"Atari? What's That? Isn't That A Car?"

The Atari Jaguar. It just doesn't have a nice ring to it. You expect a Jaguar to be strong, swift, fast, ferocious, like the animal, or like the car. Instead, you get a mediocre game system with bad marketing and little valuable software.

First, the history lesson. The Jaguar was released in the middle of the 90's, after the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo, and the Sega CD. It did beat the 32X by a year, and the Saturn and Playstation by at least two years. The head start of being one of only three next generation systems out (the other two were the $700 3D0 and impossible to find Phillip's CD-i) did not help the Jaguar's fortunes though.

From the beginning, the Jaguar had problem finding an audience. It was not carried in most major chain stores. Wal-Mart carried the system for around half a year before discarding it due to very sluggish sales. The price tag was not as high as a 3D0, but it was still double to triple the price of a Super Nintendo or Genesis (75 dollars), and those systems had cheaper games, and more games.

With the lack of a selling base, other problems very shortly popped up. Developers started to abdoan the Jaguar. Atari itself did not have a strong development team, and no game released exclusively for the Jaguar ever sold in large quantities.

There were some decent games for the Jaguar. They were just spread very few and far between. DOOM was an excellent port from the computer version, beating out every other version released. Primal Rage was a blast to play when it was released.

A quibble with the Atari's actual hardware design. The controller is just god awful. The packaged controller that came with the Jaguar was a square box that was too big for a smaller gamer and too small for someone with larger hands. And there were at least 7.8 million buttons on the Jaguar's controller. Head-spinning.

Graphically and soundwise, no one will ever be sure as to what the Jaguar could accomplish. The system was never really pushed to its max, as development only got into second generation games. Most games were better then Super Nintendo quality, but below Saturn and much lower then the Playstation and Nintendo 64.

Overall, the Jaguar was never really a factor in the either console war (Super NES vs Genesis, Playstation vs Saturn vs Nintendo 64). While it possessed the raw power needed to compete, it lacked the advertising budget and muscle from Atari to challenge the big boys.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 11/26/00, Updated 11/26/00