On the other hand, some of the ambition of later titles exposes the weaknesses and limitations of the hardware. It’s still a great time to boot up Surround or Outlaw with a pal. Our tip for navigating the best of the 2600 games in the library? Sort by year, then play the early stuff. The controls and such do take some time to grasp for those who didn’t play them back in the day, but games like Combat and Asteroids are elegant in their technologically forced simplicity. We don’t recommend you play them with any seriousness.Ĭonversely, the older games feel more modern. We’re psyched to see the work to make Jaguar games playable by a wider audience, but they serve as a spectacle and a curiosity. The controls are already on less-than-solid footing, before you deal with the game’s collision detection. Three-dimensional hills on the otherwise-essentially-Mode-7 race track! That honestly disrupt and mildly disorient more than make the driving interesting. Tons of colors! Uh, without considering whether it looks any good. There’s a desire to look “technologically superior,” which manifests itself in some rough ways. The best titles recapture the white-knuckle arcade feel of Tempest, while others feel like they can’t catch up with the approachability and polish of their modern genre peers.Īs a case study, let’s look at Atari Karts, a fairly standard racing game for the Jaguar. A few included Jaguar and Lynx games in here can still be fun, but between being limited to first-party releases and the Jag’s efforts to show off new tech at the expense of coherent visual design and controls? Yeah, the selection doesn’t particularly stand the test of time.īoth the good and bad of the later Atari consoles stems from a strict adherence to design philosophies established over a decade before. The compilation talks a lot about the marketing problems (which likely didn’t help), but they also had, uh, these games to use to sell the hardware. Ultimately, it’s no wonder why later Atari systems like the Jaguar failed. (And those execs are maybe still there.) But it could have been worth a few mentions of what Atari did then, like the Atari Flashback’s role in the proliferation of plug-and-play consoles and some of the quirkier merchandise to come out of the move to licensing out the brand. The compilation likely couldn’t cover that with the same detachment of the earlier times. There’s an unshakable veneer of PR to the selected topics.Ītari 50 also skips from 1998 to 2020, avoiding covering the ups and downs of that era. We would love to have heard what it was like to market the systems and games, or the business realities of Jaguar-era Atari! But this ain’t an independent project it’s bankrolled by the company that relies upon preserving and promoting nostalgia for Atari’s games. There’s no real effort to get into the business side of things along the way. This is logical! That was who they were able to interview, and the team at Digital Eclipse likely identifies with their position most. But putting some here, as an intellectual curiosity surrounded by artifacts of the day and an explanation of their place in history? Now that works.Ītari 50‘s narrative has a clear point of view, too: that of the designers and programmers of the era. This museum approach makes sense! After all, trying to sell a Jaguar compilation as “fun games you should play” is, frankly, ill-advised. You can bypass this and head to the second, a sortable game library, if you want! But it’s clearly intended for you to peruse the exhibits first and not just run and raid the gift shop. The first: a four-part timeline, presenting videos and scanned artifacts interspersed with the related games themselves. In Atari 50, you’ll find two separate presentation schemes. With Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, Digital Eclipse shows an understanding of its aging subject matter, treating it with reverence but also building its collection around being an educational time capsule. When we’ve covered compilations of older titles in the past, we’ve often found them to be less valuable as games to play in the modern era and more suited as a documentary archive to peruse.
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