Jaguar

Got a chance to play a bunch of Atari Jaguar games I'd been hoping to try...

• Atari Karts: Pretty good! Lacking the charm of Mario Kart, but it's still a fun racer.
  
• Defender 2000: Seems like a safe update to Defender, though it's still frickin' hard, and I can't help but feel that the sprite for the player's ship is too big.
  
• Fight For Life: The makings of a good fighting game are in there somewhere, beneath the ugly textures, silly animations, and misguided camera angles.
  
• Hyper Force: Big sprites, decent art, slow but solid gameplay... So what's wrong here? No character. The animation is so stiff that the game just feels kinda cheap.
  
• I-War: Straightforward 3D vehicle shooter. Decent graphics, bearable slowdown, engaging gameplay, albeit in smallish arenas. Nothing mind-blowing, but there's fun to be had here.
  
• Missile Command 3D: Sweet update to the classic with some really interesting variations on the gameplay. Definitely worth checking out.
  
• NBA Jam TE: Great arcade port.
  
• Phase Zero: Very pretty for its time, shows what can be done with voxels on the Jaguar hardware. I'd love to see a complete game on that engine.
  
• Pinball Fantasies: Standard pinball game; nothing special.
  
• Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure: I've always liked this game, and the Jaguar seems to have one of the best ports of it.
  
• Power Drive Rally: Not quite as much fun as Neo Drift Out, but still a really good top-down racing game.
  
• Ruiner Pinball: Some pretty interesting dynamics here (double tables, sprite scaling), but they're woefully underused and in the end it's not much more than just another decent pinball game.
  
• White Men Can't Jump: Kinda slow, bad camera angle... But there's potential here, as it's reminiscent of Street Hoop on Neo Geo.
  
• Zero 5: Fun, fast, frenetic, and frustrating as hell. This new twist on the shoot-'em-up genre is a gorgeous game; a real showpiece for the Jaguar.