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    The Atari Jaguar was the first 64-Bit game console, and Atari's final console.

    All Jaguar Games In Order: 1993

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    borgmaster

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    Edited By borgmaster

    An explanation of what's going on here can be found in the intro post.

    Earlier this week, we looked at the January 1996 Saturn releases of Wing Arms, NFL Quarterback Club '96, Mortal Kombat II, World Cup Golf: Professional Edition, Darius Gaiden, and Hang-On GP.

    The Jaguar was only released in the two test markets of New York City and San Francisco in 1993, and only four games were available for it. These are Cybermorph, Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, Evolution: Dino Dudes, and Raiden.

    **This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**

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    No Caption Provided

    Cybermorph

    Developer: Attention to Detail

    Publisher: Atari

    Release Date: 11/23/1993

    Time to Where Did You Learn To Fly: 27 Minutes*

    Let's kick things off with the original pack-in title for the Jaguar, Cybermorph. This game seems to have begun life as a tech demo for the cancelled Konix Multisystem, which was in some ways the spiritual predecessor to the Jaguar but that's a story for a different time. When the creators of the Konix were tapped by Atari to design their new 32-bit console, the guys at Attention to Detail were brought in to develop for it. Everything I've seen about the making of this and the other launch title, Trevor McFur, strikes me as informal and vibes based. There is a sense of everyone involved at every level just kind of winging it. Viewing the development from that perspective helps the end product make any amount of sense.

    This is, I guess, a futuristic Flight Combat game in the old style. You play as a little ship that flies around small, open levels collecting thingies and shooting stuff when necessary. There are some basic power-ups that drop few and far between, and don't really impact the gameplay unless you're being serious about playing this thing. There isn't much in the way of vertical maneuverability, putting this in the same classification of flight control as the future Agile Warrior, which is not a flattering comparison. The main gameplay gimmick seems to be that you can throttle the ship down to the point that it can hover or move backwards. This intersects with the main visual gimmick, which is the ship changing shape when you accelerate or collect power-ups. That's so important to the game that it's the reason why this damn thing is called cybermorph and why the in-fiction name for the ship is TransmoGriffen. I'm not making any of that up.

    The game is a whole lot of this
    The game is a whole lot of this

    So, when you're in a level, you fly around collecting things, dodge enemies and other hazards, play around with teleporters, and eventually reach the exit point when you're done. The open nature of the levels encourages a degree of exploration, but that's hampered by a few of the many issues with this thing. First, the draw distance is almost nothing, which doesn’t help when trying to get your bearings. This is exacerbated by the bland, featureless terrain. This is a polygonal game that fits onto a 2 Mb cartridge, so there wasn't any space for textures or superfluous geometry. The game uses Gouraud shading to try to add some kind of visual anything, but it isn't enough. The blandness of the levels is alleviated by their relatively small size, so even though everything looks the same you can still eventually get a handle on their layouts. Lastly, the combat in this game sucks. Even when you figure out how to turn on the aiming reticule, the relatively low framerate combined with the draw distance, enemy speed, and hitbox sizes makes the combat an unrewarding chore. So, even though you need to explore around, you can't see shit, differentiate shit, or shoot shit.

    The whole feel of the controls saps what little fun could otherwise be had with this thing. The relative breadth of content makes that even more damning. There are apparently 40 levels in this thing, separated into five zones of eight levels each. Each level can have a minimum of a handful of things to collect or a maximum of dozens of things to collect, and it's hard to think of something more tedious than going through that 40 times. There's a password system, so you don't have to do everything in one go, but still. The tedium is made worse by the lack of sound design. There's no music during the levels and the sound effects are sparse. There's a floating computer-lady head that pops up on screen to say stuff, but she seemingly only has a handful of canned lines. Sadly, one of those canned lines gets used every time you run into a piece of terrain, in which she says, "Where did you learn to fly?" That gets grating real fast. So, it looks bad, sounds bad, and is uninteresting.

    Buildings are destructible, in theory
    Buildings are destructible, in theory

    The context around this game is more interesting than the thing itself. This was apparently the pack-in game for the Jaguar's launch, which means it’s the game that every Jag owner was likely to play. Additionally, there's a weird story about how the standalone cartridge of this thing that was sold in Japan was only 1 Mb for some reason, and it's painful to imagine what a cut-down version of this game would play like. Cybermorph also seems to have been divisive with reviewers at the time, who were split between hating this game for being a bad time and wanting to give the new Atari system some benefit of a doubt. It didn't help that Star Fox came out at around the same time as this game. Atari couldn't seem to catch a break even in the limited realm of early-3D console games.

