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Between the Sega 32X and Atari Jaguar, which do you feel had the better game library and why?


Leeroy ST

Better library between Sega 32X and Atari Jaguar?  

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  1. 1. Better library between Sega 32X and Atari Jaguar?

    • Atari Jaguar
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    • Sega 32X
      36

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Nope, Val d’Isere is one of my favorites too. Super scaler games were on the outs with the kids at that point. It’s a shame that more people (including myself) didn’t appreciate them - in a lot of ways, they looked much richer and more interesting than polygon games would for years. Just as they reached their peak in the arcades, home ports died out. I would love Outrunners for a home system.

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10 hours ago, Stephen said:

Speaking of Super Burnout (which I definitely find to be a top tier game and fun to play), is there anything on 32X comparable to Val D'Isere Skiing?  I see very little mention of that game, and found it to be fun to play as well as graphically impressive.  I guess that one would be considered a "super scaler" style of game.  It's a shame Phase Zero was not released.  These three examples though all go to prove the point that the Jag shouldn't have been trying to focus on polygon based games because overall it did a very poor job with them.

Val D'Isere Skiing is very much a 16-bit console gen game. It looks like a home port of a super scaler game that shrunk everything and uses pre-rendered frames.

 

Here are a couple SNES games for comparison:

 

 

 

 

 

And then there's stuff like Cliffhanger for Sega-CD:

 

 

 

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Impressive stuff.  I basically went from my Atari 2600 to an 8-bit computer, then nothing until the Jaguar.  I missed out on the NES, SNES, Genesis, etc.  I am seeing more and more why the Jag was looked down on so much.  Given the Genesis, SNES generation coupled with Atari's ludicrous "64-bit Do the Math" promos, it was very underwhelming.  It was pretty neat when I got it, and I was very excited back in 94 to experience it, but yeah.  I can see why it got the historical treatment.  Looking back without the rose coloured glasses, it wasn't that big of a step forward compared to its contemporaries.

 

Nothing like when I got my first Voodoo card on PC.  That was a generational leap.

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I think those videos are a great comparison. The Sega CD could do some impressive scaling, but there are no real games that take advantage of it. BC Racers? Middling to bad, less fun than Game Gear’s Sonic Drift 2. The Batman games and Cliffhanger? They’re great, but they’re basically just minigames. “Afterburner 3”? The first G-Loc looked better on the Genesis.

 

The SNES games don’t begin to compare. They look like Master System games compared to this, which has twice the frame rate AND throws a lot more objects and terrain on the screen:

 


Let’s remember what the great arcade super scaler racing games looked like:

 

 


Yes, these were almost ten years old when the Jaguar’s super scaler games came out, but no home system prior to the Jaguar and the 32X had been able to do anything near this frame rate and complexity except the Amiga.

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1 hour ago, jgkspsx said:

I think those videos are a great comparison. The Sega CD could do some impressive scaling, but there are no real games that take advantage of it. BC Racers? Middling to bad, less fun than Game Gear’s Sonic Drift 2. The Batman games and Cliffhanger? They’re great, but they’re basically just minigames. “Afterburner 3”? The first G-Loc looked better on the Genesis.

 

The SNES games don’t begin to compare. They look like Master System games compared to this, which has twice the frame rate AND throws a lot more objects and terrain on the screen:

 


Let’s remember what the great arcade super scaler racing games looked like:

 

 


Yes, these were almost ten years old when the Jaguar’s super scaler games came out, but no home system prior to the Jaguar and the 32X had been able to do anything near this frame rate and complexity except the Amiga.

 

Games on Sega CD like Soul Star, Thunderhawk, Battlecorps, and RDF Global Conflict make very good use of the ASIC for the entire game.

 

I dont see how the Amiga was any better than the Genesis at super scaler stuff.  Neither one had any inborn ability to do it.

 

Edited by zetastrike
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I’ve never had an Amiga but at Space Harrier at least it blows the Genesis ports away:

 

 

That’s true, I was mostly talking about racing games. I have played a bit of SoulStar but need to spend more time with it and the others. The Jaguar port of SoulStar was shaping up nicely and has recently been mostly finished.

 

 

I really hope that Reboot can negotiate a way to release it.

 

Then again the 32X port of SoulStar probably would have been awesome too. The beta is missing lots of everything but what's there is impressively fast.

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1 hour ago, jgkspsx said:

Yes, these were almost ten years old when the Jaguar’s super scaler games came out, but no home system prior to the Jaguar and the 32X had been able to do anything near this frame rate and complexity except the Amiga.

Why does everyone always forget about the X68000...?

