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JAGUAR, 3DO, AND THE CDI


AtariORdead

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All 3 flopped, but which one looking back was the better console, and which one is the better to go back to now.

 

CDI for me is just a no no, had one for a while and I only just sold it last year. It really does not work as a gaming machine.

 

I honestly thought I would choose the 3DO without hesitation, and if we were back in the 90's that would be the case.

 

However as for now, I actually prefer the JAG.

 

1. The slow loading times and awful FMV games and the 3DO has that early 3d look similar to Saturn and PS1 that has not aged well.

 

2. Cartridges, funny ereally because at the time carts were being left behind but in terms of retro gaming Carts just seem so much more immediate.

 

3. in terms of pure visulaly eyepleasing in terms of on display, the Jaguar boxes look so much nicer on a shelf.

 

 

 

 

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I would never even consider the CD-i because of such a small gaming library, IIRC, less than the 20 or so the Sega 32X got even. If a third choice is needed, I'd throw in either the 32X or the Commodore CD32 as they were also flops. But the reality is that the Jaguar and 3DO were actually successful comparatively to any of those other 3. But take away all the FMV stuff and non-game software from the 3DO and it has about the same size library as the Jag, if we include the Jag CD and games and all the home-brews as well as carts.

 

All that being said, my Jaguar and 3DO have lived side-by-side since '97, and compliment each other and I have to choose BOTH of them. I don't even own a Saturn or PSX, but I do have older 8/16-bit systems and DC.

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I've never owned a CD32 but would love to have one. I think the 3DO was better despite absolutely loving the Jaguar but the price was also dramatically different so that's not much of a shocker. CD-i was a joke. With that said, I don't own a 3DO but I do own a Jag... not sure what would give that away though... ;).

 

Someone send me their shitty CD32! :D

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I have favorite games on all 3 systems, but the Jaguar is my favorite of them.

 

The CDi is interesting because Phillips actually did a decent job on their FMV games. Burn Cycle, Voyeur, and Lost Ride are pretty good imo, and Thunder in Paradise is pretty decent too with the game gun (which actually works on modern displays). There are some others like 7th guest, lost eden and the readysoft games that some people seem to like.

Edited by Willard
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Nothing against the CD-i (or any of the systems mentioned) in itself, some of that stuff is really cool (except lack of re-playability, unless you wait for years until you forget), It lacks arcade and action games, real-time stuff. All the titles mentioned hail back to vintage text adventures or 'Choose your Own Adventure' books in the sense of limited choice, no open 3D worlds to explore in real-time. It's not a serious console, it's a party/casual user type system for people that would rather curl up with a novel than play Doom or Halo, but decide they want a bit of visual stimulation for a change. Or, they are movie addicts looking for something just slightly more interactive for a change.

 

That being said, if I ever come across a CD-i with a few good titles in the wild, i'd definitely pick it up as occasionally i myself get tired of video games and like to curl up with a book or movie myself. And CD-i could be a third alternative. But the games you mentioned at the end i can get on my 3DO or already have on my jag. And as for video CD movies, i have a DVD player and my Dreamcast to play those on. So I'm in no hurry to go searching or spend a premium on a CD-i. I would like to try out Burn Cycle some day, I've always heard good things, but that's the only title that ever really interested me back in the day.

Edited by Gunstar
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I think the 3DO may be confirmation that PC game companies were forcing their titles to suck on home consoles. Doom is windowed and slow when the 3DO could have done it full screen, full speed, NO PROBLEM! There are games like Poed with aiming, jumping AND 3D textures at full screen at a good frame rate! So why did Doom have to be in such a reduced form on this system? I know people think I'm a conspiracy theorist for believing that the PC software big boys of the era were withholding and forcing crap on the home consoles, but should the 32X have had a better Doom than the 3DO?

 

Samurai Showdown and Super Street Fighter 2 are excellent on the 3DO. If you can get Virtual Cameraman for it, and get through the questions, get ready to be AMAZED!

 

I have all three systems and the Jaguar is my favorite with the 3DO as a very close second. I always choose carts over spinny things as one will certainly die before the other! But, 3DO had more titles and a lot of fun games! It suffered through the FMV era of gaming when actors thought that the future of games would be digitized footage mixed with gameplay and we all had to suffer with it! If you can find the gems out of the poo, it's a great system! Get the FZ-10 unless you eventually want problems and slow loading. The controllers were usually good, although a few stiff pads game out of the bunch. They daisy chained and that was cute.

 

Road Rash, Need for Speed, Doom (meh..) and so many other great games came out for it! Trip Hawkins had us all FREAKING OUT!

 

The CD-i is really fun if you have a VCD collection and like those weird Zelda offshoots and Hotel Mario. The Apprentice is one of the best titles for the system and I highly recommend it!! The Zelda games can be fun if you can stand the really funky animation! Finally Princess Zelda can be the hero (pre-Smash Bro.)!!

