Jaguar Reviews E-F

Dino Dudes is a tedious puzzle game disguised as an action-oriented platform title. Its slow, deliberate gameplay involves switching between multiple caveman characters and manipulating items in order to reach a goal. Did Atari really think this would impress anybody? When a one-player game requires "teamwork", that's never a good sign.

Each of the 80 stages (!) offers a new maze of platforms to overcome. The developers would have been better off programming only three stages, because there's no way a gamer could possibly stomach any more than that! Icons on the bottom of the screen indicate possible actions, but good luck determining what those poorly-rendered images are supposed to symbolize. At least two of them could be construed as obscene gestures!

Evolution's user interface is so poorly designed that it takes two button presses to activate a single icon! The flat, 2D graphics are not the least bit interesting, and your cavemen are a pretty dull bunch. The puzzles often require you to pass items back and forth and traverse the same areas with each "dude", which is time-consuming. In certain levels it's possible to destroy a vital item, yet the game doesn't bother to inform you that the stage has suddenly become impossible to complete. Dino Dudes has absolutely nothing going for it, and I'm pretty confident you'll hate it as much as I did. © Copyright 2008 The Video Game Critic.

The original Fast Food (Atari 2600, 1982) was an obscure bargain bin title. Not an obvious choice to resurrect 35 years later, but here we are. As in the original, you control a chomping set of lips, but they are a lot more luscious in this case! I'd love to meet the lady who modeled those shiny red lips! I think I'm in love!

The idea is to consume food items moving left to right across the screen. The original 1982 game offered unappetizing pixelated fare, but the digitized food items in this game look damn good. There's plenty to chow down on including hot dogs, fries, spinning shakes, rotating tacos, and flapping pizza slices. Food tends to bunch up in groups, making it easy to rack up big points but at the risk of accidentally ingesting a nasty purple pickle. Consume six of those and it's game over.

Fast Food 64 may be shallow but there's something about its weird, offbeat style. The bumping techno beats sound like something from the 1990's but the audio quality could be better. The psychedelic backdrops can be pretty mesmerizing if they don't make you sick.

Each frantic game only lasts a minute or so, but you'll want to play over and over for high score. My friends were somewhat dismissive of the game until Brad became hooked on it. He rightly pointed out how it required no buttons to play, and how many games can you say that about?

Secondary modes include a chaotic two-player variation and a confusing first-person "VR mode". Classic mode mimics the original's graphics but throws a lot more food your way. The box comes with a little laminated menu and overlay, which is a nice touch. Not fancy but fun, Fast Food is the equivalent of going out to grab a late-night bite at a cheap diner. © Copyright 2023 The Video Game Critic.

In the original Fast Food 64 (Wave One Games, 2018) you moved a chomping mouth around the screen gulping down digitized food items. Holiday Snacks is a more festive version of the game with Christmas music, snowy scenery, and a veritable smorgasbord of food. A cheerful version of We Wish You A Merry Christmas plays over the main menu, and the wintery landscape looks nice.

The default arcade mode has you gobbling down turkeys, gingerbread men, ham, candy, pumpkin pie, and hot cocoa among others. The only thing you need to avoid are the nasty purple pickles - now adorned with red bows.

The game has a mesmerizing quality but the new "power-up" icons don't add much. One freezes the action, causing a bunch of ice cubes to appear around the screen. Okay, so now what? You just crunch them all to continue. Another makes your lips downright tiny, which really exposes just how erratic the game's collision detection is. I often find myself drifting off the right side of the screen while trying to snag passing food items, sometimes disappearing almost completely from sight!

Fast Food: Holiday Snacks does pack its share of surprises. One is an unexpected "hyperspace" functionality. Should you find yourself in a tough spot, pressing A causes you to instantly disappear and reappear in a random spot. Now that's old school for ya!

Of the two extra modes, Santa's Cookies mode challenges you to catch Oreos in a glass of milk. Hey - are those Jaguar games burning in the fireplace in the background!? Oh the humanity! In "poultry mode" you must avoid all other food and only consume whole turkeys. In my book this automatically qualifies Holiday Snacks as a Thanksgiving game as well, serving a perfect segue between the two holidays. © Copyright 2023 The Video Game Critic.

Following in the footsteps of EA's FIFA series, this is a highly playable, fast-moving soccer game. In fact, the frenetic pace makes it hard to keep track of the ball! Over 50 teams are available to play in tournament or exhibition modes. The action is viewed from an overhead diagonal view. The ball looks sharp and its movement is smooth and realistic. It's easy to pass the ball around, despite the lack of a "scanner" to track your players. When you pass up field there's usually someone in the vicinity to receive it.

Special moves are available for "star players", but apparently there aren't many stars on my USA team (*sad face*). The action is too frenzied to get all that creative, but I do like the ability to bend shots (like Beckham). It's not hard to score, but since the goal is usually off the screen, it can be hard to tell where to aim. Goalies usually get their hands on the ball but rarely make a clean catch. When someone scores you're subjected to a "celebration" screen featuring a pair of players that look more like hideous, overweight mutants. It's disturbing!

Tie games are decided by shootout rounds, which are fun and well-designed. The sound effects include a crowd that increases in volume as the ball approaches the goal. The players grunts sound clear but the sound of kicking the ball sounds more like a shotgun blast! It's not perfect, but Fever Pitch Soccer is easily one of the more playable sports titles for the system. © Copyright 2013 The Video Game Critic.

