nester's one star gaming - one star gaming #1

RSS Bot · September 8, 2006

"Just like in those action movies"

Club Drive for Atari Jaguar

Occasionally I will have a friend come over to my house who has never seen an Atari Jaguar and wants to know what it is all about. I never get tired of showing this thing off, and eventually I will get around to the quality games which usually impress my friends. Before I do this, however, there is something that I have to show them first.

If you are a fan of Club Drive, you might know where I'm going with this. I start up my Club Drive cart and drive around Jerome's Pad for a while. I am in hot pursuit of that most symbolic of Jaguar images, Jerome's box cat. If you've never seen this, it is a bright orange figure made of blocks that is supposed to represent a cat. It has whiskers, and it will meow if you drive into it the right way. However, it looks more like a floating piece of bread than a cat. Its limbs don't move and it has no facial expressions. This image has been known to caused sustained fits of laughter in groups for days at a time. After you see this, it's hard not to fall in love with the Jaguar. We'll then move on to Tempeset 2000 or Iron Soldier and actually get some enjoyment out of the system.

In reality though, graphics are the least of this game's problems. The thing that hurts this game more than anything is the horrible control. It seems that no matter how slow I am going or how straight the road is, something strange always starts to happen. My bright yellow car will start to wobble. It just gets worse if I try to fix it. After it gets bad enough then it will start spinning. At this stage, it seems like my car always ends up in the ocean. Even in the middle of the western level's course, my car always ends up in the dungeon. It's almost as if the car would rather drown itself than play this silly game. With handling this bad, it's probably just as well that this racing game has no computerized opponents. I have enough trouble finding the finish line without a bunch of other cars spinning around and getting in my way.

It seemed like Atari had a deliberate plan for games like this. They must've known that this game was low quality when they tested it, so they did what they always did with Jaguar games. They made sure that it was in the future. This game had the completely ridiculous backstory of taking place at an amusement park about 100 years in the future. Cars had been illegal for 50 years or so until some crazy doctor made this park with indestructable cars. This reveals 2 important things. First of all, it somewhat explains the bad quality cars. After 50 years they must have forgotten how to make them. More importantly however, it shows that Atari was trying to get by on selling the future. The Jaguar was 64 bits, a first for consoles. With that kind of power, do you really need that much quality? I will admit that Atari put a good amount of thought and effort into some of the games, and there are many reasons that this system failed. But when I play a silly, poorly designed game like the futuristic Club Drive, everything makes much more sense. I don't know about you, but I'm rooting for the F-Zero future!

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=1977