"While the chances of this next batch of releases for the Atari Jaguar actually matching up to the sheer quality we had last time were slim, what we got in this third part of 1995 actually wasn't terrible, on the whole... Regardless, Atari Corporation still couldn't really take advantage of the opening that Sega's poor launch of the Saturn had given them, effectively pulling a Shaq or Wilt Chamberlain & throwing bricks when given free throws (fitting metaphor, for this part). Now it's Sony's time to enter the North American video game market as a first-party hardware provider..."
Before we begin, I should give an update. For the past seven parts of this series I had simply relied on Wikipedia for the (loose) order of releases for the Atari Jaguar's official catalog, mainly because there was nothing even remotely close to "official" & "definitive". That all changed on Halloween of this year, when a Twitter user named Pimpeaux unleashed a highly researched & much more accurate release schedule for the Jag's official catalog, not dissimilar to what a place like the Atari Archive has done for pre-NES console catalogs; this is likely as close to "definitive" as we'll ever get. Looking over Pimpeaux's list I was overall not too far off, but as the list went on there were some notable changes in order, but what's done is done; I won't go back & change what I've done already. However, from this point on, I will be relying on Pimpeaux's list, and doing so now means that this series will be changing from 11 parts to 12, as 1996 will now be split into two parts due to some (then-thought) late 1995 games actually coming out the following year. Also, instead of always featuring four or five games, some future parts (like this one) will only feature three; however, to make up for that I'll try to include more general overviews of what was happening around the releases of the included games.
So... where did we leave off? Oh, that's right! U R NOT E
 |
| Talk about overshadowing... |
On September 9, 1995, Sony Computer Entertainment of America released the PlayStation in North America at an MSRP of $299, a price that head of development Steve Race legendarily announced succinctly at the very first E3 earlier that same year in response to Sega's surprise launch of the Saturn (& to rousing applause). Though the low price point would result in SCEA's President & CEO Olaf Olafsson being forced to resign (as he pushed it through, despite resistance from higher ups in Japan), it also was all SCEA needed to instantly cut Sega of America off at the knees, and the decision to have the console focus primarily on polygonal graphics from the very beginning helped make the PlayStation (I'll mostly use the term "PS1" from here on out, despite it being anachronistic at this point) truly feel like it was the start of a new generation. In just two days the PS1 would sell more consoles than the Saturn was able to muster in five months, nearly selling out of the initial batch of 100,000 units produced. Despite some attempts at making a comeback being planned, Sega of America & the Saturn was already on life support & instantly became a distant second place to the seemingly overnight success of the PS1.
Oh, wait... wasn't this supposed to be about the Atari Jaguar?
Needless to say, Atari Corporation was more or less boned with the launch of the PlayStation, and in those same initial two days of it being on sale in North America the PS1 had sold more or less the same amount of consoles that the Jaguar had sold in two years! Atari Corp. (kind-of-sort-of) responded to the PS1's North American launch, though, with the long-promised release of the Atari Jaguar CD add-on on September 21, 1995, complete with two pack-in games, Blue Lightning (a remake of the Atari Lynx's pack-in game) & Vid Grid (a port of a year-old music video puzzle game for Windows); the PS1, notably, had no pack-in title. I'll bring up Jag CD games as they release during this series, but they won't get covered here; maybe after I finish this main series (& all CD games become fully playable via the Jaguar Game Drive). Needless to say, though, the Jag CD was literally nothing more than a CD-ROM drive so that the console could play games released on that medium, plus Jeff Minter's cool Virtual Light Machine tech, with absolutely no extra hardware to boost the Jag's capabilities; in short, it was more TurboGrafx-CD than Sega CD. Also, the Jaguar CD literally made the console look like a small black toilet when attached (especially once the Memory Track cartridge was inserted in the back end, for saving), which definitely didn't help matters any. However, games still would come out on cartridge for the Atari Jaguar, and while the PS1 was wowing everyone as the "new hotness", including Europe once it launched over there on September 29, the Jag was eventually paid a visit in mid-October by an old (& "busted"?) friend of its great-grandfather, the 2600.