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Here is a side-by-side comparison of the two Val d'Isere games. They seem night and day different to me - the Jag is three times the resolution, three times the framerate, much more nicely colored, pushes four or five times the number of onscreen objects, and has far better sound and music (the SNES version is particularly embarrasing here, but that's probably not the system's fault). But a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest, as the philosopher said.

 

 

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32X vs. Jaguar? In terms of the game library I'd call it a draw, myself. The 32X doesn't have anything quite as unprofessional as the worst Jaguar games, but it also had a slightly lower ceiling, with nothing quite as forward-looking as the strongest, most-polished games on Jaguar.

 

On the other hand Mortal Kombat II, Virtua Fighter, and Virtua Racing have a relevance, for want of a better word, that Jaguar games didn't often match (with the exception of Rayman, and probably Doom too).

 

And on the third hand, a game like Skyhammer is kind of astonishing and nothing on the 32X matches it...but I'm not sure about the gameplay yet, and its propensity for crashing is non-trivial.

 

And on the fourth hand, the 32X's killer exclusives, Blackthorne and Kolibri, kind of stink IMHO, whereas some of its most-maligned games are better or at least more fun than their reputation. I genuinely enjoyed Motocross 32X, for example, and I think Metal Head is an actually-good game.

 

(Blackthorne, OTOH, is a deadly-dull, dumbed-down, bro version of a cinematic platformer -- not in the same universe, quality-wise, as a game like Out of This World or Abe's Odyssee -- while Kolibri has fundamental flaws in the controls and scrolling that mess the whole thing up. And yes, I've beaten both.)

 

And on the fifth hand (have I mentioned I'm an octopus?), I enjoyed some of the Jaguar's maligned games like Hover Strike, Cybermorph, even Trevor McFur. Others, like Kasumi Ninja, are irredeemable trash -- amusing trash, to be sure, but still trash. It's also got too many slow, methodical, Gouraud-shaded polygon games that blend into one another, even if I like that type of gaming.

 

All told, I get the urge to play each one about the same amount as the other. 32X is more of a hassle to set up but has nicer controllers. The 32X feels like a beefed-up Genesis that went wrong somewhere along the way; the Jaguar feels like a consolized computer that has a lot of power, but also has bizarrely unprofessional aspects more typical of a shareware game than a polished console title.

 

Personally, if I'm going to mess around with failed 5th gen systems, I prefer the 3DO! But I'm pleased to own all three.

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1 hour ago, jgkspsx said:

The 3DO is a thicket of brambles I’ve steered far clear of. Some of the games look great, but most of those got ported to Playstation or Saturn or PC. Someday I will check them out, but I don’t think I’m ever going to start a collection.

The 3DO had over 3 times as many games as either the Jaguar or 32X, it definitely had more than both of those consoles combined. There's lots of great 3DO games, it doesn't deserved to get overlooked so hard.

 

As for the topic question, my pick is the 32X but that's more because the 32X is massively more common than the Jaguar, you can actually still find 32X consoles and games even today. The Jaguar? It's extremely rare now and extremely expensive for what it is. You can't find a Jaguar console under $300. Even if the Jaguar has some good games, it has an extremely high barrier for entry, which makes it a huge turnoff.

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I should probably mention a few things: X68000 has no hardware support for stuff like sprite scaling, so everything in the X68000 Super Scaler ports is done in software. It still looks pretty nice, though... damn I wish I had an X68000!

 

Second, since I'm here and have been reading this thread since it was started (by someone who no longer comes here, it seems), my vote is, of course...

 

abstain. I've got a 32X and I've played almost every game on it that I can play, as the region lock prevents me from playing Star Trek, the PAL exclusives, and a few others, but I've never played a Jag. The closest it comes is having Rayman on the PS1. Sorry Jag, I'm not buying you or your toilet add-on, as that's far too much cash to spend when just the toilet alone is more expensive than a month of rent.

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I'd say jaguar. Yes the games that are trash on there are unholy god awful, but the upper end games are much better. Truthfully, when averaged out the two systems are pretty on par to one another. Unfortunately the average Joe won't ever get to experience it due to the obscene prices they go for now (and likely will continue to) so unfortunately jaguar will largely be hype and not truly known.

 

Keep in mind, yes, I have a jaguar, and I'm sure many of you do too, but buying the thing in the 90's - 00's era for $50 WITH several of its top games, is a world of difference from buying one now for closing in on a grand, and paying well north of 100$ for the more worthwhile games.

 

I mostly give it to jag because while both systems have a half dozen must plays, and a dozen or so good games, while the rest of the library ranges from "meh" to "killing yourself is more fun (and more productive)" is because MOST of the worthwhile games on jaguar can ONLY be played on jaguar. Most the 32x stuff can be played, often better, elsewhere.