Edited by Papa
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3. in terms of pure visulaly eyepleasing in terms of on display, the Jaguar boxes look so much nicer on a shelf.

This pretty much sums up Jag collectors. Games that look nice on the shelf, but are generally shit to play.

 

If you like collecting stamps, the Jaguar is for you. If you like playing fun games, move on to another system.

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My preference for games is arcade pick up and play stuff. I also like early 3d graphics, but am not that interested in FMV based games.

With that in mind, the CDI is out. The game library does not compare to the others in terms of what I like.

The 3DO and Jaguar are about even for me.

On the 3DO, the crystal dynamics games have held up well for the era and I get enjoyment out of them. Road Rash and Need for Speed are quite good as well. I am also a fan of the FZ-1's design and the design of the controller.

Interestingly enough, I was excited to get a jag (in the 21st century, after experiencing 3do) because, based on the cartridge medium, I knew I would not have to wade through FMV games and figured things would be easier to pick up and play. But by golly, due to the limited production values, small development teams, tight deadlines for creating software, lack of support/tools from atari, etc, there are many Jaguar games that honestly seem really subpar or just not fun. There are several standout quality titles and I find the system fascinating, but it is not clear to me that the jaguar's game library beats the 3dos.

If it were the early 90s, cost of the systems aside, I definitely would have gone with the 3do. I played one as a kid back in 93 and crash n burn blew my little kid mind. Nothing about the jaguar could have steered me away from wanting that game at the time.

Edited by sirlynxalot
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This pretty much sums up Jag collectors. Games that look nice on the shelf, but are generally shit to play.

 

If you like collecting stamps, the Jaguar is for you. If you like playing fun games, move on to another system.

 

The Jaguar is shit, the games are shit.

 

Why are you here again?

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The CD-i is really fun if you have a VCD collection and like those weird Zelda offshoots and Hotel Mario. The Apprentice is one of the best titles for the system and I highly recommend it!! The Zelda games can be fun if you can stand the really funky animation! Finally Princess Zelda can be the hero (pre-Smash Bro.)!!

 

I agree on Hotel Mario, it was pretty cool to see the characters from Super Mario World in an arcade style game. There were some pretty cool levels in that game, like the haunted hotel where king boo chases you around. Maybe I'm a little bias though because Super Mario World is one of my favorite games! I really wish Super Mario's Wacky Worlds had been finished.

 

@ Gunstar, I don't really know about likening the CDi's FMV games to virtual novels or choose your own adventure .etc, Thunder In Paradise is an arcade shooter like Area 51 with enemies that are randomly placed each time, and a 360 degree shooting stage that's actually pretty decent (really hard though). The Lost Ride features randomly generated mazes and is more interactive than rail shooters like Panzer Dragoon 1-2 because you can choose the paths you want to go down as you collect objects and defeat bosses to complete the level. It's a shame it's a little glitchy due to the seamless branching technology.

 

The two that come closest would be burn cycle and voyeur. I suppose I get some of your points, but at the same time the reason why I find good FMV games intriguing is because so many aren't, and playing a different kind of game is nice once in awhile. Burn Cycle mixes things up a little with sub-games and arcade shooting sequences, and there are several "Versions" of events in voyeur with many ways to win or lose. They are very good examples of a pretty poorly represented genre. And they aren't FMV games modeled after traditional adventure games like snow job on the 3DO or identical every time you play them like Crime Patrol.

 

There are also some other real time games on the system. Steel Machine, an enhanced Pac Panic, Mutant Rampage, Inca, Dimo's Quest, Zenith, Plunderball, Atlantis, Alice .etc are pretty good.

 

I did find that CDi games are generally less polished than you'd expect, like the QA department at phillips had no real standards, which is a bit of a shame though. And a lot of games are truly awful.

Edited by Willard
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The Jaguar is shit, the games are shit.

 

Why are you here again?

As I said elsewhere on here, I appreciate the Jag for what it is. Not for what it could've been. Not to speculate about what Atari could've done to make the Jag successful. Not to say the Jag was better than every other system of the time. And I certainly don't defend it saying the games look great on a shelf or that the cart port was accessible because it didn't have a dust cover. I have a large Jag collection and I enjoy parts of it, but I'm certainly not under the delusion that it's the most underrated system ever or that it's better than the Neo Geo.

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which one looking back was the better console, and which one is the better to go back to now.

 

I'll come right out and admit, I'm a closet fan of the 3DO. It's cheaper to collect for than the Jaguar, and the original library is far superior in every way. On top of that, despite the numbers saying otherwise, it is in every demonstrable way a more powerful (or at least better programmed for) system. The 3d games are faster, smoother, better looking. The 2d is higher res, and the FMV is higher res as well. The top few good FMV games are an actual fun bunch of throwbacks that are worth a play through. There are a handful of good 3d games on the Jag, and there are closer to 15-20 on the 3DO. They all look better and play faster, with a few exceptions of lazy programming (doom and wolf 3d were lazy shitty ports on the 3DO.)

