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/vr/ - Retro Games

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3767515 No.3767515 [Reply] [Original]

What was Jaguar's biggest downfall? Some serious untapped potential, but it was never given the chance because of favoritism.

>> No.3767524

>>3767515
It looks like a toilet and wasn't 64 bit.

>> No.3767557

>>3767515
I have a nice Jag collection and love Atari to death, but it is a legitimately bad system. The add-on should've been built into the thing in the first place. The controller is very comfortable, but the numpad is stupid. The bit-wars angle was a mistake. Western consoles always suffered a lack of Japanese support, and Japan was knocking everything out of the park in the 90s. The remakes of their arcade classics were okay, but hardly the kind of thing you wanted to drop full price on. Missile Command 3D came out the same year as Chrono Trigger. The presentation just wasn't there. And of course it was overpriced before being bargain-binned.

>> No.3767565
File: 37 KB, 500x375, microbox3[1].jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
3767565

I think the Jaguar story starts and ends with the branding. Atari was legendary enough to guarantee some sales but also had left a bad taste in the mouths of consumers and had been notably absent from the console scene for two whole generations. Cartridges were also a mistake, one Nintendo ignored. In hindsight the best Atari could have done would have been to have consolized the ST and put that advertising budget they obviously had into marketing that, featuring tricked out new-school versions of their classic IPs. Amiga was also marketing a consolized CD based Amiga at the time and it didn't go so well for them but they didn't have Space Invaders, Tempest, Frogger etc. Maybe they could have even sucked David Crane's dick and got Activision as a 2nd party developer.

They still would have gotten the corporate curbstomp from Sony but it would have been better than Jaguar

>> No.3767576

>>3767515
Lack of publisher and customer confidence.
Inadequate development tools and documentation.

>> No.3767653

Everything really:
>managment of Atari
>shooting yourself in the foot with hardware most couldn't make real use off.
>shitting on developers who are making games for your system

>> No.3767749

>>3767653
Interesting, I haven't heard of any stories of the Jaguar's failure - never looked into it because the system never appealed to me. Would love to hear about those.

>> No.3767818

>>3767515
The architecture had power, but it was bad. Bad because it was really hard to actually get any power out of it. It was actually 64-bit, but not the CPU, that was a 68k 7 Mhz 16-bit dog that was good enough for Amiga 500 but not a 64-bit console. The Tom and Jerry coprocessor chips were powerful and 64-bit, but so hard to use most developers just ran code on the 68k. Basically, it was like putting a GTX 1080 into a Pentium III rig, and expecting developers to use some weird GPGPU software so they can use the GTX 1080 as a CPU and a GPU at the same time.

>> No.3767832

>>3767565
I think the CD32 sold well but a ton of stock got stuck in the Philippines because of a lawsuit and Commodore itself was in deep financial shit.

>> No.3767861

The controller was junk too, really I mean it sucked to hold. How could anyone feel comfortable using the top portion.
>muh classic 12 function buttons

>> No.3767974

>>3767832
Atari's situation was fairly parallel

>> No.3767996

To developers, the hardware is a mess. Plus it brought back the "you can make phone calls" number buttons from gen 2.

>> No.3768146

>>3767515
>muh bits
>no CD built-in to the original console
>Atari didn't have enough power at the time to get lots of developers
>No killer game title
>Stuck between 16-bit gen and 32-bit gen that wiped the floor with it
>Weird architecture
>Shitty controller
>All the crossplatform titles on jaguar were better on the newer consoles. If you played Rayman on Jaguar and tried the PS1/Saturn version you would shit yourself just hearing the music.

>> No.3768246

>>3768146
Isn't Rayman on Jaguar generally considered the definite version?

>> No.3768321

I remember being 11 when this system came out and being really interested in buying it. I ended up buying a SNES instead though and was glad I did. For every Tempest 2000, there were ten Fight for Lifes.

Look at Ultra Vortek:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Za6jmMbUQ

This game was supposed to be a big exclusive for Jaguar, but looks worse than most SNES or Genesis fighting games at the time.

There were too many games that could have easily been done on a SNES and they were mostly mediocre.

>> No.3768362

>>3768246
No, the music sounds like shit and the physics don't work correctly in the Band Land levels.

>> No.3768389

Where do I begin?