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On 5/14/2021 at 7:33 AM, jgkspsx said:

Here is a side-by-side comparison of the two Val d'Isere games. They seem night and day different to me - the Jag is three times the resolution, three times the framerate, much more nicely colored, pushes four or five times the number of onscreen objects, and has far better sound and music (the SNES version is particularly embarrasing here, but that's probably not the system's fault). But a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest, as the philosopher said.

 

 

Technically they are a lot closer than you think. Im sure we are talking 320x240 vs 256×224 and both at 60 fps. The game doesn't look to push either system really.

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My two cents is that the Sega 32x basically cleans the jaguar's clock in terms of having a respectable quantity of polished and fun games. This is mostly due to sega having more cash and more programmers/artists to throw at projects, as well as people who seemed more knowledgeable about how to develop for the hardware. However the Jag definitely does have a mysterious x factor that draws you in. From my perspective, the Jag is like a branch on the videogame tree of life that died out and didn't continue. There are tons of jag games based on original IPs, and games that didn't get sequels or ports to other systems, so it kind of feels like this alternative obscure gaming universe. The games are so different in their level of quality that it leaves you wondering just what exactly the Jag's strengths are, and what would be a game that really showcases the hardware. 

 

As a kid in the 90s, the 32x would have been the more fun system hands down, but as someone interested in exploring obscure games and systems, the jag doesn't disappoint and might be more fun than the 32x in that regard.

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The Jaguar has always intrigued me, but I picked the 32X because that's the one I got back then. But it's not just a choice by default; I really enjoyed it at the time. What I explained in another thread is that the Saturn was even more expensive in France (3390F, which is like 520 € so $630 and I don't take inflation into account here). Selling at a loss was forbidden back then, so it would be long before the price was lowered and we got it later on (in 1996 I think, with Alien Trilogy and Panzer Dragoon Zwei).

 

The 32X might have been expensive as well for what it was, since it was basically priced like a brand new system (1290F afaik), but we had our (second hand) Genesis for a few years already. We didn't get a lot of 32X games of course, but at the time we would buy like a game every quarter anyway, so we just had a dozen Genesis games, and got 4 32X games (Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, Star Wars Arcade, and Mortal Kombat II - that we had skipped on Genesis). I only regret we sold the Genesis version of Virtua Racing because I loved a music in it that was not in the 32X version. ? But at least the bridge was finally orange and not in a red & yellow pattern like on Genesis. ?

 

Of course that sounds a bit silly in retrospect, especially compared to the amount of games I buy and play now, but it's important to remember the context.

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On 5/14/2021 at 5:33 AM, jgkspsx said:

Here is a side-by-side comparison of the two Val d'Isere games. They seem night and day different to me - the Jag is three times the resolution, three times the framerate, much more nicely colored, pushes four or five times the number of onscreen objects, and has far better sound and music (the SNES version is particularly embarrasing here, but that's probably not the system's fault). But a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest, as the philosopher said.

 

 

So true. :P

 

The SNES game is 256 x 224 at 60fps, so you're seeing 768 x 672 at 180fps on Jaguar?

 

You've still proven my original point though. They're both 2D games and the Jaguar version still looks mild compared to Panarama Cotton.

 

Try comparing 32-bit snowboarding games to see where the Jag and SNES games fall.

 

 

 

 

 

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Those are all impressive snowboarding games, and I don’t ever want to play them again.
 

More fair and more impressive is ESPN Extreme Games aka 1xtreme, a launch window PS1 title that uses scaled sprites along with some polygons to amazing effect:

 


The frame rate is noticeably lower than Val d’Isere, but it’s doing a lot more with it.

 

But obviously the PS1 and the Saturn kicked the Jaguar’s and 32X’s asses in every regard. (Even if Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing were best on 32X.)

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2 hours ago, jgkspsx said:

Those are all impressive snowboarding games, and I don’t ever want to play them again.
 

More fair and more impressive is ESPN Extreme Games aka 1xtreme, a launch window PS1 title that uses scaled sprites along with some polygons to amazing effect:

 


The frame rate is noticeably lower than Val d’Isere, but it’s doing a lot more with it.

 

But obviously the PS1 and the Saturn kicked the Jaguar’s and 32X’s asses in every regard. (Even if Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing were best on 32X.)

This is the stuff I saw on PSX back in the day, that let me know the future had arrived - next gen was here.  Nothing on the Jag gave me that "holy shit" moment.  Tempest 2000 was awesome, I love a lot of the titles in the Jag library, but this was a quantum leap if you will.  When I got my first 3DFX card for PC - the difference between blocky warping texture Doom, and proper 3D accelerated smooth high framerate Doom was game changing.  SNES generation to Jaguar was like Doom to Doom 2.  PSX was like seeing Quake.

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