#oneaday Day 736: Atari Jank

I've been playing some Jaguar this evening, and I'm feeling good about my purchase. This is an interesting system for sure, and while it's irrefutable that many of the games (particularly the 3D ones) pale in comparison with what the PS1 and Saturn offered, there's an absolutely unique feel to Jaguar-exclusive games that is quite unlike anything on any other platform.

I've been pondering exactly what that unique aspect might be, and I think it's a distinctly "old-fashioned" feel to a lot of the games. I don't mean that as a pejorative, either; I mean that the Jaguar feels like a platform that provides similar sorts of experiences to what we had on '80s home computers, only with somewhat more up-to-date technology. I've been playing Hover Strike this evening, and it feels rather like something I would have played on the ST, albeit with marginally better graphics. Cybermorph is much the same way, and the other game I got with my eBay bundle, Sensible Soccer, was available on the Atari ST!

It's hard to nail down exactly what constitutes this distinctive feel, but it most certainly stands out when compared to other types of game on other platforms. I think it's a sense that there's just a little more complexity to the experience; a feel that it's designed less as a fast-action arcade-style experience, and more as something that almost has a more "sim" feel at times.

At least part of this is down to the controller. The Jaguar's numpad on the controller allows for a certain amount of flexibility a more conventional controller doesn't offer, but the nature of its design means that its functions are best left for things you don't need to press quickly. In Hover Strike, for example, you use the numpad to target things and fire missiles, and the game is designed in such a way that you can do those things from a distance. In many ways, it seems a lot of Jaguar game designers were well aware of the machine's limitations, and so rather than designing games that were unplayable due to the system's dodgy frame rate when doing 3D, they instead worked within those limitations and designed the game to accommodate the technical shortcomings. It's rather interesting — though those technical shortcomings are also likely the reason so many people bounce off the system.

I'm bidding on a couple of Jag carts on eBay and holding out for the (supposedly soon-ish) release of the Jaguar GameDrive, as the latter will allow easy access to both most of the commercially available games and the more modern homebrew efforts. I'll likely start doing some coverage in earnest of the games on the system in both written and video form once that's all sorted — though I already have an article in mind for now, so I might post that tomorrow. We'll see!

Anyway. Enough of that for now, it's time to go play pinball in bed. Have a pleasant evening!