I bought an Atari Jaguar. WHY NOW? And how does it play?

hey guys metal Jesus here now I think a lot of people assume that I already have every gaming console and computer known to man and I've been very lucky over the years to build up an awesome game collection that I can be very proud of but the truth is actually I don't own every game console I think it's almost impossible to do so but some people may not realize is that early on in my youtube career I reached out to local retro gaming stores in the Seattle area to borrow some of their inventory and actually an early one that let me do that was my buddy Emilio who is running a retro gaming store and he let me borrow the Atari Jaguar in a stack of games and over eight years ago I made this video and as you can see I'm very baby-faced and very innocent to the youtube ways but this was a really fun video to do at the time but at the end of it I gave it back to me leo and went on my merry way and never really thought about the atari jaguar after that and the truth is i actually walked away from the atari jaguar fairly impressed i liked it more than i expected to it's just that the library was pretty weak fast-forward over eight years and I went to the Portland retro gaming expo and I was stunned to see how many people were interested in collecting for the Atari Jaguar and also how many home brews and original games were being published for that system right now like in 2019 I was actually really blown away by it and so I got to thinking I mean I was like is now the time to collect for the Atari Jaguar and I kind of put my feelers out there and sure enough Cody who owns pink gorilla with Kelsey actually picked up at the show a box Jaguar to sell me so that's what you see in front of you right here this is my box atari jaguar and i'm gonna unbox it here and kind of show you basically kind of give you an update as to what it's like to collect for the atari jaguar today because things definitely have changed and i have to say my initial impressions of how the atari jaguar looks its design is exactly the same as was when I first saw it all those years ago it's got a really cool sleek design to it if you pick up the console and take a look at its profile well the first thing you notice is that it's actually really light but the other thing is that it looks really sleek again I love the design of the Jaguar you'll notice on the front of it that there is a power button as well as two ports for the joystick and then you swing around to the back and there is a place for power and then there's this long slot right here which actually I'm gonna get into later because that's actually really handy for modern gamers but by default my Jaguar came in the box with RF so those young uns out there watching this video may not know or remember what RF is and that's the old coax style that you would plug into the back of CRT televisions and you know actually to test it out I tried it and the games look fantastic on an old-school television because that's what it was designed for but let's be honest most people don't have one of these sitting in their gaming room anymore and so one of the first things that I did was I went on eBay and bought a third-party s-video cable and that's actually what plugs into that slot right there so I think they call that a monitor port and the reason why I did s-video is because I have the retro tank which is the two times upscaler and it also has smoothing and I'm going to show you smoothing both on and off in some of the games and let you see the difference but first we need to talk about the Atari Jaguar gamepad you know at first glance that's a pretty weird-looking controller right you look at it here just like what the heck is going on it looks so old-school but I got to be honest with you it's actually pretty comfortable you hold it on its sides and then it has those three buttons right there but then it has this d-pad over on the left now I think one of the biggest critiques of this is that the d-pad is very shallow more shallow than I think most modern controllers and so that is one of the odd things about it but it's completely playable it works fine in the games you also have those buttons in the middle of the controller almost like a telephone but in my experience almost all of the games just ignore those there are a couple where you need to push to select either one or two player or something like that but for the most part you just ignore but again the controller is light and very comfortable surprisingly so so let's go ahead and get to the reason why I decided to pick one up today and that of course is the video games and again going to Portland and seeing how many people were creating awesome brand-new Atari Jaguar games blew my mind and I'm going to show you a bunch of those so I'm gonna start off with speedball - brutal deluxe and check out that awesome custom read cartridge is beautiful and you'll notice that most of the games that I bought this weekend come complete in box which again is amazing for home brews and they also come with full-color manuals and sometimes other goodies as well now speedball 2 is a futuristic extreme sports game that was originally programmed by the bitmap brothers but is being brought over to the Jaguar by Atari H com [Music] as you can see by the gameplay footage it's a mix of handball and also ice hockey but with a cyberpunk attitude now this game was originally released on the Atari ST and it was quite popular but it was ported to other systems because I remember playing it on the Commodore 64 but now it's being brought to the Jaguar and what's interesting is that it's one of the largest capacity cartridges