The Polygons of Another World: Atari Jaguar (2020)

The Flare technology hardware designs seem unfortunately clever - the Jaguar was "Flare Two", while "Flare One" made it into a few arcade units and the unreleased Konix Multisystem. When the software that runs on that hardware tends to be rushed out for release, the design tends to be underused.

This lesson got relearned a few times by several different console manufacturers. The N64 was too elaborate; so was the PS3. Even the early commercial lifecycle of Amiga games consisted mostly of low quality Atari ST ports - and the Amiga design is much more "assistive" than "dependent" on its coprocessing, with the major features of the custom chips translating mainly to implementations of software functions in hardware, rather than a wholly different programming paradigm.

For a point of comparison, the final evolution of the ST line, the Falcon, had a programmable DSP. Released in the year previous to the Jaguar, this system proved to be capable of rendering Quake 2 levels, decades later. Would it have worked as a console? Probably not(a different cost structure applies to computers and this example was positioned at the high end), but a 1992 system that renders 1997 graphics somewhat competently is an impressive feat; this was the era when the transistor budgets became biased towards higher clockspeeds and the 18-month cycle of Moore's law was putting PC gaming through a "micro-generation" every two years.

This was my favorite game on the Amiga back in the early '90s, even though it installed via only two floppy disks and had a one-way, time limited story line. The intro was one of the coolest of that period and I'd always watch it when starting the game, even though it always played the same content. I read this article and the dedication of the Jaguar fans must be admired. They went to all lengths to make this port happen, long after the console was considered "dead" by the general public.

Another World was a beautiful piece of a work, but (for me) a terrible game. It's the sort of thing people might complain about today - wonderful graphics, punishingly bad gameplay - except that we were mostly kids, and so remember it fondly and complain that things aren't like the old days. I suspect it gets additional bonus points for the (much more deserved) sentimental aura of the Amiga, but I've tried replaying it over the years on various other platforms and it all comes flooding back "oh yes, you die here" and "now, which exact pixel was it you had to jump to?"

(2020)