Glendale Jaguar Preview
by Robert A. Jung, September 18, 1993

In September 1993, I attended the Southern California Atari Faire in Glendale, California. Though the official release of the Atari Jaguar was still two months away, I was able to join a small group of people and get an early preview of the console, thanks to the influence of John Tarpinian. Leaving behind the non-Jaguar observations, here's what I saw, for the first time...

...Still here? Okay. The rest of this article is Jaguar stuff, and boy there's a lot of it. Even though a Jaguar unit was not available for playing on the floor, I was very fortunate to receive an invitation from Atari's Director of Application Software Bill Rehbock to join a small crowd back to his hotel room and play the Jaguar he had there.

Let me emphasize this point now: The Jaguar exists, the Jaguar does do a lot of incredible things, the Jaguar is ready for production. This was no circuit-board prototype, and there were no Macs and Crays secretly running the games (not demos) I saw. The next person who thinks the entire Jaguar project is a myth is welcome to join the Illuminati.

Before I get to the actual unit/controllers/games themselves, a few more news items of interest:

• Add a third city to the Jaguar '93 rollout! Apparently, just a few days ago, Atari has signed a deal with the "Tandy Superstores" in the Dallas TX area for the Jaguar "test market". I'm not exactly sure who the Superstores are (a subsidiary of Tandy Corp.?), but if what I heard is right, Texas gamers can buy Jags too.

• On the subject of third-party Jaguar developers, the following exchange took place (paraphrased) --

  Observer:	"What would be neat is if Atari can get the big third-party developers to do stuff for the Jaguar."
  Myself:	"That'll happen when people buy Jaguars. If Atari can go to Capcom or Konami or whoever and say, 'Look, we got 5 million Jags in people's hands already--'"
  Bill Rhebock:	(making a "time out" sign) "Hold it, hold it. What makes you think we don't have big-name third-party developers signed up already?"

  That's the closest anyone from Atari would get on the subject. Make of it as you will, though I would still be surprised if the initial list of committed Jaguar developers included a firm on the caliber of Capcom or Konami. I'll be happily surprised if this turns out to be true.

• When will Jaguars be available nationwide? Bob Brodie says the entire January 1994 to March 1994 time period. That's how long it'll take for the Toys 'R Us stores and Electronic Boutiques to get them in stock. In other words, it's seen as a region-by-region progression, and when you will have a Jaguar near you will depend on what part of the country you're in.

• Is there still friction between Atari Corp. and the editors of EGM {Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine}? Bob refused to say anything bad about the folks at EGM, being the diplomat that he is (hey, he put up with me, and that's a pretty big diplomatic task in and of itself *Grin*). He did mention that the editors of EGM did not make it to the Jaguar rollout on August 18th, and a special private showing was held to accomodate the guys at Sendai publishing. One presumes things are well again.

{Crescent Galaxy was renamed and released as Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy. Checkered Flag II became Redline Racing for a while, then settled back and was released as Checkered Flag.}

The Jaguar Unit and Controllers
Looks like all the photos shown right now, especially the ones in the October 1993 issue of Gamepro. The only control on the front of the unit is a power switch -- there's no reset button and no headphone jack. The cartridges were exposed EPROMs, not in cases, but my guess is that they'd be comparable to Super Nintendo cartridges in size. Small, sleek, lots of air vents, the machine looks neat.

The controllers are bigger than the ones for the SNES {Super Nintendo Entertainment System} and Genesis right now, but they're not very heavy. It's pretty obvious the things are hollow; probably about the same weight and width of a standard Sega Genesis controller. On the top of the controller is the standard 8-way joypad, Option and Pause buttons, and three fire buttons labelled C, B, and A (from left to right, yes). The numeric keypad is below this, and the "bottom" part of the controller that holds the keypad has molded round edges for gripping. The keys are small rubber buttons, comparable to the ones found on the Lynx. As mentioned before, some games will use overlays on the keypads. The overlay I saw was a paper sheet fitted with holes for the buttons, covered with a second, clear plastic sheet that held the first one in place. Small tabs on the plastic sheet fit into small holes on the side of the keypad's recessed area to keep it all still.

Jaguar Games
In no particular order...

Crescent Galaxy. Side-scrolling shooter, for one or two players. As the photos in Gamepro will attest, this game (can) look really nice. It is also clearly the most nearly-finished game of the five I saw in action; a little tweaking of the sounds, a few extraneous touches, and a musical soundtrack are all that are really needed to get this game to the market. At the start of each level, you pick a planet from a map of six or eight, then go in there and shoot everything that moves. At the end of the level, you fight the obligatory large boss, then get a congratulatory message from General Patent (probably with digitized voices, I suspect). Pick another level and kick more butt.