Wait - video games are supposed to be fun right? Somebody needs to remind me after playing the monumentally abysmal Fight For Life. Reviewing this wretched one-on-one fighter is best described as a hardship. Fight For Life redefines the word "bad", with shabby visuals and pointless gameplay. Even in 1995, its blocky, texture-mapped fighters looked ugly. The backgrounds are sharp and colorful, but Fight For Life's basic gameplay is a complete joke.

The characters can side-step and evade attacks, but they move like snails! Could they possibly take smaller steps? There's minimal technique involved in the fighting action, and each hit only removes a tiny sliver of your opponent's life meter. As both fighters endlessly trade punches, generic guitar music loops in the background. After what feels like an eternity, your opponent finally falls to the ground.

But the sense of relief quickly turns into despair when you realize you're just beginning round two. NOOOOOOOOO! The one amusing aspect of this game lies in its instruction book, which claims you can save your game up to 100,000 times (sorry, you'll need to reset the cartridge after that). Is that supposed to be funny!? Did Atari really expect this to compete with Virtua Fighter and Tekken!? There has to be more to life than this! © Copyright 2006 The Video Game Critic.

I was inspired to revisit Flashback after playing CyberPunk 2077: Ultimate Edition (PS5, 2024). I first experienced this futuristic, Blade Runner-esque adventure on my Sega Genesis back in 1993. Flashback was groundbreaking at the time, featuring motion-captured animation and amazing full-screen animations only seen in CD titles.

A more subtle innovation was how when you shot your gun, you didn't see the bullets. Back then this was a mind-blowing step forward in terms of realism. Shooting mercenaries and guys in jetpacks is so much fun. The sound effects are explosive and watching enemies get knocked backward is very satisfying.

When I first fired up Flashback for the Jaguar I immediately found myself fumbling with the controls. Were they this obtuse on the Sega Genesis? After a quick check I could confirm the answer is yes. The controls are quite touchy and not particularly intuitive. Even simple actions like climbing down off a platform requires executing a very specific sequence of controller commands.

The problem is, one false move spells instant death. Hard-to-spot visual cues are often present along the very top and bottom edges of the screen. Some, like sizzling green electric charges, are only a pixel tall so you really need to look closely.

Of course, the more you play the more natural the controls feel, and it helps to dial down the difficulty to easy. The gameplay is highly sophisticated. There's a lot of sneaking around, often with your gun drawn. There are many characters and electronic devices to interact with. Flashback demands a slow, deliberate approach.

The first stage is set in a jungle with spiraling green vines that look like huge snakes constricting the scenery. Hazy trees in the distance do a good job of conveying depth. I love how high-tech sensors and machines are blended into the rich jungle landscape. Advanced stages include more modern locations like a subway, secret base, and TV game show.

Flashback's graphics are excellent. The concrete and metal look properly weathered, and I love how the subway stations show signs of decay. Subtle lighting effects help convey a dark, tense atmosphere. The fluid animation of the characters is amazing to behold. And while the cutscenes may no longer instill a sense of awe, they do a fine job advancing the plot and its many twists.

How does this compare to the Genesis version? Well the graphics are sharper. The audio is clearer but you really need to crank up the volume just to hear it! I love how ominous music kicks in during consequential milestones. There's some curious slowdown at times but it doesn't affect the gameplay.

Once you get the controls down, Flashback is a captivating experience. The puzzles aren't too difficult and there are surprises around every corner. Fools that rush in may find the game frustrating, but calm, cool, and collected gamers will enjoy losing themselves in this epic journey. © Copyright 2024 The Video Game Critic.

Simple-but-addictive puzzle games were the flavor of the month in the mid-1990's, and Flip Out was Atari's feeble attempt to grab a piece of the pie. But as this game taught me, the ability to manipulate colored objects does not always result in a good time. The game is played in rounds, with the idea being to flip square chips on a matrix to match a certain pattern. It's pretty confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, it's just tedious. By incorporating a whimsical soundtrack, goofy aliens, and the occasional fart sound effect, Atari hoped you might not notice how much fun you weren't having! Unlike similar puzzle titles, there's never any pay-off in the form of explosions or chain reactions. I can't recall the last time I've been more disinterested in a video game. © Copyright 2006 The Video Game Critic.

Most classic gamers can probably surmise from the title that this is a translation of the old Frogs and Flies (Atari 2600, 1982) game, also known as Frog Bog (Intellivision, 1982). Those games were simple yet fun, so you'd expect this 64-bit CD edition to be gangbusters. Fire up the CD and you're treated to an attractive title screen with catchy, twangy music. There are one and two player options. So far so good.

Then you start playing and wonder if this is even a finished game. Frog Feast is a contest between two amphibians leaping between a pair of lily pads, snagging flies that flutter over the pond to earn points. The game is timed and ends after two minutes. In the original versions you could control the height and trajectory of your leap, but not here. You always jump the same height and distance, which is lame. One button is used to both jump and stick out your tongue. It occurred to me there are 22 buttons on my Jaguar Pro controller, yet this game uses one to perform two functions.

The frogs are well-defined but the forest background looks like it was drawn with Microsoft Paint. The sky darkens slightly as you play but never actually turns to night. The sound effects are basically limited to periodic croaks. Only the Jaguar could mess up a can't-miss concept like this. Frog Feast is actually a watered-down version of an already simplistic game, prompting my friend Scott to proclaim the Jaguar as the "reverse King Midas" of game consoles. © Copyright 2015 The Video Game Critic.