Released by Activision in mid-1982, Pitfall! would quickly became a smash hit, selling around four million copies on the 2600 alone (it'd later get ported to the Intellivision, ColecoVision, Atari 8-bit computers & 5200, Commodore 64, & even the MSX in Japan), making it the fourth best-selling game for the Atari 2600, tying with Parker Brothers' port of Frogger, & the best-selling original IP released on the console, in general; the 2600's top three selling games were all ports of arcade games. Developed by David Crane, Pitfall! was both a technical wonder for the hardware & is often cited as one of the earliest examples of a platforming game with an actual world to explore, as Crane managed to create a 255-screen environment that wasn't randomized in any way, & challenged players to figure out how to grab all 32 treasures strewn about within 20 minutes & just three lives. Crane & Activision would then follow things up with Pitfall II: Lost Caverns in early 1984, a post-Crash release that expanded on things even more, now allowing multi-directional scrolling that challenged players to explore a large underground environment without time limits & life restrictions, but now included checkpoints; Crane even developed the on-cart Display Processor Chip just to allow the 2600 to run the game. After that Pitfall as a series would mostly be forgotten due to the whole Mediagenic era, minus a couple of reinterpretations of Pitfall II handled by other companies, before finally returning in 1994 with Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure. Originally made with the Super Nintendo in mind, Activision would completely re-haul the game with the Sega Genesis as the intended hardware, working with animation studio Kroyer Films (FernGully: The Last Rainforest) to produce the animation that the sprites would be adapted from to create excellent visuals, and the gameplay was really good, too. The Mayan Adventure would go on to become widely praised & become a bit of a cult-classic of its era... but now it's October 17, 1995, roughly a year since the original release on Genesis & SNES, so how does the game hold up when the series finally returns to Atari, especially since it's the console's last platformer (at least officially)?
Ported over by Imagitec Design, the studio's penultimate Jag game & its final port, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure is a good version of an admittedly great & underrated platformer of its time (though one that does take a little bit to get used to)... but it could have been one of the best, had it been handled better. In terms of content, we have 11 stages (same as the Genesis & SNES, so the three extra stages seen in the Sega CD, 32X, & Windows versions aren't here) & the enhanced visuals seen in the Windows 95 & 32X versions, so it's a mixed bag; at this point not having the extra stages is bizarre. Unfortunately, much like the 32X version, the Jaguar port only runs at 30 frames per second, not the 60 that it was designed around, and in certain stages (like Yaxchilan Lagoon) there is notable slowdown that can mess with you; it's definitely still more than playable, though, & better than the 32X port. The audio is also fine, as while you wouldn't expect the redbook-quality score of the CD-based ports, the Jag's take on the game's great score is wholly unique in comparison to the Genesis/32X & SNES versions, though whether it's better or worse will come down to personal taste. However, the audio for the hidden 2600 Pitfall! game is all sorts of scratchy, muffled, & honestly kind of terrible. If I had to guess, I think Imagitec took the easy way out & simply relied on the Motorola 68000 that was included as a manager for the primary Tom & Jerry chips, just like many prior Jaguar ports of Genesis & SNES games did before it, and that would explain why the framerate was halved, since it used the higher quality sprites. Maybe the Jag's notoriously difficult (& buggy) programming history played a role, but when you see something like Rayman come out on the same console before this, it really does make you wish that it came out better, because I certainly think the Jaguar was capable of delivering the best console version; at the very least, this port actually includes a proper save feature between levels, which I think only the Windows 95 version also had.
As it is, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure is still one of the best platformers on the Atari Jaguar (second only to Rayman) simply by the nature of the game itself being great, & you can certainly still have fun with this port, but when compared to the other versions out there (especially the Sega CD & Windows 95 versions, which remain the best) you really wish this decision was by actual merit & not simply by default; I mean, it's still better than Zool 2 & (especially) Bubsy.