>Atari botched the marketing
>Designed in a way that never took full advantage of its hardware
>horrible to develop for
>archaic controller design
>no 3rd party support
>CD was an afterthought

In all honesty, the Jaguar DID have some power, but like most things Atari, they borked up how it functioned.

>> No.3768418 [DELETED] 
File: 93 KB, 600x849, DoubleDragon_front.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
3768418

American/Western developers are terrible and generally port hungry faggots, resulting in a system with barely had any original games to define the it

Double Dragon V and that shitty Bruce Lee game do not a good library make

>> No.3768423
File: 93 KB, 600x849, DoubleDragon_front.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
3768423

American/Western developers are terrible and generally port hungry faggots, resulting in a system with barely any original games to define it

Double Dragon V and that shitty Bruce Lee game do not a good library make

>> No.3768578

>>3767515

What ever became of the Jag's VR headset?

>> No.3768586

It's all western games, in a time where those were really bad.

>> No.3768606

>>3767515
The controller was ass

>> No.3768694

>>3767515
Taint of 80's Atari.
Lack of 3rd party support.
Developers who used the 68k to do most of the work.

>> No.3768790

What was the purpose of an uncomfortable numpad in the 90s?

>> No.3768797

>>3768790
Games came with an overlay you could put on top of the numeric keypad. It was too ahead of its time, maybe if they introduced it nowadays it would have a more positive reception.

>> No.3768983
File: 62 KB, 1000x750, photo-dsi-keyboard[1].jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
3768983

>>3768797

>> No.3769546

>>3767565
>Maybe they could have even sucked David Crane's dick and got Activision as a 2nd party developer.

By the late 80s David Crane had left Activision to join Garry Kitchen's new company, Absolute Entertainment. Pretty much all the 2600 glory days folks at Activision had left the company by 1990.

>> No.3769773

The Jag had its fair share of good games in its defense. Alien vs Predator is amazing but a bit slow by today's standard. The Iron Soldier games are awesome. Cyber morph and battle morph are great if you are into them. Ultra Vortek is decent, Highlander is decent. It had good ports of doom and wolfenstein. Brutal sports football was a great 2 player game. It's every bit as mediocre as the 3do without really and major third party support like 3do had. That has to account for something.

>> No.3769848

>>3769773
Differences is that 3DO is almost decent while the Jaguar is almost worse than mediocore

>> No.3769871

>>3767515
They missed out a generation, and wanted to get into an already full market. Atari's name was already tarnished and they just weren't cool anymore. The hardware was flawed and difficult to use, and software support was very poor - other than John Carmack having a boner for the DSP chips and porting Doom to them, there was not much else the system had.

>> No.3769885

>>3767749
The system had a strong dsp+gpu chip. You were meant to run your code on the dsp and display it on the gpu, which had super fast communication. But because of a design snafu the dsp could not execute code from memory, only from cache, so it was impossible to use for any program larger than 2 kilobytes.

The other dsp chip was inside the sound synth, and specialized for more sound related processing - for which it was a bit overpowered. Id software used it for number crunching, which is part of why Doom ran relatively well, and why it had no music (they could've implemented it, but had deadlines).

Because of this, it was damn near impossible to get real power from the thing, so most devs used the 7mhz 68k which was put there to watch controller input and I/O. Instead of the DSP which was 3-4x faster.

Perhaps they should've ported JRPGs to the system, since it had a gpu with many colours. I'm not sure how much the gpu was ever pushed, my impression is that nearly everything was cpu bottlenecked on the system...

>> No.3769897

>>3769848
Japanese third party devs did wonders for the 3DO. Great ports of SSFII Turbo, Samurai Shodown, original WARP games D and Trip'd, Lucienne's Quest-a decent JRPG, the only good Sailor Moon vs. fighter, and so on.

>> No.3770004

>>3769897
Did Japan really like the 3DO or something?

>> No.3770029

>>3768578

They didn't really develop their own but licensed the tech from Virtuality and scaled down the specs to make it affordable. When the project fell through, it became the Squba, a general purpose VR HMD that almost nobody bought.

>> No.3770041

>>3770004
Developers thought it was Matsushita console, even though they only developed one of the models.

>> No.3770060

>>3767515
What everyone else said? Shity controller, overpriced compared to le Sony, didn't think about le games, and more processors don't mean shit if you don't make it easy for devs to do shit with it.

>> No.3770063

>>3769897
Hmmm? Starcontrol 2 was good too.

