I, err, may have bought myself an Atari Jaguar. I found a good deal on eBay that came with the console, RGB SCART cable, power adapter and three games (one of them boxed) for just a little over what CEX charges for a "discounted" unit by itself.
I'm not necessarily going to collect for Jaguar — the games are quite expensive, but not prohibitively so — but I am initially going to pick up a "GameDrive" for it when it becomes available again from AtariAge. This is your standard "SD card in a cart" solution for the Jaguar, and most of the ROMs from the commercially available games for the Jag back in the day are readily available via either archive.org or Atarimania, so I can load that up with pretty much the full library, then decide if I actually want to collect boxed copies of the games I find myself particularly enjoying.
The reason I went for the Jaguar is because although I know it's an absolute disaster of a system, it's an interesting one. It was Atari's last-ditch attempt to see success in the console market after enjoying repeated failures with everything other than the 2600, so it's intriguing to see exactly what they were trying at the time. Plus there's a bunch of cool games on it — some of which are like "big brothers" to a number of Lynx games, which I'm excited to explore.
The other reason is that Jaguar emulation doesn't appear to have really gone anywhere from the sound of things, so a lot of these games are potentially at risk of being "lost" for anyone who doesn't have real hardware. I think it'll be interesting to give them another chance via video and/or written stuff — I feel an Atari Jaguar A to Z series somewhere in my future. Then I can see how bad Kasumi Ninja really is — and how good Alien vs. Predator is, too. And, of course, whatever the fuck Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy is.
That should hopefully arrive before Christmas, but the GameDrive units are currently unavailable, so I'm going to have to wait on that. Probably just as well, since they're a bit pricey, but at about $180 (£130ish) for access to the Jaguar's complete library, that feels like money well spent when the games are still going for £30+ each.
Expect more Thoughts when I have my mitts on this dumbass system. I'm looking forward to playing with it!
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