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Fire_In_The_Valley

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Posts posted by Fire_In_The_Valley

  1. Hey atarilbc, I just started playing Zaku and I agree that it's both interesting and well-made. It doesn't look like a home-brew effort and it has a better all-around feel than most games that were released on Lynx. I bought it thinking it would be a Sonic clone but it feels much more like Air Zonk mixed with a shump. I wish Zaku were more widely available.

  2. Not really. Just that the 68020 would have had more power, hopefully the jaguar wouldn't have been so screwy to write for. An ease of programming would have lead to more 3rd party vendors and hopefully more great games. We're playing the "what if" game though..

     

    Staying on topic, the Jaguar as it was, not what I wish it had been, meant a lot to me. It's a part of my youth and the lesson of "great graphics do not correlate to great games" as that commercial would have you believe, is a lesson I'll have with me for the rest of my life.

  3. Welcome to the forums ptw-ace  :)  I agree with your assessment of the 68000 chip. They say the Jaguar was designed for the 68020 and Jack Tramiel wanted to cut costs and demanded they go with the 68000. I'm not a historian and I don't know how much truth is in that, but the 68020 would have put the Jaguar over the top. For me though, as earlier, it all comes down to the games. What 3rd party support do you have, how many great games are there, and why should I buy this tech? I have a Panasonic 3DO-M2 Accelerator. It's a development console and I don't have any games to play with it. Without games processing power doesn't mean shiz. 

  4. I must first preface this by saying I have a soft spot for the Jaguar too. Yes, it failed to steal the spotlight from Nintendo and Sega but it was a valiant effort from an underdog who put out some decent games on a console that was years ahead of its time. It hurts my heart to see it so deeply maligned, often unfairly. That happens a lot with Atari, from E.T. all the way up to the Jaguar. I love the Jag very much and respect it for what it is. With that said, I don't want what I'm about to say to sound like a bash.

     

    I had a pre-release console in November, 1993 and totally bought into the Bit Wars that had been going on ever since Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 went that route against Nintendo. "64-Bit! That means Jaguar is EIGHT TIMES better than the NES!" I proclaimed to my friends, who looked at me with a tremendous amount of skepticism. 

     

    It became a tradition to have all the friends over for gaming Friday after class. At first everybody wanted to see the Jaguar. In 1993 Cybermorph came across as really impressive. Tempest became a group favorite.

     

    Shortly after these gaming get-togethers became routine, somebody asked about the Atari 7800 sitting under the TV next to the Jaguar. "What games does that Atari play?" asked a friend, picking up the joystick and examining it oddly like a foreign object that fell from space. A decade after its release, with everybody in the room looking on, I put in Centipede and started it on Team Play. From that point on, nothing would ever be the same. We'd still play the Jag, but EVERYBODY came to play these classic arcade games on the 7800, and they would show up energized and excited. Even 2600 games like Warlords did well. We spent countless Friday afternoons playing Dig Dug, Xevious, Joust, Galaga and the rest, but Centipede would remain the favorite among the group.

     

    So to be completely honest, what I love most about "the last true Atari" is that it taught me the most important lesson I would ever learn about play value in Silicon Valley: "Graphics don't make the game."

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