>> No.3770073

>>3767818
>expecting developers to use some weird GPGPU software so they can use the GTX 1080 as a CPU and a GPU at the same time.

That woudl require a magically efficient multi-threading algorithim if it has to pass through only 2 kilobytes of cache.

>> No.3770094

>>3768790
>>3768797
It was to give certain "complicated" games an edge when ported to Jaguar, namely PC games that would have a lot of hotkeys and control binds that would never make it onto the SNES or Genesis

The Jaguar port of Doom is a great example. You would use the numpad buttons to swap directly to any weapon you were carrying, exactly as you could on PC. Keep in mind in all the other Doom ports your only option is to just cycle up and down the list.

If the thing wasn't a failure and a gigantic bitch to develop for it might have had a nice niche for alleged "PC perfect" ports the way other consoles would boast about giving you the "arcade experience in your living room!" and shit. But it was not to be.

>> No.3770105

>>3769897
SSF2T has input lag even with the pistol grip capcom controller, samurai Shodown has massive frame skip and massive slowdown during the camera zoom effects. Plus both suffer from poor controllers in general, especially 2p when daisy chaining the second controller. Hardly what I would call good ports, they look good sure but they are fighting games and require precise control. 3do has return fire, road rash and guardian war which I would say are great titles. The Jaguar port of Doom is 100x better. I am not even entertaining the fact it has a bunch of text heavy Japanese RPG'S that are unplayable to English speakers. The fact that both consoles have 10 or so "good" games even further reinforces my opinion that Jag is slightly better, especially when the 3do library is more than twice as large. Plus if you figure in cost then and now the Jag was the better buy. Having paid $999, $799, $699 or even when it was $499 would have pissed anybody off. Jag at $250 and later at $150 was a better buy. If you were one of the guys who spent a grand when it came out to play Shelly Duvall's birds life and Shockwave for the first 6 months, you would have wished you bought the Jag.

>> No.3770109

>>3770094
>"arcade experience in your living room!"
Kega Genesis and PC-Engines did that just fine. So did Saturn, PSX, Dreamcast... Jaguar had no niche and no devs who want to work with douched monkey execs.

>> No.3770124

>>3770105
>a bunch of text heavy Japanese RPG'S that are unplayable to English speakers.
>on 4chan
This is a weeb pictorial board filled with brown weeaboos. How /new/ are you? We all speak gud nihonese like Ken-sama!

>> No.3770138

>>3770124
Lol..too true. I just love the Jag vs. 3do argument, everytime somebody mentions all the great Japanese RPG'S that nobody can even play. It always makes me laugh. Guardian War made it over here and was really good.

>> No.3770139

>>3770105
>I am not even entertaining the fact it has a bunch of text heavy Japanese RPG'S that are unplayable to EOPs.
FTFY

>> No.3770143

>>3770109
Likewise for 3do, no niche and nobody wanted to hear or entertain Trip Hawkins rant and rave about how great the 3do would become once the M2 add on came out and they could milk you for another $500. He was telling everyone to be patient for M2 like only six months after it was out and already underwhelming everyone. He was lucky he had ties to EA, or that system would have been 10x worse.

>> No.3770146

>>3770105
>a bunch of text heavy Japanese RPG'S that are unplayable to English speakers.
The one mentioned was released in USA and is fully translated into English. It's also worth a fortune, but that's what burned ISOs are for (the JP release of it can be had for nothing).

3DO Wolfenstein is actually a good port compared to the Doom debacle.

>> No.3770150

>>3770139
No EOP'S even had 3do's, I don't think store clerks even let them touch the displays, so that's irrelevant.

>> No.3770152

>>3769546
Somebody owned them IPs

>> No.3770157

>>3770146
>3DO Wolfenstein is actually a good port

Isn't it in a window, where the Jag port is as smooth or smoother but also fullscreen?

>> No.3770162
File: 1.45 MB, 1600x1200, rott.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
3770162

How come there was no Rise of the Triad port? If it could run Doom, it would have run ROTT superbly, and it would have been graphically impressive for the time. Also a better game than much of the Jag library.

>> No.3770163

>>3770157
Yes they scaled it down to make it faster and shrunk it so you wouldn't notice. The Jag was full screen and maybe a bit slower but the better port again.

