An explanation of what's going on here can be found in the intro post.
Last time with the Saturn we covered the June '96 releases of Virtual Open Tennis, In The Hunt, NBA Action, Skeleton Warriors, Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball, and Primal Rage.
It's been a while since we looked at the Jaguar's 1993 test market releases of Cybermorph, Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, Evolution: Dino Dudes, and Raiden but we're back now with actual video games to cover.
Now, we get to take a look at the first four Jaguar games of 1994 with Tempest 2000, Wolfenstein 3D, Brutal Sports Football, and Alien vs. Predator.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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Tempest 2000
Developer: Llamasoft
Publisher: Atari
Release Date: 4/13/1994
Time to Swallowing My Tongue: 57 Minutes
Jeff Minter is a weird guy. For starters, he's British, which has so far proven to be a red flag when it comes to game development. Then there's his affinity for woolly mammals; he chose 'Yak' as a nickname at an early age and has raised sheep and llamas for at least half his life, hence his studio's name. That's just the shallow end of the pool when it comes to odd details about the man, but this isn't about him. Instead, we're here to look at the game he is, probably, best known for, Tempest 2000.
This game is a sequel to the 1981 Atari arcade game, Tempest, which is a very early Vertical Scrolling Shooter where the player's ship moves around a tubular playfield. If you don't recognize the name, you have almost certainly seen the concept. This particular style was widely cloned for a couple of years but didn't catch on far enough to solidify into its own genre of Tube Shooter, but that was a memo Minter didn't receive. When the 90's rolled around and the Tramiels cast their net for developers willing to work on the Jaguar, they caught relatively few fish with Minter being one of them. The resulting collaboration allowed him to get his hands on the extremely dormant Tempest name and show the world what a Tube Shooter could be.
The result is one of the very small number of Jaguar games that anyone might remember. At its core, this is just Tempest, you move a ship between two-dimensional lanes wrapped to resemble a three-dimensional shape. The graphics are still in the vector style and all the tube shape variants from the original make their return. Yet, the game options have been expanded and the presentation has been revamped into something much more…stylish. Yet, those expanded game options boil down to three similar flavors of Tempest and a nightmarish competitive mode. For the three modes (Traditional, Tempest Plus, and Tempest 2000) I tend to go with Geometry Wars Retro Evolved as an analogy. You know how that game had original and "evolved" modes? That's how it works here, with Traditional literally being Tempest, 2000 adding all the new gameplay elements, and Plus acting as a weird in-between mode.
Those new gameplay elements serve as a straightforward modernization as much as anything else. Various power-ups are available, there are weird first-person bonus levels, and stage warping. This is less important than the changes in presentation. The sound effects have been improved, the visualizations made more dynamic with trippy color gradients and movements, and floaty text pop-ups occur when you perform certain actions. A thumping techno soundtrack pulls all of these elements together into the strongest vibes you're going to see on these early 32-bit systems. Because you're concentrating on the punishing early arcade gameplay, you end up letting the sights and sounds wash over you like a particularly out-there drug trip, which was almost certainly the intended effect. There's really no other game like this from the time, at least on consoles, so this would have been a one-of-a-kind experience only available on the Jaguar.
That isn't to say there aren't issues with the thing. The biggest problem, which ends up ultimately being a dealbreaker, is that lane movement feels bad. The original Tempest was designed around the use of a knob controller which, in case you weren't aware, is not a feature of the Jaguar controller. D-pad movement has never been great for this kind of game, though Tempest 2000 does what it can with only partial success. Lastly, I have to mention the two-player mode. It's kind of superfluous, but too bonkers to not bring up. If you can scare up another person to play with you, the splitscreen multiplayer battle mode features one player on either end of a tube stage shooting at each other. The game moves fast enough that any semblance of tactics or skill gets drowned out in utter chaos. This mode is an unmitigated nightmare to such an extent that I have to admire it for the sheer audacity of subjecting players to that kind of torture. Even still, I enjoyed my time with this thing more than any experience I've had with the 3DO, as low of a bar as that is to clear.
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Wolfenstein 3D
Developer: Id Software
Publisher: Atari
Release Date: 8/1/1994
Time to Mein Laben: 30 Minutes
One of the more famous game development stories from the 90's is the rise of Id Software and their role in the creation and refinement of the First Person Shooter genre. The personalities of guys like John Carmack and John Romero are famous, with anecdotes about early Id taking on a borderline mythical quality. There's a book, multiple documentaries, and supposedly an upcoming dramatization about them. It's a whole thing. As such, I ain't touching any of it. Instead, we're here to look at the Jaguar port of Id's original FPS, Wolfenstein 3D.