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    No Caption Provided

    Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy

    Developer: Flare II

    Publisher: Atari

    Release Date: 11/23/1993

    Time to Killed By Odd-It: 17 Minutes*

    The other game available at launch for the Jag was an aggressively mediocre horizontal shooter developed by the company who designed the system for Atari in the first place. That game in question was given a title that was deceptively playful and weird, but which on further reflection used a similar naming convention as the Bubsy franchise. That's an automatic red flag. We are of course referring to Trevor McFur in The Crecent Galaxy. It appears that the release of Star Fox hamstrung the Jaguar launch titles in more ways than one, but we'll get to that.

    The writing is definitely something
    The writing is definitely something

    You play as the eponymous furball, Corporal McFur, who is tasked with defeating some kind of villainous force that has invaded his home solar system. That villainous force is call Odd-It for some reason, and that one detail inspires in me no desire to further engage with the premise. What we do have to engage with is the gameplay of this stupid thing. The game is structured in five worlds, with two levels each. The first and second levels of every world are structured the same way and share most enemy types between them. Each world starts with a level where you're going through an asteroid field with random boring enemy waves that culminates in a boss fight. The second level is typically an obnoxious cave with worse enemy patterns and a boss fight. Go through that cycle five times and you win. The main issue with this is that the combat is bland, the pre-rendered sprites are ugly, there's a paucity of sound design, and there's generally nothing compelling about the experience.

    The way in which the visuals and encounter design are bad reminds me of mid-00's flash games, like what you would find on Newgrounds back in the day. The sprites have some kind of shading or animation thing going on that is instantly reminiscent of those old flash games, or maybe a first generation $0.99 smartphone game. This impression wouldn't have been possible all the way back in '93, so it is a bit unfair to use that stuff as reference. Yet, my brain is so primed to associate this "artstyle" with low effort shovelware that I can't help making that association. This isn't helped by the shoddy design. I usually don't harp on the placement and behavior of enemy waves in these kinds of games, cause what the hell do I know. Yet, I do know enough to recognize that the designers here didn't seem to have a strong grasp on what they were doing. This causes a type of difficulty that is frustrating, not because of high demands on the player, but because it feels like the game is just throwing random nonsense at you regardless of what is or isn't fair.

    The visual design is just...off
    The visual design is just...off

    There's supposedly some depth in the power-ups and secondary abilities, but they aren't particularly worth caring about. Even with the crummy level design, this thing could probably be beaten in an afternoon of abject misery. Reviewers at the time seem to have come to similar conclusions. It really didn’t help that Star Fox was a better interpretation of anthropomorphic animals in space. Between this and Cybermorph, the Jaguar launch line-up was exceptionally uninspiring. There are still two more games that came out for this system in '93, can they make a case for buying this thing? (Spoiler: lol no)

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    No Caption Provided

    Evolution: Dino Dudes

    Developer: Imagitec Design

    Publisher: Atari

    Release Date: 12/1/1993

    Time to More Like Dino DooDoo (heehee): 27 Minutes*

    Lemmings was released in early 1991 for the Amiga family of computers and quickly became the highest selling Amiga game of the time, for what that's worth. Game designers all over the UK perked up and noticed the success of the Lemmings puzzle game concept, which consists of moving little guys around a 2D level while having them perform role-based actions to get to an exit. Thus, in the spirit of getting paid, the small-time studio Imagitec released The Humans in May 1992 for Amiga computers.

    The Humans sought to differentiate its gameplay from Lemmings in a few different ways. First, there were fewer little guys on screen at a time, and each of those has a much larger sprite. Second, the player could change control between each guy far easier than in Lemmings and the guys wouldn't do anything when not controlled. Finally, the player doesn't have access to all the available roles for each guy at the outset of the levels, items need to be acquired in the levels in order to unlock roles for the guy holding the item. Visually, Imagitec went for a cartoon caveman theme instead of whatever the hell a Lemming is supposed to be. This was all enough to set the game apart and lead to some acceptable level of success in the Amiga market.

    Just the biggest pain in the ass
    Just the biggest pain in the ass

    In the years that followed, The Humans would follow the example of Lemmings and get ported to every possible system available at the time. Due to Imagitec's other work for the Atari Lynx and Falcon, they were tapped to get a game put on the Jaguar in time for the launch season. That all seems to be how we ended up having to deal with a port of this second-tier Amiga game, rebranded to Evolution: Dino Dudes for the U.S. market. This is all very unfortunate because the game is a miserable chore. The pacing starts off slow and ponderous and never improves from there. There's an unwelcome emphasis on finicky platforming, which when combined with the lives and non-existent retry system leads to a frothy mixture of tedium and frustration. For example, the individual Dino Dudes need to use a spear to jump between platforms. The spears need to be picked up in order to be used and there are only a set number of the things in a level. The platforms are spaced in a way that makes doing successful jumps tricky without extensive practice. Also, if you need to move multiple Dudes across a gap with only one spear, you need to throw the thing back and forth multiple times. The spear, and any other item, can disappear if it falls between a gap or hits one of your Dudes. That makes It extremely easy to soft-lock yourself, which you can't recover from by just restarting the level, you need to quit out and use a password to restart the level. If you want to see how this caused the game to break me, watch the clip here.