>> No.3770168

>>3770146
Well if we can count isos then we can count Towers 2 for Jag. Released 10 years after its demise. That game is a seriously great first person RPG.

>> No.3770171

>>3770168

It's great if you're autistic and want a dead serious, extremely detailed and plodding western RPG experience.

That's not a big. Jag AvP is the same way, being that every enemy on the map is always active and moving around rather than just waiting for you to find them, and other cool details (which is why the framerate was bad)

It just limits the appeal is all. AvP in particular would have been a better game with linear level progression, chopping that huge map up into smaller levels so the framerate would be smooth.

>> No.3770173
File: 452 KB, 500x375, 3l.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
3770173

>>3770168
No, what I mean is you can burn the ISO to save money if you want. That title, Lucienne's Quest, was a commercial release during the 3DO's lifetime. Resellers and the bubble have driven it's value up too much when you could just buy the Japanese copy, for collecting purposes, and burn the English edition.

>> No.3770183

>>3770162
It could run Doom because Carmack himself ported it.

Build engine is a different pie altogether.

>> No.3770187

>>3770183

...ROTT is not build engine. It's a beefed up Wolf3D engine.

>> No.3770206

>>3769885
This is the first actual explanation of the borked 64 bit architecture I've ever read. Thank you

>> No.3770217

>>3770105
I don't always play SSF2T and Samsho ports on the 3DO and Jaguar, but when I do I prefer the 3DO. Some lag, or such, on 3DO is preferable to the infinite lag of the Jag ports-seeing as how said ports are non-existent. The point that 3DO > Jag in actually having Japanese third parties at all apparently whooshed past you, and that was a factor in the system actually doing respectably for one of the "losers" of the console wars (3DO console sales blew away Jag).

Jaguar is a good system.

>> No.3770249

>>3770217
Not the point I was making at all actually. I'm just not putting SSF2T and SS in the "good" column when they are terrible ports, especially when comparing the two systems. A better comparison would be way of the warrior vs Kasumi Ninja or Ultra Vortek. All 3 are pretty much garbage but Kasumi and Vortek are at least playable garbage. Tit for tat both have 10-15 good games, 25 mediocre games and the rest is shovelware. I think both systems are underrated. I just think the 3do is a bit more overrated because of major titles. At the time I think samurai Shodown and SSF2 on genesis were better options.

>> No.3770262

>>3770217
Also sales figures are a bit skewed due to no Jag in Japan and the 3do had a better following in Japan. Gex was packed in consoles in the USA, Europe and Japan and is the best selling game at just under 1 million units other than that 3do doesn't have many titles that reach 250k in units sold worldwide. Tempest 2000 and AvP both sold around 300k units. No American games stateside even come close on 3do except pack ins. Maybe it was because of the bigger library, but grading them on a curve they are neck and neck not counting Japan.

>> No.3770285

>>3770094
>If the thing wasn't a failure and a gigantic bitch to develop for it might have had a nice niche for alleged "PC perfect" ports the way other consoles would boast about giving you the "arcade experience in your living room!" and shit.

That's really hard to do. For example, when FPS games went to full 3D with mouse aim, it was very difficult to have accurate aiming on the PS1, even with dual analog. I tried Quake II, which was a terrific port but aiming was nightmarish, so I gave up and used the non-analog gamepad and relied on vertical aim assist. Even the Dreamcast and PS2 had substandard aiming playing Unreal Tournament. By 1999 there were optical mice that had superb accuracy. Console joysticks didn't work well for FPS aiming until the Xbox 360.

>> No.3770317
File: 25 KB, 328x365, k1.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
3770317

The keypads with overlays really hearken back to the pre-crash days of Intellivision, ColecoVision, and the 5200. I like early 80's games, so think it's all good, but I can see how that connection plus the Atari name could lead others to see it as an ill omen.

>> No.3770337

>>3770285
ah yeah that's true

in hindsight what I said was kind of nonsense and probably wouldn't work out in the long run

>> No.3770343

>>3770337

It would have worked up until Quake. That's long enough for a new console generation to come out.

>> No.3770451

>>3770262
It seems that it did get released in Japan in https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Atari+Jaguar+stalks+Japan.-a015890850 but my guess it was just straight American imports without even localized packaging.

>> No.3771735

>>3770451
That's hilarious, I wonder how many they sold. Probably not even enough to gain a niche cult like the first xbox had in Japan.