Reject Games #3: When Atari sucked

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Ataxia
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Reject Games #3: When Atari sucked

Post by Ataxia »

Welcome to Reject Games Number 3! This week, we step away from the PS1 and have a look at something made for the Atari Jaguar.

I hope you enjoy it, and to be honest, I recommend you don't play this game. Like, at all.
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Barbazza
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Re: Reject Games #3: When Atari sucked

Post by Barbazza »

That looks truly awful. Btw, you mention a Giorgio Moroder reworking of Blondie's 'Call Me' - he wouldn't have any need to rework it as he produced it in the first place!
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Re: Reject Games #3: When Atari sucked

Post by Ataxia »

Barbazza wrote:That looks truly awful. Btw, you mention a Giorgio Moroder reworking of Blondie's 'Call Me' - he wouldn't have any need to rework it as he produced it in the first place!


Oh wow, I had no idea - that's pretty cool, actually!
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Re: Reject Games #3: When Atari sucked

Post by CoopsII »

Barbazza wrote:Btw, you mention a Giorgio Moroder reworking of Blondie's 'Call Me' - he wouldn't have any need to rework it as he produced it in the first place!

Impressive!

Great write-up Ataxia but as bad as you describe these games you realise you're simply making them sound appealing to the likes of me, in all their glorious awfulness.
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Re: Reject Games #3: When Atari sucked

Post by girry »

I don't even know why but the AI's inner Tora Takagi truly cracked me up.

Good work as always.
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Re: Reject Games #3: When Atari sucked

Post by dinizintheoven »

Hmmm. While it's fairly obvious even from the screenshots that Checkered Flag is well and truly worthy of its Reject Rating, I'll have to take issue with your lambasting of the Jaguar as "not up to much". Its teeth were (almost) as sharp as Atari claimed, it's just that it was usually a lot less hassle to keep its jaws wired shut.

If you've got 42 minutes to spare (and who hasn't, at some stage?) then Nostalgia Nerd's detailed story of the Jaguar will reveal the story of a more than capable console hamstrung a by lack of financial clout and some poor management decisions, a story which should be more than familiar to readers of this site - I'm already thinking of the Fondmetal GR02 and Forti FG03 amongst our favourite backmarkers who could have punched well above their weight had it not been for the teams collapsing around them... plus a certain team in green from the early 2000s who weren't rejects but performed rejectfully, and the name should be obvious in the context of this post. Even Andrea Moda might qualify here as well, had the S921 been run as the originally intended BMW works car rather than by an impoverished entity with a clueless boss. And the video does also show what the Jag was capable of when it was fully unleashed, even if it was 15 years too late to save it, as well as what it sealed its fate when the programmers couldn't be bothered, a category which Checkered Flag most certainly fell into, and it does make a brief appearance in all its less-than-glory.

The only time where I diverge from Nostalgia Nerd is that I think Edge had a good point about Alien vs. Predator - everything that I can see about it from his video screams "Wolfenstein 3D engine" at the same time as Doom was released (including on the Jaguar). Then again, Rise Of The Triad was also based on a modified Wolfenstein 3D engine and was supposed to be its official sequel, and I enjoyed that far more than the critics told me I was supposed to...

Also, I might have to take further issue with your 5/5 Reject Rating, because... where do we go from here? I can think of a game that will challenge Checkered Flag for its rating, relative to the hardware it was supposed to work on: Spirit Software's Formula 1 Simulator, released for the ZX Spectrum in 1984. I could point out its deficiencies here, but from what I remember of playing it (or, at least, trying to) plus a cursory glance through some of the World Of Spectrum links, I think it may well be worthy of a Reject Review of its own.
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Re: Reject Games #3: When Atari sucked

Post by Ataxia »

The rankings are there more for comic effect, but the beauty of them is that they're pretty open to interpretation. Is 5/5 Lavaggis a worse or better score than 5/5 Inoues, and is 2/5 Takagis worse or better than 3/5 Rossets? It's up to you, really.

Because I don't *own* a Jag, I have to take things at face value. The game was garbage; it's a barebones blast through polygon landscapes which showcase the developers putting in the bare minimum of effort. It's a shit-show, honestly.

As for the Jag itself, I can only go on what I've read/heard; the console was difficult for developers to work with. You can't realistically expect someone to get the most out of it when Atari themselves make it difficult to do so. If you want your product to have longevity, it has to be user friendly.
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Re: Reject Games #3: When Atari sucked

Post by dinizintheoven »

Ataxia wrote:The rankings are there more for comic effect, but the beauty of them is that they're pretty open to interpretation. Is 5/5 Lavaggis a worse or better score than 5/5 Inoues, and is 2/5 Takagis worse or better than 3/5 Rossets? It's up to you, really.

So allow me to throw further comic effect into the mix as any review of a dire early 80s Spectrum game will require an appropriate driver of the day. Is 5/5 Lavaggis a worse or better score than 5/5 François Hesnaults?

I will give this reviewing lark a stab at some stage, because Spirit's Formula One is a reject game with an even more rejectful background. Now don't any of you go and research it and spoil the surprise.
James Allen, on his favourite F1 engine of all time:
"...the Life W12, I can't describe the noise to you, but imagine filling your dustbin with nuts and bolts, and then throwing it down the stairs, it was something akin to that!"
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Re: Reject Games #3: When Atari sucked

Post by BioBiro »

dinizintheoven wrote:I will give this reviewing lark a stab at some stage, because Spirit's Formula One is a reject game with an even more rejectful background.
Spirit made a Formula One video game? :?
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Re: Reject Games #3: When Atari sucked

Post by RAK »

dinizintheoven wrote:If you've got 42 minutes to spare (and who hasn't, at some stage?) then Nostalgia Nerd's detailed story of the Jaguar will reveal the story of a more than capable console hamstrung a by lack of financial clout and some poor management decisions, a story which should be more than familiar to readers of this site


Part of the problem with the Jaguar is that the system was way too complex for its own good. By far the most successful console of the fifth generation was the PlayStation and that was easy to program for compared to things like the Jaguar, Saturn, 32X or the Nintendo 64. And even taking its complexity into consideration, it still wasn't in the same league as the PSX, Saturn, N64 or the 3DO in terms of 3D performance, which meant that you were spending more effort to get less performance out of the system than you were on those other consoles.

I never really got why Tramiel-era Atari went down the road of making consoles. Jack Tramiel never really seemed to get them. I think that the Atari 7800 was the best reject console that Atari made, followed by the XEGS and Jaguar, with the 5200 (why the bathplug would you ignore a three-year back catalogue on similar hardware?) a long way behind.
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