 

I actually like my Jag more. Its a combination of character and the homebrew scene. But the 3DO really was the first true "next gen" console. Just look at Road Rash, Star Control II, Need For Speed, Space Hulk, PGA Golf 96, Etc. There just isn't anything like it on the Jag.

 

I think at the time the lower price point of the jaguar would have appealed to me, but now it's the exact opposite. The 3DO has more on offer for less. I'd advise someone with a lot of money to collect both, but if I had to recommend just one to someone on a budget i'd say 3DO.

 

That being said I play my Jaguar more and love it for what it is, a system that wasn't done the justice of having a decent library and following until after it was commercially dead in the water. For whatever it was too hard to tap into it's "true" power.

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As I said elsewhere on here, I appreciate the Jag for what it is. Not for what it could've been. Not to speculate about what Atari could've done to make the Jag successful. Not to say the Jag was better than every other system of the time. And I certainly don't defend it saying the games look great on a shelf or that the cart port was accessible because it didn't have a dust cover. I have a large Jag collection and I enjoy parts of it, but I'm certainly not under the delusion that it's the most underrated system ever or that it's better than the Neo Geo.

Oh, Neo Geo, seem to be the holy cow, only the boldest dare to critique! No, actually there is no point in giving it critique since no followers would listen to you, that must be it! If "defending" Jag is a problem, go to Neo-geo.com: there will be no defending only time to worship it as the god of gaming. There you find relief, people enjoying it for what IT IS.

 

The difference between Neo Geo followers and Jag followers (imho) is that Neo Geo DID achieve full potential and faar beyond, while Jag didn't. It's a open wound, never to be healed, the unfairness to the Jag.

 

I looked at Atari Jaguar when it came out. One indie game store i Stockholm had it (the store doesn't exist today), and I thought the cat eyes was really cool. Didn't have the money to pour on a new system, had to stick to my Amiga 600 with cracked floppy disk games for free. Moved on to PC from that. BUT I was curious of the Jag for what it seem to be. The 3DO I remembered loathed me, though I really can't say why... maybe it had no *soul*. "3-D-O" wtf!?

 

I got an Amiga CD32 next to my Neo Geo AES collection as a fun thing to mess around with from time to time, with hombrew cds including hundreds of old Amiga games.

 

To put them in order the Jaguar is by far the best. To me it has around 20 good games or even great games. I showed my Jaguar collection and played some of the games with my friend who is a developer of internet and app games, and he was kind of impressed. He found the non-textured 3d graphics to be charming, an interesting step in the evolution of video gaming he said, and he not once complained on any the games except Ultra Vortek (being kind of spoiled playing 1-on-1 fighters on my Neo Geo). For me even Vortek rock, it is actually a pretty good fighter and I have played lots of them for 1000 and 1000 of hours, believe me.

 

To order them after my bla,. bla... here we go:

 

First: Jaguar, and then Amiga cd32 for the fun of all old-timer games of my early teenage. They both have alot of charm, I mean one being called Jaguar (think cougar) the other Amiga (spanish for friend of female gender). Great, even sexy, names - highly charming. (throw in Ne Geo as well)

 

Last: the rest fifth gen mishmash systems.

 

 

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As I said elsewhere on here, I appreciate the Jag for what it is.

 

And you keep saying what it is is 'shit'. And I can see someone thinking that. I just don't know why they would torture themselves by hanging out somewhere where they felt the main topic was shit.

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And you keep saying what it is is 'shit'. And I can see someone thinking that. I just don't know why they would torture themselves by hanging out somewhere where they felt the main topic was shit.

 

Honestly, I think hating on things is more fun than liking them.

 

How anybody could say the Neo Geo was better than the Jag is beyond me. The Jaguar is obviously superior.

 

I guess the 3DO was better than the Jaguar but the Jaguar would have been better if it had a better library. It was better hardware for less money. Also I like that it had cartridges instead of CD's. And I would like to point out that there was no 3DO "Iron Soldier". At the time there was no other home console game as cool as Iron Soldier.

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Travistouchdown pretty much nailed it with his post.The 3DO's range of software is that i'd personally return to now, as it had the far superior support.