Overall it looks to be decent. Background graphics are universally gorgeous and make great use of color, easily beyond anything on the Genesis or SNES right now. If I can really nitpick at anything, it's that Crescent Galaxy leaves me begging for an even better shooter on the Jag. The Swamp Planet, for instance, is uneven, with an incredibly elegant background and brightly-colored, simple foreground obstacles/enemies; the Cave Planet only featured two levels of parallex scrolling (background -- gorgeous, as mentioned -- and foreground, with an occassionally dropping stalactite). On the other hand, the Space Planet was really eye-popping, with smoothly colored/shaded/animated rocks, ships, dangers, scenery, and everything else. There's a really eye-popping, mind-blowing shooter just begging to be written for the Jaguar, and I hope to see it someday. The guys who did Gradius or Thunderforce IV could have a field day with this...

Tempest 2000. What can I say? It's Tempest. The fans of old video games will cheer, while the young whippersnappers will say "so what?" *Smirk* Options include playing with or without fancy new graphics (wireframes or filled/shaded polygons, a background multicolored warping starfield, stuff like that), but for the most part it's meant to be the original game. The vector graphics of the arcade have been duplicated very well on the Jag, needless to say. This is written by Jeff Minter, the infamous author of Llamatron and Attack of the Mutant Camels (if I am correct). An odd thing is that, when your ship is caught/killed, the game emits an odd screaming sound...

{Read the review. Obviously, much was changed between the preview I saw and the final version. The preview version was not even half-finished, with only the classic Tempest game mode available and a few controls to change the graphics. The final product was -- as Jaguar enthusiasts now know -- much more explosive...}

Cybermorph. This game looked only half-done, but is already impressive. You fly a polygon-generated morphing ship over a "surreal" polygon landscape, rescuing floating pods while blasting enemy ships and staying alive. The landscape is full 3D, meaning you can go in circles and explore, though there is a limit to how high you can go. Your ship is rendered with a passable number of polygons; it's about 150% more detailed than the Arwing from StarFox (during actual game play, at least, since StarFox uses a more complex Arwing model for cinematic sequences), but not as complex as the opening sequence of Silpheed, for example. Your ship "morphs" as you move, growing rudders for sharp banks, and having smaller/larger engine ports as the throttle changes. I was told that Cybermorph will not use texture mapping, that the abstract look of the landscape was deliberate. Still nice.

For the record, Cybermorph had a brief intermission clip with the picture of a woman that quickly rotated and scaled simultaneously.

{Read the review.}

Alien vs. Predator. The second-most visually impressive Jaguar game I saw, second only to Crescent Galaxy. And the game's not even one-third done! Depending on whether you play as the Alien, the Predator, or the Marine, transparent displays will appear on the borders of the screen to give you game status (time, score, item to use, weapons available, etc.). Movement through the tunnels of the space station was smooth, and Gourand shading and other effects are used as objects are scaled to do on-the-fly anti-aliasing (if you're tired of the blocky look of objects in Wolfenstein 3D, this is what you've been waiting for). Static poses of the Marine, the Alien, alien eggs, and the Predator were shown (though the Predator pose was moving continuously through the halls, clearly a quick hack), and Bill said the same effects will be used to make them look clean when scaled close.

{Read the review. The graphics in the final version of Alien vs. Predator was not as fast as those on the preview. This is because the preview only had to move one Predator, while the final game had to move, process, and track up to several hundred characters throughout the space station. All that bookkeeping eats up the processor time.}

Checkered Flag II. The least developed Jaguar game shown, but also one with a lot of potential. At best, the version I played was about 15% complete; it featured a Formula 1 racer that could drive anywhere on the track, all done with filled polygon graphics. On the other hand, the graphics were fast and smooth, and even included roadside obstacles like palm trees and signs (all done with polygons) -- it already looks better than the screen shots of the Sega Genesis version of Virtua Racing that are shown, and one suspects the final game may come close to, or even surpass, the arcade version. You could even (in the version I played) dynamically select your view of the game, fron in-the-cockpit to far-above-and-beyond. I do not mean the four fixed views of Virtua Racing; I mean you smoothly selected a view, as everything moved and scaled around you.

{Smooth-scaling polygon graphics may be common today, but remember, we're talking about 1993. Read the review.}

*Whew*

Anyway, that's everything. I must confess, I did not see anything on the Jaguar that directly blew my socks off. On the other hand, I was only looking at incomplete games and in-progress screen shots, and everything I saw indicates that this machine has a lot of potential.