered Flag runs absolutely horrible, and while I'm not exactly one to be able to do things like make guesses in regards to frame rate, I'd have to imagine that 10-15 fps would honestly be the highest it ever gets, and I don't think this doesn't really change in any way if you have fewer vehicles on the course. In turn, this results in the actual driving feeling very awkward, especially when you have to deal with sharper & longer turns. On straightaways & minor turns it feels decent, but once you have to make any sort of major turn you always feel like you can't help but oversteer, resulting in you crashing into a wall. In fact, I think the game even drops frames during these turns, as I often felt like I had teleported over a few feet during a large turn, leaving me unable to adjust before I crash into a wall. Visually, it honestly only looks marginally better than Virtua Racing on the Sega Genesis or a Super FX game on the SNES, which only hinders the Jag's image of being a "64-bit" machine; honestly, VR Deluxe on the 32X looks better. In terms of audio there's nothing really remarkable, either. Simply put, Checkered Flag on the Atari Jaguar, while not literally unplayable, is an absolute mess, and really feels like an afterthought by Rebellion that they made just to fulfill the deal with Atari UK. What's crazy, though, is that this game was originally planned for release at the start of 1994, yet didn't come out until November, and was STILL this bad!
As for sales, it actually did somewhat decently for the console, selling 20,257 units by April of 1995, making it the 8th best-selling title, likely due to a lack of competition in the racing genre on the Jag. But, seriously, just avoid this game entirely; while it'd take a while, much better racing games would come to the Jag.
It should really say something that, despite launching nationwide in the US in May, followed by other regions over the next few months, the Atari Jaguar only saw a paltry three new releases over the next six months (plus one more that came out during the test market run). Now, to be fair, those four new games are all good-to-excellent, and two of them would become the console's best selling pair, but in 1994 the SNES & Genesis were still fighting tooth-and-nail for market dominance, and the 3DO was still seeing strong support; in fact, even the CD-i had exponentially more releases than the Jaguar in 1994 alone! However, the release of Checkered Flag marks the start of an actual surge of releasing for Atari's new console (well, relatively to Jaguar, at least), with nine games coming out over the course of a single month, from November 28 to December 22. Still, with actual next-gen competition now coming out in Japan, it's only a matter of time until Atari can no longer rely on marketing talk regarding "Doing the Math". Simply put, the games need to deliver.
Next Time: While we're already nearing the end of 1994, it at least ends with a small blitz of new games for the Jaguar. So many, in fact, that they need to be split up across two entries! First up will be four games released across just two weeks, all while the Jaguar tries making a mark in Japan... Right after Sony enters the gaming market itself.
*All in-game screens sourced from AtariAge*
Tempest 2000 © 1981, 1994 Atari, Inc.
Wolfenstein 3D © 1992 id Software, Inc.
Brutal Sports Football © 1994 Telegames
Alien vs. Predator © 1994 Twentieth Century Fox
Checkered Flag © 1994 Atari, Inc.
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