Simply, this thing was a big deal when it hit shareware in 1992, and it's the foundational game of its genre from which all others followed. Yet the year is now 1994 and this port isn't even the first console FPS. That doesn’t even include other efforts to port Id's catalog to previous gen consoles, since both Escape From Monster Manor and Iron Angel of the Apocalypse came out on the 3DO several months before this. That isn't even to mention that the PC market for this genre had decidedly moved past Wolfenstein-clones and firmly into the Doom-clone era. In fact, Doom II would be released a couple of months after this thing. In that way this would have been something of a throwback for anyone in the know. In that context, this release is a complete afterthought and forgotten as such.
Yet, in the narrow context of the Atari Jaguar, this is a massive deal. Besides name recognition, this is actually a very well-done console conversion for a genre that had been prickly at best to translate to consoles. This, among other games we'll get to, is something that Atari could have pointed at to showcase the power of the Jaguar and its dual 32-bit processors. This game looks and feels like Wolfenstein 3D. The frame rate feels the highest of any console shooter of the time, and the gamepad controls work well enough for the relative simplicity of the game. As an individual experience, it's better than anything that could have been found on either of these 32-bit consoles at the time it came out. That's not to say it's a one-to-one port, the levels have been simplified and likely wouldn't hold up in a side-by-side comparison. Still, as someone who hasn't played Wolfenstein for a while, it seems close enough.
But there's still that wider context. Good games on the Jaguar are medium sized fish in a very small pond. The FPS genre was moving so fast at the time that this game would have been antiquated. Everyone who had the disposable income for a Jaguar likely had a PC and had played either this very game or the more advanced Doom by this point. No one bought this port, and it left no impression. We're going to run into more extreme instances of these same positives and negatives when we get to the Jaguar port of Doom, so I'll save the lengthier discussion for then.
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Brutal Sports Football
Developer: Millenium Interactive
Publisher: Telegames
Release Date: 8/22/1994
Time to Never Having Seen A Football Game: 11 Minutes
I was going to start this off with a joke about Amiga developers being the only ones willing to work on this console, but I think I came up with a real reason for the phenomenon. Commodore had a lot of mindshare over in dreary Albion both under the Tremials and after, so it's easy to imagine that the family had more extensive connections in the British development scene than anywhere else. That makes sense to me and works within my conceptualization of this era of Atari existing solely to poach business from Commodore. Anyway, I bring up the Amiga because Brutal Sports Football is the most offensively Amiga-ass Amiga game on the Jaguar.
The concept is that of a fictional sport in the vein of something like Mutant League Football, with structure and play vaguely reminiscent of Football (actual), Rugby, and Football (Soccer) but which comes across as being designed by a European who had only a loose grasp on the concept of American football. A match consists of two teams of seven who try to move a football into goals on either side of a field, with the ball capable of being either passed or run. The gimmick is that this is also a 2.5D Beat 'Em Up where you pick up weapons on the field and whack away at opposing players during play. It's all very cartoony by modern standards, but the violence is explicit enough that it might have inspired a few clutched pearls back during its original release in '92.
The aesthetic matches the jumbled gameplay. There's an oddly rote feeling mishmash of post-apocalyptic sci-fi/fantasy junk, where the teams consist of dwarf looking vikings and fantasy creatures who are all Mad Max-ified cyborgs. I was nonplussed by the mild rudeness of it all, but then again I'm not a 12 year old British kid with only an Amiga to keep him company. I've been talking about it in terms of the original release because the Jaguar conversion is basically ok. It controls moderately bad and there's some occasional hitching, but it does play better than contemporary conversions on the 3DO like Soccer Kid or what have you. That's somewhat of a running theme I'm starting to notice with the Jaguar. The games all run and look fine, but there's nothing substantively going on that would be worth the price of admission.
That really sums up this game. There is multiple tournament, single game, and multiplayer modes with multiple teams of fantasy weirdos to choose from, some basic team management mechanics, and a basically coherent gameplay loop. It checks all the boxes for qualifying as a minimum viable video game and nothing more. What kills it in the end is that the damn thing isn't fun. The basic act of moving the little guys around, fighting, and handling the ball feels bad. The throws never go where they should, ball stealing is inconsistent, and the pick-ups all kinda suck. Also, any tactical considerations with weapon pick-ups and player damage go out the window because you by necessity are constantly changing your controlled player, and it isn't really possible to set-up plays or do the kind of planning you would want from a sports game. The whole thing is kind of a drag, which I suppose is to be expected.
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Alien vs. Predator
Developer: Rebellion Developments
Publisher: Atari
Release Date: 10/20/1994
Time to Game Over Man, Game Over: 33 Minutes
Now for the big one. If there's one game anyone who knows the Jaguar existed could name, it would be this one. It also had the longest and deepest impact of any game on this system, the effects of which we're still feeling even in these modern times. Then there's the fundamental concept, which is the whole thing. A person could probably throw together a multi-hour video essay on the history of Alien and Predator crossovers, and I'm sure someone has. On top of all of that is the bizarre detail that this is the first breakout game from Rebellion Developments, who have had a wild ride over the last thirty years and are known now as the Sniper Elite people and owners of 2000 A.D. This game shouldn't be as significant as it is considering that 2/3rds of it is trash. Though, that last part is completely normal for the output of a British studio in the 90's.
