Is the Jaguar really that bad?

[groundbeef]

I owned a Jaguar. I will say it is on the bottom end of consoles. The controller was a janky mess. The games were below average. It was better than the Philips CD-i though. Alien Vs predator was a little fun.

 

[Bomberman]

Nah, its open source. If I had the money I would buy one for Tempest 2000, Rayman, and maybe AVP

Its a shame it never took off and sunk Atari. Would have been cool to see Atari stay in the game for the sixth gen. Atari had the rights to Gauntlet. Seeing Gauntlet Legends with a proper sequel in addition to an expansion pack would be a sight to behold.

Not that I am an Atari fan though. I have a hard time getting into NES games... Atari would be ancient for me. Heck even SNES/Genesis games kick my ass although I have admiration for their art.

 

[regretro]

They called this 64-Bit! More like a 32-Bit computer emulating 16-Bit games.

This has always been a scam. You only really need the 64 bits when your 32 bits run out of address space. The maximum space addressable using a 32 bit wide address is 2³² = 4294967296 bytes, or 4 GiB. The Nintendo 64 with a RAM expander had all of, drumroll... 4 MiB RAM. That's off by a factor of 1000.

Okay, so there is a little bit more than that to it, but essentially, we were scammed. :P

 

[OpenVMS]

"WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!"

The TV commercials at the time told you everything. They thought just throwing around the "64 bit" was enough to win everyone over, even if the games were horrible. Atari, by this point, was fat and lazy and they did little to encourage 3rd party developers. They just assumed those "extra 32 bits" would do all the work for them.

Unfortunately, the bit precision of the game platform doesn't translate to the fun, which ultimately is what people buy consoles for. If one spends an hour with the various Atari Jaguar titles, you'll see the problem almost immediately.

The fact anyone at Atari played Atari Karts and thought it was in any way a substitution for Mario Kart shows the level of self-delusion at play over there.

 

[Aisf]

I do agree they are bad, but they're also very expensive, I went to a game shop once and they actually had an Atari Jaguar out (I wonder if anyone actually bought it lol)

 

[BrawlMan]

This console is horrible. The few good games aren't worth it as a whole, or stick with emulation.

 

[cjl8336 cjl8336]

people complaining about the giant original xbox pad never had to use the jaguar slab controller

Post automatically merged: Feb 8, 2026

I made a shitty photo edit - that big ass tablet shaped controller made me think of charlton heston as moses - forgot to change the canvas size though

 

[stealthRUSH stealthRUSH]

 

[Zerpina]

people complaining about the giant original xbox pad never had to use the jaguar slab controller

Post automatically merged: Feb 8, 2026

I made a shitty photo edit - that big ass tablet shaped controller made me think of charlton heston as moses - forgot to change the canvas size though
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Ya know.... I saw this and thought about redoing it myself, but no...
Why mess with perfection?

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

No, the Jaguar was great.

It just launched with the weakest possible line-up and didn't get a single good game until everyone's minds were already made up about it — but it had some of the best FPSs ever seen on a console, including the definitive versions of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.

 

[Zerpina]

No, the Jaguar was great.

It just launched with the weakest possible line-up and didn't get a single good game until everyone's minds were already made up about it — but it had some of the best FPSs ever seen on a console, including the definitive versions of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.

Don't make me make you play the Zelda CD-i games...

And fair about Wolfenstein and DOOM

 

[ArchienineZXAdventArchienineZXAdvent's icon]

I think that the hardware was pretty rough to work with but the homebrew scene made nice things with it

 

[Lena CE]

It is a pretty irredeemable system. Bad release timing, bad architecture, mediocre-at-best controller and while is has a couple alright games the best claims to fame that it has are things like "good version of Doom on console" when the PS1 would arguably get the better Doom game just a year later anyways. Some homebrewers have some some cool stuff, but it is cool stuff that is way harder to do that still results in a game that is worse than what would be possible on any contemporary machine. There is no real reason to defend it outside of it being a novelty machine in 2026. There was no value proposition, no good marketing, no interesting gimmick at the time. You would have been insane to want one in the 90s over anything else.

It got 99 problems and Atari was all of them.

You have more problems than the Jaguar has games

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

Don't make me make you play the Zelda CD-i games...
View attachment 213869
And fair about Wolfenstein and DOOM

Don't make me make you play the R-Zone.

(See? I can be evil, too >:D).

 

[Zerpina]

Don't make me make you play the R-Zone.

(See? I can be evil, too >:D).

Implying I have never played one of Tiger's awful handhelds strapped to my face

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

Implying I have never played one of Tiger's awful handhelds strapped to my face
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[Zerpina]

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

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[Zerpina]

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

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[Zerpina]

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

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[Zerpina]

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

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[extermist]

AvP is pretty rad, but since most of the other games got ported to other systems there's less of a reason to have it.
But hey, it's got a good Doom port.