What's the most innovative gaming feature introduced on the Atari Jaguar?

[agradeneu]

1 minute ago, Lostdragon said:

Vortex started life as Citadel and was based around the concept of a transforming robot game, Powerdrome coder, Glyn Williams had put on paper before joining Argonaut. 

 

It was a low budget title, designed to exploit the SFX chip and get to market ASAP. 

 

The small team wanted a Star fox-style shooter, but not as linear. 

 

 

It wasn't intended as a serious Mech game. 

Actually, it reminds me more of Starfox than a mech game. But its not a linear rail shooter.

 

 

[Lostdragon]

8 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Actually, it reminds me more of Starfox than a mech game. But its not a linear rail shooter.

 

 

They described it as bending the gameplay mechanics to do something in the style of Starfox, but not as linear (so not on-rails) but this created unforseen technical issues and they regretted some of the level design, so much so, even they used cheats to skip the first level, to play the rest of the game. 

[agradeneu]

The other early console mech game was "Metal Head", but that is more like a Doom shooter and really QUITE clunky

 

Some other innovate feauture of Iron Soldier was "free look" movement in a FPS game. I think there were not many games doing this. Maybe it was the 1st on console?

Edited April 14, 2022 by agradeneu

[laoo]

Mentioned rotation is generally clever affine transformation, when you can grab pixels reinforced with fractional part of a source address step, opposed to only the ability to increment it by one. There are few levels on which it can be done.

1. Like Jaguar's Object Processor. It can scale images because the X and Y step has fractional part, but they aren't independent - while traversing a row only X step is applied, and Y step is applied during moving to another row

2. Like Lynx' Suzy blitter. It can scale and do limited skewing. As with OP when a row is being fetched only X step is applied and Y step is applied only when moving to another row, but additionally after copying each row both steps can be updated, together with start position.

3. Like in SNES. With free skewing. It is done there similarly like with OP, during rendering. But each pixel the source address can be updated using both steps, X and Y. There are separate steps for moving to the next row. That gives arbitrary transformation.

4. Like in Jaguar's blitter - it's like in SNES, but it can do in both directions. It can address source or destination with arbitrary transformation (depending whether A1 and A2 addresses are swapped). E.g. texts in Tempest 2000 seems to be drawn using swapped addresses.

 

So answering the question from few posts earlier - Lynx can't do rotation. Every rotation must be precomputed. It can only scale and skew. Skewing can be seen in European Soccer Challange and scale and skew in Electrocop. It can also do some idiomatic effects like in Bubble Trouble. But no rotation.

Edited April 14, 2022 by laoo

[Leonard Smith]

Slightly offtopic -- I just realized that the "B" button on the original Jaguar game controller looks similar to the square buttons that they used on the LYNX 2

Pretty innovative use of existing parts?

 

[Shaggy the Atarian]

One thing that Cybermorph brought to the table that might be considered an innovation in '93 (among consoles) was having 50 or so levels, while most console games in those days only gave you a dozen or less. That combined with the kind of open worldness of the game I think would be considered innovative - it just wasn't much fun to collect pods for most of those levels  

 

I didn't see resetting the console from the controller as one - not a big deal but that was nice (granted, the 5200 let you do that too, so it was more of a reborn innovation).

 

Since T2K was mentioned, Melt-o-vision would certainly be a graphics innovation, not that such an effect really works in most games but it was always fascinating to watch. That and whatever effect he cooked up for the mountains in Defender Plus mode. And speaking of effects, the mirror textures that I-War does looks cool, but since most people play the game in 1st person they may not see it (that and it brings the frame rate down even more). 

 

I did enjoy unfolding the story by finding computer walls in AvP, although I think that games like Blake Stone had done that first in an FPS game (Catacombs Abyss sorta did that too). But AvP's open-world setting was quite different from most FPS' of the time, which were generally just using the Wolf3D/Doom design of "find an exit to the level and kill everything along the way."

[SegaSnatcher]

On 4/9/2022 at 2:06 PM, Leonard Smith said:

Most innovative feature?  For me it would have been the battery-less backup/saving built into the carts.

I don't believe any mass market console offered that...I believe SNES and N64 carts all used battery backup.  Unless I'm mistaken.

Sonic 3 used FRAM for saves. 

[alucardX]

On 4/10/2022 at 12:53 AM, PFG 9000 said:

I'm in the minority, but I think the keypad (and overlays) was a great feature that should have been used in more consoles.  It would have made for far better controls in PC ports like Sim City, Warcraft, etc.  I'm not sure how Syndicate controlled on the 3DO (I know it was terrible on the SegaCD and SNES), but it couldn't have been offered as many features as the Jaguar port.

 

Even games like Doom and Wolfenstein, with relatively simple controls, benefitted from direct weapon access on the Jag, thanks to the keypad.  No other port could offer that.

I think it is a good feature and it was bold to include it. It was the easiest thing for people to make a mockery of but had real application, as you have stated.

[alucardX]

On 4/10/2022 at 3:19 PM, Jag64 said:

Have to agree with this point, as I (just my personal opinion) consider the keypad more a throwback to previous generations, than an innovation.

Was this with/for Ultra Vortek (95)? I've never met another Atari Jaguar owner in person, so never actually tested linking them up. (I guess I could hook up a couple of my Jaguars together. But it feels dirty; West Virginia dirty.) Does Sega Channel (94) count for the Genesis as linking together? I feel like Japan probably had networked consoles before anyone else, maybe.

Doom used this as did Air cars and Battlesphere of course.

[alucardX]

I think the cartridge shells were THE innovation the Jaguar broughtto the industry.

[Jag64]

On 4/24/2022 at 2:33 PM, alucardX said:

I think the cartridge shells were THE innovation the Jaguar broughtto the industry.

Those carts are iconic. Kind of like Skylar, people that have never played a Jaguar or know what Cybermorph is, they recognize the green head from that Atari console. Not as many people recognize the carts, of course, but every hardcore gamer and collector knows the distinctive shell.

[alucardX]

19 minutes ago, Jag64 said:

Those carts are iconic. Kind of like Skylar, people that have never played a Jaguar or know what Cybermorph is, they recognize the green head from that Atari console. Not as many people recognize the carts, of course, but every hardcore gamer and collector knows the distinctive shell.

They just looked next gen and the fact that "ATARI" was molded into the design on the back was really cool.

[Editorb]

On 4/24/2022 at 1:33 PM, alucardX said:

I think the cartridge shells were THE innovation the Jaguar broughtto the industry.

I've heard a lot of bleats about the cart not needing handles. That was kinda my impression as well until using a Game Drive. The standard cart handle provides a far better removal experience, and a slightly better insertion experience.

[Pete5125]

4 hours ago, Editorb said:

I've heard a lot of bleats about the cart not needing handles. That was kinda my impression as well until using a Game Drive. The standard cart handle provides a far better removal experience, and a slightly better insertion experience.

Honestly the carts weren't the issue, the cheap boxes, and inserts only some of time, should of copied Segas plastic boxes.

 

Got to give them credit box art and box design was great.

 

They really were the 1st game company to push the idea of linking several systems together, most of their design ideas made it to xbox