Following the release of Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, the Jaguar CD would see its next two releases with Hover Strike: Unconquered Lands, an expanded remake of the same game released on cartridge earlier that same year (see Part 2 of 1995) that wound up being the literal sole Jag CD game Atari Corporation itself would ever develop & release, on October 20 & Highlander: Last of the MacLeods, a very poorly received action/adventure game based on the animated series based on the cult-classic movie franchise, on October 28. November would see only a single cartridge game for the Jaguar, but before we get to that I should just let the cat out of the bag: Atari Corporation has, quite literally, given up. While an exact date isn't known, and this wouldn't become more widely known until Atari filed its 10-K405 SEC filing on April 12, 1996, at some point in November of 1995 Atari Corp. made the decision to abandon the Jaguar, effectively pulling out of the video game hardware business. Naturally, word of this started to seep out alongside word of mass layoffs, and while Atari Corp. obviously outwardly denied these allegations the truth was that the company was pretty much focused on just two things by this point: Selling off (or liquidating) any remaining Jaguar stock & releasing any remaining games in the works that were close enough to completion; Atari Corp. would release 11 more games before calling it quits 100%, with only one left developed internally.
Of course, since this is Atari we're talking about, right around the time all of this was happening at Atari Corporation, Atari Games (by this point a subsidiary of Time Warner Interactive, now Warner Bros. Games) released a brand new arcade game that used modified Jaguar tech! Developed by Mesa Logic, Area 51 was a light gun rail shooter powered by the Atari CoJag (as in "Coin-Operated Jaguar"), with the only major differences in the hardware being that the Jag's Motorola 68000 was replaced with either a Motorola 68020 (first revision) or MIPS R3000 (second revision) & the RAM was expanded from 2 MB to either 4 or 6 MB, depending on the game; also, the games ran off of hard drives holding either 1 or 2 GB, depending on the game. The end result was a mix of FMV characters running around pre-rendered CG environments & (quite frankly) the end result was an experience that the stock Atari Jaguar likely couldn't deliver, and I even wonder if the Jaguar CD could actually handle the game well without notable concessions being made; Area 51 would eventually get ported to Windows, PlayStation, & Saturn, though. Unfortunately, the CoJag would only ever see one other arcade game released (& I'll bring it up when it happens), though the tech would also be used for a handful of kiddie rides by Carousel International that were at one point readily seen at Chuck E. Cheese, the pizza parlor chain co-founded by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell.
Of course, by the time our next cartridge game for the Jaguar came out, it's entirely possible that Atari Corp. hadn't yet fully committed to abandoning the console... though I imagine the decision was all but official. Anyway, November 7 saw the release of Ruiner Pinball, the third game developed for the Jaguar by High Voltage Software (the second being Jag CD pack-in Vid Grid) & the studio's only 100% original title (i.e. not a port or based on a licensed IP) until the debut of WiiWare in 2008(!). Notably written in C++ (compared to most Jaguar games, which were written in Assembly), Ruiner Pinball is the second & final pinball game for the Jag, though it only has half the amount of tables as Pinball Fantasies, i.e. two. It was also the first game to be marketed as supporting the newly released Jaguar Pro Controller, which not only added a second row of face buttons (labeled Z-Y-X, to match the bottom's C-B-A reverse order) but also a pair of shoulder buttons (L & R); this was no doubt done in an attempt to imitate what the Saturn & PlayStation did with their controllers. In reality, though, the Pro Controller was more a workaround than anything truly substantial, as the new buttons simply corresponded to numbers on the keypad (L=4, R=6, Z=7, Y=8, & X=9), so technically every Jaguar game "supported" the Pro Controller; it's just that games that "officially" supported it simply took those extra buttons into consideration for keypad button layout. All that being said, though, the best way to play Jaguar games is with the Pro Controller (and any modern Jag controller reproductions you find now are of the Pro), since the redesigned face buttons are a marked improvement, and even some games released before the Pro do still benefit from it, depending of how they used the keypad; for example, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure now has weapon switching easily accessible via the top row. But enough about new controllers, how's the Jag's final game of pinball like?