    Probably the reason why the game doesn't have a retry feature is the lives system. You have a certain number of Dudes that you can use, starting with a pool of twelve. When one of your Dudes dies in a level, he respawns taking a guy from the pool. If you finish a level and don't have enough guys left to fill out the starting number for the next level, it's game over. There isn't much of a point to having this system, other than forcing an opportunity to reset your score. The need to quit and reload levels adds a layer of punishment that turns already mediocre puzzles into something much more annoying. Nothing about this game is fun. It also isn't particularly great to look at or listen to, which is a major flaw due to the seemingly large number of levels in this thing.

    Reviewers seemed mixed on this game at the time, and my own impressions are far less charitable. The worst part comes when trying to figure out whether this thing or Lemmings was the better game. That's an exceedingly cursed train of thought, though I suppose I would rather play this again over the 3DO port of Lemmings. Even still, it bodes poorly for Atari that 3DO was able to get a port of Lemmings while they were only able to get the knock-off.

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    Raiden

    Developer: Imagitec Design

    Publisher: Atari

    Release Date: 12/1/1993

    Time to Shot Out Of Space: 37 Minutes*

    Guess what, it's Raiden. It's literally just Raiden. It's the classic 1991 vertical 'shmup. I last looked at this game all the way back in Part 003 of the PS1 series. There's very little to comment on that wasn't covered in that post, so let's just do a run-down of the differences between this version and the future version from The Raiden Project.

    First, the framerate here is noticeably worse, which I'll chalk up to the differences between the Jaguar and PS1. Second, they don't seem to have quite figured out the best way to handle the difference in aspect ratio between vertical 'shmup cabinets and standard TVs. This led to about a third of the screen being taken up by a sidebar displaying the score, bombs, and lives of the two possible players. These visual issues are to be expected for the time, though. Of more interest are the gameplay differences. This version has the benefit of starting the player at the point they died when using a continue, which makes the game significantly more enjoyable than the later, more accurate version. That positive feature is more than balanced out by the truly awful feeling controls. For whatever reason, the d-pad movement here feels horribly sluggish and unresponsive, which is the last thing you could ever want from a 'shmup.

    Aspect ratios are hard, I guess
    Aspect ratios are hard, I guess

    Everything taken together, I was still able to get to the sixth level before running out of continues, which is further than I would have ever made it in the version featured in The Raiden Project. Because this is a port of a game that was already good, it ends up being the best Jaguar game of 1993 kinda by default. It's kind of an odd way to end things out for the year, but that's just the way it's going to be with the Jaguar.

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    With 1993 out of the way, we can now establish the much awaited Ranking of All Jaguar Games. Coincidently, this first batch also counts as the provisional GOTY list for the Jag in '93.

    1. Raiden

    2. Cybermorph

    3. Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy

    4. Evolution: Dino Dudes

    No Caption Provided

    Somewhat awkwardly, now that we've started this series on the Atari Jaguar, it's time to switch back to All 3DO Games (Kinda) In Order and begin experiencing the horrors of 1994. That means in two weeks we're going to look at the first five games of the year for that system: Burning Soldier, Way of the Warrior,(I'll explain later) Total Eclipse, Microcosm, The Horde, Iron Angel of the Apocalypse, and MegaRace.

    But, before then, we need to take a look back at the 18 games we've looked at from '93. So, next Friday we'll stop briefly to consider the launch seasons of both the 3DO and Jaguar when we do our 1993 Round-Up.

    Finally, I'll be back on Wednesday with the Saturn to look at the February '96 releases of Street Fighter Alpha: Warrior's Dreams, Cyberia, The Horde, Clockwork Knight 2, Defcon 5, College Slam, and Johnny Bazookatone.

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    I streamed these games over on my Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. You can watch the archive below.

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    Manburger

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    #1  Edited By Manburger

    With the title Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy and that cover, I could imagine a Flashback-esque cinematic platformer with some saucy furry action — Hah! Surprise, me, you stupid piece of shit! Of course it's a lackluster shooter! Nothing less for the Jag.

    Dino Dudes made me think of (Space Taxi-like) Ugh! which appropriately enough seems a fitting reaction. That clip though! The impeccable comedic timing and reaction made me cackle.

    Appreciate the lunacy thoroughness with which you are attacking all these adjacent consoles and their games. Happy to be along for the ride!

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