made for this system it actually clocks in at 6 megabytes when most other Jaguar cartridges are around 2 to 4 megabytes max it's funny because people will ask me what kind of sports games do I like and I always have to say these are the kind of sports games that I do like I don't know why it's something about the futuristic aspect of it I always definitely lean towards speed ball - Tony Hawk and SSX next up is fantasy world dizzy so as you can see here this is a 2d platformer / puzzle game now this one originally came out on the Amiga and the Atari ST computers but it's been again brought over to the Jaguar and like speed ball - I am digging the green cartridge I love how they do that I'm new to playing this game I didn't play it on computers back in the day and the thing I knows immediately is that there is a heavy emphasis on puzzles and thinking your way through these levels for instance you pick up objects throughout the level and store them in your inventory until you meet something that requires it early on here you'll see that I needed water to get past a fire or you'll give a piece of bread to a rat that's blocking your path etc I also noticed that this is slower paced than most platformers that you would play probably on the Super Nintendo but again it's designed to let you think through it a little bit and then I mentioned that I'm using the retro tank upscaler with the s-video cable and I wanted to show you the difference with smoothing turned on and turn off so here is smoothing turned off so basically the retro tank is simply just line doubling the original signal - I believe 480p and then I can turn the smoothing on and I have to say that this is one of the best cases for using smoothing you know with the retro tank in my opinion I think I think a lot of these games actually look a little bit better with that smoothing turned on and I do want to mention that if you like these type of games this is technically the second dizzi release on the Jaguar it's fun but it's also really challenging here's a game I'd never heard of before and that is soccer kid and then it comes with a bonus game called frog feast and this is published by songbird productions and as you can see here it comes on a clear cartridge which is pretty cool so this is another game that was originally released on the Amiga but I did some research and I guess it came to the Super Nintendo as a game called The Adventures of kid cleats and I was surprised to learn that this game is kind of expensive nowadays especially if you try to get a complete and box copy and the premise of this game is kind of interesting so it's about soccer or football if you are from the rest of the world but basically the World Cup is shattered and then spread across the globe and in you control the soccer kid who uses his platforming skills as well as soccer skills to go through the different levels and try to find the pieces and the game is pretty big too at over 20 stages and each one of those has hidden secrets to discover within them and then you're gonna be traveling all around the world to try to find those pieces of the World Cup and like the previous game I want to show you the difference between using the retro tinks smoothing on or off so up to this point I've had it on which I again really like but here is it with it off but for some reason and maybe you can explain it to me down in the comments below but I really like the smoothing on the Jaguar turned on I just think it looks better and as you can see the game is really polished and a lot of fun it's also got some serious challenge too and then the other bonus game on the cartridge is called frog feast now this immediately remind me of another Atari 2600 game called frogs and flies and of course if you had it in television well it was called frog bog and in this game you control a frog that can from one lily pad to the other trying to snag flies while in flight with your tongue now the gimmick with this game is that once you're launched you can't actually control your flight all you can do is hit the button to stick out your tongue and hopefully catch a fly so this game is all about timing now I get it this game actually looks pretty simple and kind of dumb but trust me it's actually surprisingly fun here's another game I picked up it's called protector special edition and as you see here it also comes on a clear cartridge obviously this is a defender clone but originally it was released by Bethesda yes that Bethesda back in 1999 for the original and Jaguar but this is a special edition that adds a bunch of tweaks to the enemies it also changes the levels a little bit graphics and difficulty and I have to say it plays really well I would consider myself a decent defender fan I think I played it a lot more as a kid than I did really growing up but man this was just a throwback to the classic game but again just updated for the Jaguar if you have a played defender before it's really easy you basically are in that spaceship right there and you're trying to take out waves of enemies as they try to kidnap humans that are on the ground and every once in a while though look cry out for help and so you have to zoom over there shoot the enemy and then try to pick them up before they crash to the ground and as you can see here it runs really smooth at a solid 60 frames per second it's a great-looking updated version of defender again on the Jaguar [Music] here's a game that's gonna be familiar to a lot of people now this defender of the crown and that's because it is a classic cinema where game well that came out on a bunch of different systems I originally played this on the Commodore 64 but it's cool