25th March 2009, 7:44 PM
Quote:EDIT - Oh yeah, don't forget games that have long, complicated passwords, which he often gripes about.
I complain about games with passwords over about 8-10 characters too... that long is fine, but when you get into 16, 25, 40 character passwords, something is really wrong.
Quote:That was probaily due to cost cutting, The Jaguar obviously was their last ditch attempt to rescue Atari from sinking .
Yeah, definitely. The company was already struggling, and cutting corners on hardware costs are a way of maybe saving a bit... sometimes that backfires, like with Microsoft and the 360, but it didn't hurt Atari much. It wasn't reliability that killed the Jaguar, it was the graphics, controller, and games (both quantity and quality).
Jaguar sold 250,000 units, total... supposedly. The number was only like 100,000 something as of early 1996, so either that number is far too high, or more than half of the systems sold were sold at clearance prices. The Jag CD only shipped 20,000 or 40,000 systems; most of the ones shipped sold to the Jaguar diehards, but they shipped very few. This puts the Jaguar and Jaguar CD right near the bottom of the list as far as console hardware sales go... and given all of its problems, it's very easy to see why. It's too bad Atari had to end like that, but given how long it had been struggling with no hope of improvement, Atari's end was really only a matter of time, by that point.
Quote:Had it truly had any killer apps that made use of its untapped power and produced a genuine 64bit game , It might have had better fortunes.
The system is very hard to develop for and was poorly documented. It had multiple processors, a complex layout... developers didn't know what to do with it. It also wasn't great at texturing polygons, which explains why so many of the 3d games use shaded polygons, not textured. It could do some decent graphics for the time, though, when pushed... look up Iron Soldier 2 and BattleMorph for some of the best examples. But most games definitely didn't fit anyone's expectations for "64-bit".
Now the Nintendo 64... that most certainly did. :)