So, both the Alien and Predator franchises were owned by 20th Century Fox back in the 80's. Aliens was hit big in '86 and Predator was a major success in theaters the next year. Fox had landed on two completely unrelated and highly successful Action/Sci-fi/Horror concepts at roughly the same time, and such successes demanded merchandising. All the more so since sequels to both movies were in the works to be released in '92 and '90, respectively. The upshot of this was that Dark Horse Comics came into possession of both licenses at around the same time. Someone there had the bright idea of making a story where Aliens and Predators fight each other. This was an objectively good idea and the resulting 1989 miniseries, creatively titled Alien vs. Predator, gained immediate traction. This was followed by more comics, novelizations, and, of course, video games.
The first video game adaptation was a truly awful Beat 'Em Up, creatively titled Alien vs. Predator, which was released for the SNES in 1993 and rightfully forgotten by everyone. This was accompanied by an even more forgotten Pseudo-Metroidvania Game Boy release. Early '94 saw the launch of the arcade Beat 'Em Up that everyone actually remembers, creatively titled Alien vs. Predator. That finally brings us to our game of the moment, the uniquely titled Doom-style FPS, Alien vs. Predator. This wasn't the first game in the franchise, but it's the one that left the most lasting impression. That impression has long been interpreted as, "the marine campaign is cool but the other two are ass." It shocks me as much as you for that piece of received wisdom to be 100% correct.
That brings us to the game itself. There are three campaigns, one for each faction. Each one features its own texture palette, combat loop, and a couple of unique gameplay mechanics. The marine needs to collect keycards and guns before escaping, the predator has to manage an invisible honor stat to unlock weapons on the way to killing the Alien Queen, and the Alien can set up respawn points on the way to rescuing the Queen. In an odd quirk, the campaigns aren't level based. You're dumped into a multi-floor combat maze and left to wander aimlessly until you find your objective. It's almost run-based in its set-up, and each campaign could probably be completed in less than an hour by someone who knows where they're going. On paper, it sounds like only one or two steps up from Iron Angel of the Apocalypse, and in many ways it is.
The part that makes it stand out is the atmosphere, specifically in the Marine campaign. The technical limitations around sound design and draw distance are utilized for effect by having the minimalism create tension. The other important factor is the fragility of both the player and the xenos who are aimlessly wandering around. Combat is less frequent than other shooters of the era and correspondingly more decisive. It was enough that the game got a good jump scare out me while traversing some air ducts. Games from the 90's rarely have that effect on me, so that's something. I'm not going to go into the other two campaigns, because they're borderline unplayable trash. That leaves us with 1/3 of a great game, which is better than most of its peers.
This might sound like faint praise, but it was good enough for this thing to be the highest selling game for the Jaguar, at roughly 50,000 units. That's a very small number, but also an almost 100% attach rate, so it's like the Mario or Halo for this system. I'm not sure if that was enough to break even, but it did signal that Rebellion was onto something. They would later try again with the concept on the PC in the post-Half Life era with the groundbreakingly titled Alien versus Predator. That one is the most well-regarded thing in the entire Alien vs. Predator multimedia franchise, which means very little. That franchise was kept alive through the 90's by the video games and novelizations until 2003's creatively titled film adaptation, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, which is, uh, a cult classic? Maybe? It's certainly something. Anyway, Rebellion spent most of that decade making questionable project decisions before returning one last time to the well with 2010's throwback-titled Alien vs. Predator. People tend to forget how aggressively mediocre that game was because of how poorly things went for the Aliens franchise in the proceeding years.
So, what does any of this mean? Not much. It's cool when individually cool movie monsters fight each other, and the Jaguar was probably the best d-pad based console for First Person Shooters. If there are any two things you can take away from this blog, let it be those.
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I Think I'm going to maintain a mostly positive attitude on the Jaguar going forward, at least until I run into Bubsy. Let's get our Ranking of All Jaguar Games set-up and filled out.
1. Wolfenstein 3D
2. Tempest 2000
3. Alien vs. Predator
4. Raiden
5. Cybermorph
6. Brutal Sports Football
7. Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy
8. Evolution: Dino Dudes
Next time, we're back to the Saturn in June '96 with Shellshock, Baku Baku Animal, Gungriffon, Creature Shock: Special Edition, Road & Track Presents The Need for Speed, and Road Rash.
When we return to the Jaguar, we'll continue our brief journey through 1994 with Checkered Flag, Club Drive, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, and Doom.
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I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the forgotten depths of Saturn and Jaguar games and tilting at every FromSoft windmill.
The stream archive of myself playing these games can be watched below.
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