to see it show up on the Jaguar something that I didn't expect to see when I turn this on was support at the beginning here for either using the gamepad or in Atari ST / Amiga Mouse that's pretty cool defender of the crown plays a little bit like risk where you're trying to gain and control territory on a world map but then what's cool about it is that you'll be playing minigames during the turns for instance during a turn you'll have the ability to say take on an army and a one to one battle there where your stats and also how many men in your army and what units you have is definitely going to be key at other times you might be sword fighting in a castle to say take control of an enemy land or you might be rescuing a princess but the game is famous for its jousting and this is it I wish I was better at it I don't know why I suck at the jousting so badly I think I need to practice at the time this game and also other cinema where games blew people away with their amazing colorful graphics and this is definitely no exception I think it looks really good on the Jaguar here's another game that a lot of you are going to be familiar with that of course is total carnage which originally was a twin stick shooter in arcades and also on other home consoles and as most of you know it was the follow-up to the much-loved Smash TV so what do I think of the Jaguar port well I think it's it's okay here's the deal it's hard to play a true twin stick shooter on this Atari gamepad I mean you don't have to thumb sticks what they did to compensate for that on a lot of these home ports is basically you run around with a d-pad but then the moment that you start firing and you hold down that button you'll strafe and that works pretty good but again it's not it's not the same I do like that they throw lots and lots of enemies at you I mean sometimes it's even overwhelming but it is good fun and as you can see here the graphics are good I mean the sprites are nice and big and well animated but I do feel like the movement is not quite as smooth as I would have liked and here we have reboot erodes reboot toroids that's a weird name but as you can see by the gameplay footage here this is yet another asteroids clone which obviously there were a lot of back in the day but this is a new version of that with some really cool tweaks this kind of reminds me of a mix of classic asteroids but with a little bit of geometry wars in there especially in the graphics department I mean as you can see they're a bit more colorful and a little bit more whimsical than the original asteroids but the feel of the game is exactly like you remember in the arcades especially that spaceship physics about how it slides around almost like an ice field but this game has a bunch of weapon upgrades as you play which keeps things fresh it's also a big game at over 80 unique levels and then it has an additional 20 bonus levels and here is cyber morph but this is not a homebrew this is actually an original atari jaguar release that i just happen to also pick up at portland and as you can see here this is very different than the other games in this video the atari jaguar was advertised as a 64-bit console and so it needed to have something that would be perhaps more impressive than say starfox on the Super Nintendo and I believe it's my opinion that this game was designed to be like that at least to show off the power of it you know playing it today it's easy to see all the faults of a game like this obviously it has an extremely low framerate I mean it's painfully slow it makes the game too difficult or I should say more difficult than it needs to be but the game does have its fans and I think if you would play this back in a day it would have seemed impressive for the time it's just unfortunate that plane and now today it's kind of frustrating with that low polygon count and also the the slow draw in so it's not a great game but it's worth a look so that's a quick look at the Atari Jaguar the latest game console to be added to my game room and somewhat a bit of a surprise again I didn't know if I would ever need or want one but now that I've played a bunch of these brand new games for it yeah it's it's pretty cool you know you guys know me see I don't have a problem with some of the funkier you know game systems out there sometimes there's a lot of joy to be found with something that's a little bit offbeat and I think it's safe to say that the Atari Jaguar is definitely kind of offbeat but I would love to know down the comments what you think of the Atari Jaguar is that a game system that you have in your collection already is it something that you're looking at I would love to know all right guys thank you very much for watching thank you for subscribing and take care [Music]

Channel: MetalJesusRocks

Views: 432,998

Rating: 4.8120937 out of 5

Keywords: metal jesus rocks, metaljesusrocks, metal, jesus, console, system, review, gameplay, video, game, cartridge, reviews, history, retro, retrospective, gaming, collection, collector, Atari Jaguar, Homebrew, Ports, Hacks, AtariAge, Songbird, atari jaguar (video game platform), retro gaming, atari panther, atari jaguar games, atari history, atari jaguar review, atari jaguar history, jaguar review, gaming history, atari jaguar story, the angry video game nerd

Id: IK0V0d7d3sQ

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/InfiniteComboReviews]

I really wish I had even half of those consoles, though to be fair. I doubt I'd play them. I've barely played my Saturn or Dreamcast since I got them.

[u/Aftermath604]

I can't imagine getting a Jaguar. I don't even have time to play the consoles I have as much as I want to.