It has 21 titles on retroachievements, so those are probably worth emulating at least ?
Having achievements usually means there’s people dedicated enough to care, especially on such an otherwise unpopular system. At least I would try those titles first, emulated or not.
Some would say it wasn’t worth playing in 1994.
Only some?
The rest didn’t know it existed
Well for the first year until the PS1 came out it was pretty cool, but they just didn’t have the game lineup to pull it off.
There is just nothing to see in Jaguar’s library. The high quality emulator it finally got is more valuable for preservation than for actual gaming.
Tl, dw: If you really want to spend a lot of time and money to play a handful of bad games, then sure.
about 20+ years ago I decided to start collecting videogames. In hindsight it was a good time to start as the prices for the retro stuff was still dirt cheap. I had all the consoles. mastersystem, nes, snes, genesis, 3DO, NeoGeo, etc. A few japanese only stuff like the Wonderswan and what have you. Again via ebay and thriftstores it was all cheap.
The Jaguar for whatever reason took awhile to find at a decent price but I finally found one at a electronics thriftstore in the city. bought a few games for it also. some even still had the overlay for the controller.
all the games were bad. all of them. I bought like 10 games or so and they all sucked. My collection initially focused on collecting consoles and the “best” games for each which would progress to just trying to get as close to complete collections as possible. With the Jaguar I didn’t even bother after those 10 games. I had more games for the 3DO and PC-i compared to the Jaguar. Plus Jaguar stuff was just hard to find and I kinda figured that people didn’t bother trading them in or trying to resell them but because they sucked so much I bet you most people just tossed them.
Did you ever play with the audio visualiser? I believe it was built in with the CD-ROM drive? What about Tempest 2000?
I haven’t messed around with the Audio Visualizer but I do have Tempest 2000 and honestly it gives me a headache. the UI is absolutely dreadful and it’s constantly in your face with exploding text that takes up the entire screen. Playing the Jaguar for too long is like playing the Virtual Boy for too long. you’ll end up being bored with headache.
Nope
I never got a Jaguar despite being a signed up Atari fan boy at the time. The hardware was ridiculously complex which made ports to it a hard sell and Atari just didn’t have the first party exclusive clout needed to sustain a console at launch.
I do wish I’d had a chance to play with some of Jeff Minter’s creations on it though. Apparently there was a nice audio visualiser that built on the trip-a-tron from the ST days as well as some reboots of classic arcade games like Tempest 2000.
I like Jaguar but you have to bring a lot of patience since games usually take a lot of time to get into, emulation hasn’t really been perfected, and the unique controller is a barrier to the full experience in some of its better games.
Tempest 2000 (9/10) remains super fun. But there are also versions to play on other systems that are arguably better.
Aliens vs. Predator (8/10 but very subjective) is a truly unique and fun game but has a HIGH barrier to entry with pacing and framerate issues. Like the best retro games, they really did plan around the framerate to turn it into an advantage - literally turning around to check if you’re being followed while playing in a dark room is terrifying because of the slideshow reveal - but a gamer in 2025 probably can’t connect with that and will just see “bad framerate.” You need to commit a few hours to get into that zone if you want to try it. The numpad overlays customized to each human/alien/predator style help a lot.
Super Burnout (6/10) was a fun racer but could have been done on SNES.
Rayman (9/10) of course is great, if you want to play the first release originally on Jaguar, but naturally the game has been released everywhere.
Raiden (8/10) is very good, but also not exclusive.
Fight For Life (1/10) if you want to experience the biggest Jaguar disappointment, after it being hyped up as from a guy who was on the Virtua Fighter team.
Kasumi Ninja and Ultra Vortek (both 5/10) if you want to see how Atari hoped to stay relevant against Mortal Kombat.
Cybermorph (6/10) to see what the pack-in game was like. But it’s mostly empty exploration and was more meant to demonstrate Jaguar can do 3D art a time it was trying to hype itself as a “64-bit” system.
Iron Soldier (7/10) only if you can play with a real controller and have the numpad overlay.