Starfighter, The Horde, Space Hulk, Road Rash, Twisted, Bladeforce, Return Fire, Star Control 2 etc i'd want to return to.
With Jag? i hammered Iron Solider, AVP, Doom, Syndicate, Wolfenstien etc to death at the time, i'd only really be looking to get back into the purity of Tempest 2000, and i'd need to invest in a Jag CD to see what i'd missed 1st time around, let alone the fantastic homebrew stuff that's been done since it's commercial failure.
For myself any system is only as 'good' as the software support it recived and i take this question to mean commercially at retail, rather than what's been done since (i must admit the prospect of playing CJ's ST games to Jaguar along with things like Fallen Angels, puts Jag into a whole new light) and 3DO simply had the numbers in terms of quality Atari could'nt match.
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As I said elsewhere on here, I appreciate the Jag for what it is. Not for what it could've been. Not to speculate about what Atari could've done to make the Jag successful. Not to say the Jag was better than every other system of the time. And I certainly don't defend it saying the games look great on a shelf or that the cart port was accessible because it didn't have a dust cover. I have a large Jag collection and I enjoy parts of it, but I'm certainly not under the delusion that it's the most underrated system ever or that it's better than the Neo Geo.

Apparently you are under all those delusions when it comes to your Neo-Geo though...to each their own.

 

If you want to drown yourself in 2D fighting games, get a Neo-Geo.

Edited by Gunstar
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Apparently you are under all those delusions when it comes to your Neo-Geo though...to each their own.

 

If you want to drown yourself in 2D fighting games, get a Neo-Geo.

I no longer own a Neo (sold my cab) and when I did own one, I didn't have any of the fighting games as I'm not really into those. There are plenty of excellent Neo Geo games that aren't fighters. Metal Slug series, Baseball Stars 2, Puzzle Bobble, Neo Turf Masters, Magical Drop 2/3, Shock Troopers and most of the shooters to name a handful.

 

The Neo Geo being successful isn't a delusion, games were produced for it for 14 years and IMO still stand the test of time even in today's 3D hi-def age.

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There are plenty of excellent Neo Geo games that aren't fighters. Metal Slug series, Baseball Stars 2, Puzzle Bobble, Neo Turf Masters, Magical Drop 2/3, Shock Troopers and most of the shooters to name a handful.

 

The Neo Geo being successful isn't a delusion, games were produced for it for 14 years and IMO still stand the test of time even in today's 3D hi-def age.

 

Co-signed.

 

Power of the NeoGeo is almost timeless. A lot of stunning 2D to be had, without the fisticuffs!

 

It just so happens, that fighters are my fave gaming genre though, so... plenty of stuff on the Neo for me.

 

Plenty of ppl on NG.com who aren't into fighters who have great non-fighter sentiments towards the NeoGeo too.

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From my perspective the 3DO is worth getting for:

 

Crash N Burn, Gex (has save feature not in other versions), Iron Angel: The Return, Mega Race (Best Console Version), Phoenix 3, Shockwave 2, Star Control II, Wolfenstein 3D (My Favorite Console Port). There are a few others that I think are fun if you're forgiving enough like Killing Time, Captain Quazar and Blade Force.

 

The other good games like Battlesport, Bust a Move, Cannon Fodder, The Horde, Need For Speed, Road Rash, (I guess some think Space Hulk and Starblade), Street Fighter 2. Wing Commander 3 can be found on more popular platforms with plenty of other good games so there's no reason to overlook those platforms.

 

I like the Jaguar for games like:

 

Ruiner Pinball, Iron Soldier, Zero 5, Missile Command 3D, Super Burnout, Defender 2000, Tempest 2000, Battlemorph, Alien VS Predator, and Rayman (I think the Jaguar version of Rayman has certain advantages).

 

All in all I can see the 3DO as being the better system of its' time. And it's a better system to be a fan of and contend that it was overlooked and deserved to do better. I agree that it was the first "next-gen" system being the first with some truly large scale games that also featured some impressive graphics that weren't possible on 16-bit platforms of the time.

 

Most of the Jaguar games were pick-up-and-play / arcade style games that may have occasionally looked better than rival platforms but the depth of the gameplay was usually no greater. With that I prefer the Jaguar more, as I like its' exclusives more, and it has more exclusives I like. But I also like the 3DO. I even find myself guilty of buying mutli-platform games on the 3DO when given the chance :P

Edited by Willard
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You could rank them as worth the money at launch. CDI: $699(with DV cart) noway. 3DO: $699 noway. Jag: $250 yes sir. I own all three and the Jag is the only one I bought at launch. With that being said, the library for the 3DO is the best hands down. The Jag has a good amount of great games, but the 3DO has imports and EA too. I had a lot of fun with the CDI. I like the Dragon's Lair type games and it had lots of good FMV and puzzle games. Tetris, Lil Devil, Chaos Control, and International Tennis Open are some good games that have not been mentioned for CDI(only a few more after that though).

 

PS: If you had the Gravis pad for CDI like me, you had the best controller of the three. :evil:

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If you want to drown yourself in 2D fighting games, get a Neo-Geo.

This is about as factually accurate as your "the CD-i only has 20 games" statement earlier in the thread. Please go back under the rock you've been hiding under and spare us from this stupidity.

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