Despite only featuring two tables, Ruiner Pinball's pair are at least fantastical in that "you can't possible do this in real life" way. The first table, the titular Ruiner, is themed after atomic war in an over-the-top faux-50s style, with literal missiles acting as the flippers, & its main gimmick is that it's actually a pair of double-height tables (i.e. one tall table split into upper & lower fields) set up next to each other that allow you to send the ball between via a ramp. Meanwhile, the second table, Tower, is a Devil's Crush-esque triple height table, only with a bit of a more tongue-in-cheek, rock style aesthetic, with the focus being on trying your best to stay in either the middle or upper field, and not so much the lower field. In concept, both are simple but fun tables that don't really do much in terms of gimmicks, aside from Ruiner featuring parachuting soldiers that can mess with your shots & Tower having the lower & upper fields both featuring enemies that fly around in formation & require multiple hits to take out. In execution, though, Ruiner Pinball is a bit of an odd duck, as while it's not a bad game of digital pinball by any means, there are just some quirks that keep it from feeling great. For example, Ruiner's entire gimmick of side-by-side tables is kind of negated by the fact that it's not actually easy to move over to the other table, as it's only reliably doable via a single ramp, so you really just spend the majority of the time on the left side; it would have been neat if you could pick which side you launch the ball into, honestly. Meanwhile, Tower feels a little too easy, as on my first attempt I was able to literally almost sextuple the high score that the game defaults to, getting 119,000,000+ points, where 20,000,000 is the initial high score; meanwhile, I couldn't get any higher than 5,000,000+ points in Ruiner. There are also multiballs in both tables but both are honestly kind of disappointing, as the triple-height nature of Tower means that you'll never really able to see all six(!) balls in action the moment one falls below the upper field, so you'll literally be flipping away blind until all of the balls eventually reach the lower field, while Ruiner has the really cool idea of playing two side-by-side tables simultaneously with two balls... but the multiball doesn't actually start off with that, instead requiring you to manage to get one of balls over to the other side, despite the camera zooming out to show both tables once multiball actually begins.
Overall, Ruiner Pinball is still fun, but unfortunately not the best pinball game on the Jaguar by default, since Pinball Fantasies already had come out prior to this, and that both offers twice the amount of tables & an overall better experience; still, credit for High Voltage for trying something different with both tables. Following this game, the next week would see the PlayStation release in Australasia on November 15, while the very day would see a port of arcade laserdisc classic Dragon's Lair released on the Jaguar CD by Readysoft, the very first third-party release for the ill-fated add-on... and the sole November release for it, at that; the Jaguar CD's only been out for two months & has only seen three new releases since launch.
We end this penultimate look at the Atari Jaguar's 1995 with arguably one of its most interesting titles ever released, if only because of the ambitious-yet-unreleased peripheral it featured full compatibility with. Founded in October 1987, W Industries (named after its co-founder, Dr. Jonathan D. Waldern) was a company focused exclusively on developing virtual reality hardware & software, producing a handful of prototypes before releasing the Virtuality range of VR machines in the early 90s, which managed to find their way into some arcades, some being standing while others allowed players to sit down; the company even changed its name to Virtuality Group in 1990. Until the modern era of VR technology (Oculus, PSVR, Steam VR, etc.), Virtuality was probably the most successful company when it came VR, with around 1,200 arcade machines actually in use at its peak, though eventually the 90's obsession with VR died down & in 1997 Virtuality went bankrupt, its tech & IP being sold around a few times since. Before that, though, the company did try to expand out of arcades by teaming with other companies, most notably Sega of Japan for the VR-1 (no relation the Sega VR that never came out)... and Atari Corporation. First announced at Winter CES in early 1995, Atari Jaguar VR was actually publicly showcased at the first E3 that May, with hopes to launch that Christmas season. Unfortunately, the Jaguar VR headset never saw release, with Atari Corp. citing health issues, but one game developed with VR support did officially see release on December 1, Missile Command 3D, which was developed by Virtuality itself.
