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Atari Jaguar is FAR from the best console..


Tommywilley84

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4 hours ago, alucardX said:

Personally I always viewed this as being on par with the way the Genesis controller was. They came with three "fire button" configurations and offered the six button configuration as an option. I seemed to me like Atari did the same thing possibly viewing it at the time as acceptable since Sega had gotten away with it.

But the Genesis 3 button pad was designed for a system launched on 1988. By late 1993 it just was bad design to not have 6 action buttons. I mean, didnt Atari know about Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat!

Besides that, i hated the dpan on the Jaguar controller. To me it feels stiff and cumberstone... after playing so much with the Genesis 6 button pad and its so comfortable dpad, the Jags just didnt feel good to me.

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5 hours ago, Sauron said:

It's more likely they didn't see the need (or want the expense) to change the design, considering the controller was copied from their previous STE controller, which had been designed a few years earlier. Of course, Atari should've realized at that time that certain popular genres of the time (most notably fighters) often required more than three buttons.

 

The people making the big decisions at Atari obviously didn't have the best idea of how the gaming market really worked. If Sega did it maybe that was good enough for them? This was just my impression. You make a good point about them possibly not wanting added expense as well.

 

Who needs more than three trigger buttons anyway when your controller is 64 fracking bit? If you have three trigger buttons, and they have six, but yours is 64-bit, and theirs is 16-bit...do the math!!! 64-bit controllers rule! If you have a team tap you have.....do the math do the math....256-bit worth of controllers. No one can touch that!

 

There clearly was not a lot of good decision making being done at Atari. All of this aside I didn't find the controller to be bad. I still really like it and it does the job. As I'm playing games it doesn't get in my way and I don't have to think about how I'm using it. The only concern is a game that poorly utilizes the number buttons. I blame that on game design and not on the controller.

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5 hours ago, sd32 said:

But the Genesis 3 button pad was designed for a system launched on 1988. By late 1993 it just was bad design to not have 6 action buttons. I mean, didnt Atari know about Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat!

Besides that, i hated the dpan on the Jaguar controller. To me it feels stiff and cumberstone... after playing so much with the Genesis 6 button pad and its so comfortable dpad, the Jags just didnt feel good to me.

Its a good a pad for 3D action sims the Jaguar was going for.

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9 hours ago, Sauron said:

It's more likely they didn't see the need (or want the expense) to change the design, considering the controller was copied from their previous STE controller, which had been designed a few years earlier. Of course, Atari should've realized at that time that certain popular genres of the time (most notably fighters) often required more than three buttons.

 

This is an excellent point, I forget that pad was originally an STE pad. That also helps explain the keypad that is mostly only useful with computer ports. When you think about it, it now even seems more of a foolish decision to base the controller off an outdated computer controller.

6 hours ago, sd32 said:

But the Genesis 3 button pad was designed for a system launched on 1988. By late 1993 it just was bad design to not have 6 action buttons. I mean, didnt Atari know about Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat!

Exactly, not a fair comparison especially considering the Genesis/MD already had a 6-button pad by the time the Jag was released. Even the ill-fated CDi offered 4 action buttons! I could see the STE pad being used during the early dev days, but the fact nobody woke up and thought to make the Pro controller until the Jag was already a laughing stock makes no sense. But hey, what else would we expect from Atari during that time?

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49 minutes ago, madman said:

Even the ill-fated CDi offered 4 action buttons!

When I was making a modified wireless CDi gamepad (i use sega 3 button gamepad case for this), i see that Philips CDi console has only two action button. Action button A and B, and buton C just means A+B. There is one with 4 buttons, but not with 4 "action buttons" i think button 4 is for autofire or something. So, like Sega Master gamepad, I would also put CDi controlers in category 2 button gamepad.

Edited by Rugar
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11 minutes ago, Rugar said:

When I was making a modified wireless CDi gamepad (i use sega 3 button gamepad case for this), i see that Philips CDi console has only two action button. Action button A and B, and buton C just means A+B. There is one with 4 buttons, but not with 4 "action buttons" i think button 4 is for autofire or something. So, like Sega Master gamepad, I would also put CDi controlers in category 2 button gamepad.

Ironically the 3 button pad for the CDI looks much better quality than that  with 4. ;-)

Edited by agradeneu
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12 hours ago, Sauron said:

It's more likely they didn't see the need (or want the expense) to change the design, considering the controller was copied from their previous STE controller, which had been designed a few years earlier. Of course, Atari should've realized at that time that certain popular genres of the time (most notably fighters) often required more than three buttons.

 

Ahhh, so it was the STE controller I might of been thinking of. 

 

Had vague concept it was from a failed Atari computer, thought it was Falcon, but should of been thinking STE. 

 

Thanks. 

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  • 2 months later...
On 5/27/2020 at 10:43 AM, Warmsignal said:

Only the most skilled of racing game enthusiasts can master those turns at 6 frames per second. I think I read somewhere, that the game only take your control input once per frame. You just gotta know how to wrestle that d-pad into submission. A turn is not a simple matter of press the corresponding direction, it's left-right-left-right-left-right-left. You gotta have ninja skill.

Is that on the cartridge itself? because i been playing it online via retrogames.cc and it plays incredibly smooth and fast. even placed first on several tracks. it doesn't work on my virutal jag emulator though so online is the only way i can try out the game. from what i've read people say about it, i don't see it- its actually very easy to control the car and the game has no slow downs. 

 

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On 6/11/2020 at 5:21 AM, Rugar said:

When I was making a modified wireless CDi gamepad (i use sega 3 button gamepad case for this), i see that Philips CDi console has only two action button. Action button A and B, and buton C just means A+B. There is one with 4 buttons, but not with 4 "action buttons" i think button 4 is for autofire or something. So, like Sega Master gamepad, I would also put CDi controlers in category 2 button gamepad.

I stand corrected, I've never actually played a CDi game (to the extent one can "play" a CDi "game") so I had no idea. Still, the argument stands that 3-buttons plus a keypad was not the smartest move at the time. The Pro controller should've been the ONLY Jag controller.

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Late to the party but I always assumed the keypad was there for first person shooters which were the big 3D genre of that time, and since most of them used a mixture of 3D and 2D back then, the Jaguar was a good fit for them. Before Halo dared to limit the player to hold only two weapons, scrolling between weapons was a chore in most shooters.

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2 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

Late to the party but I always assumed the keypad was there for first person shooters which were the big 3D genre of that time, and since most of them used a mixture of 3D and 2D back then, the Jaguar was a good fit for them. Before Halo dared to limit the player to hold only two weapons, scrolling between weapons was a chore in most shooters.

Keypad was there as Atari wanted to get more complex simulation games like Falcon, Gunship 2000 etc converted to the Jaguar. 

 

These required a lot of keyboard controls. 

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