Originally developed under the title "Missile Command 2000" (to match Tempest 2000's naming sense), Missile Command 3D offers three styles of play to choose from: Original, 3D, & Virtual. Original is essentially the arcade original, or at least something that closely resembles David Theuer's 1980 classic, only now with new sound effects & actual background music, though the difficulty is adjusted a little to allow for easier play with a controller, but still ramps up well enough; what you see is what you get. 3D takes the same gameplay concept but now presents it with polygons, complete with a camera that you can pan up & to the side so as to create a much larger playfield to defend. To help you out, this mode includes a radar in the middle of the HUD on the bottom third of the screen, while power ups can fly up at points that can refill your ammo, & doing well after certain waves can give you secondary ammo which you can use at any time via the keypad, as well as reinforce cities so that they can take a little more damage before being destroyed. Of the three modes 3D is the coolest one of all, personally, & offers a gameplay experience that really does expand on Missile Command in neat & interesting ways; certain waves even see you shooting down asteroids instead of missiles! Finally, there's Virtual, which changes things up heavily by giving you three turrets that surround an underwater city, which you can switch between using 4/L & 6/R, and you can fire both missile & lasers, as well as smart bombs if you have any on hand. Virtual is best described as "interesting", as while it's not a bad experience by any means it also arguably complicates Missile Command just a little bit, as there's little real need to switch between turrets, and even if you get hit by a missile that's literally above you each turret has a health meter now; there's even a power up to repair damage. Also, there's next to no reason to even fire missiles, as the laser hits instantly & allows for snappier gameplay, though each turret also has its own limited amount of ammo for each type of munition, which can also be replenished via power ups. Each wave of Virtual mode ends with a sort of boss fight, but these things take WAAAAAAAYYYYY too many hits to finally kill, and I honestly just got bored with this final mode after just two waves, while I played the other two modes until I got Game Over (around 10 or 11 waves in) & had a fun time.
You can make the argument that Virtual mode might play better with the Jaguar VR, and that's likely true... but then you'd be playing VR with a low frame rate, which probably isn't all that good; 3D mode also supports Jaguar VR, too. Regardless, Missile Command 3D is a good, solid Jaguar exclusive that offers an arcade classic (mostly) as it originally was, a fun & neat 3D reimagining of it... and a "VR" mode that's likely best played with an accessory that never actually came out, though working prototypes do exist.
In terms of the games we saw in this (truncated) part of Prowling the Official Atari Jaguar Catalog, it's a small but overall decent trio of titles for the Jaguar's catalog, but all are held down in some way that prevents them from being great. Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure should have been the best console port of the game, but unfortunately the Jaguar port is nothing more than decent, though considering the dearth of platformers on the console it's still second-best, by default. Ruiner Pinball is fun enough pinball on its own, though some design decisions hinder what could have been really cool, but unfortunately there's already a better pinball game on the Jaguar. Finally, Missile Command 3D is arguably the best of these three games, but it too is weighed by a game mode that brings down the overall product, mainly because the peripheral it was intended to be played with never came out.
In terms of where the Jaguar was by the end of November 1995, there's no way to sugarcoat things here: It's a console that's now dead man walking, being supported by a manufacturer which has literally given up at this point, though not admitting it publicly, and while there are still two more games by third-parties set for release before Atari Corporation truly bites the dust, they're still technically co-published by Atari, so third-party support is more or less dead for a while; even the Jaguar CD is already on life-support, despite only being out for a handful of months. Still, there's one more month left to cover for 1995, so hopefully the last four games from the Jag's most productive year can at least send the console into 1996 with some sort of positivity... right?
Next Time: Atari Corporation has given up on the Jaguar, and all it can do now is do its hardest to just get rid of whatever stock is still has on hand, as well as release whatever games are closest to completion. With the Holiday season on hand the Jaguar finally ends its 1995 with a quartet of games in December, but can a tank-based shooter, a kart racer, & two different sports games (alongside a price cut for the console) really help things out in any way?
*All in-game screens sourced from AtariAge*
Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure © 1995 Activision
Area 51 © 1995 Atari Games (now Warner Bros. Games)
Ruiner Pinball © 1995 Atari, Inc.
Missile Command 3D © 1995 Atari, Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment