Jagvent Calendar - Day 4
0I hope you are all happy, safe & healthy whatever challenges you are facing right now.
Fans of my channel may remember I did a GameBoy Advent Countdown last year - a different mystery game each day of December. I thought I'd do something similar this year for the much maligned Atari Jaguar. So this is Day 4 of my Jagvent Calendar :-)
Gameplay starts at 3:50 as I let the intro run
First some credit though - I used a snippet of Kevin Macleod's version of Jingle Bells to set the tone at the start of the video details below:
Music Used: Jingle Bells by Kevin MacLeod | https://incompetech.com/
Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
The Atari Jaguar gets a lot of stick but I got mine back in the mid 90's purely for Tempest 2000 & the port of Doom & then picked up cheap games after that. To be fair I actually got my Jaguar by trading a few PAL Saturn games I had Japanese versions of (I got my Jag CD as part payment for clearing my bosses spare room - pro rata probably the most I've been paid for a single days work :) - so I didn't pay for either console in real terms
I won't reveal the game in the Title until the next day but in the Description.......well that's a different matter. Does anyone other than me actually read them?
This is Kasumi Ninja - one of the many, many Mortal Kombat copycats that flooded the market seeking to emulate the success of that series. However this was originally going to be much more ambitious as can be seen by the 3D engine for the character selection etc before it got stripped down to a poor MK rip off. It came out in 94 when many had already moved on. Apparently MK3 was being ported to the system too which would have been interesting but it got canned.
Plus points - it is a Jaguar exclusive, the graphics can look really good with detail and colour - especially the backgrounds, the game originally came with a headband and throwing star. Oh and Angus is a stand out character :-)
Negatives are numerous - the gameplay is slow and controls are the most responsive (3 buttons - Punch, Kick and then use C and motions for special moves - the Jaguar pad doesn't exactly make these the easiest things to pull off). The animation is stiff, the character selection is small and fairly uninspired (Angus aside!) & there are very few moves all round. The basics are there but it needs to play faster, a few more animation frames, a few more characters & moves & this could have been decent.
Most Jaguar owners have this game as there were a lot of copies & it was sold cheaply when clearing the inventory. I play the easy mode here which locks the final boss behind the next difficulty.
This is my original PAL copy from back in the day played on my Jaguar console through S-Video (I have the official RGB Scart cable somewhere) through a Retrotink 5X for ease of capture. It's the first time I've played it in years so forgive the slightly erratic gameplay but it should give you the idea. I play the first few levels to give you an idea of the game.
As always if you enjoy this video let me know. As always this is running on original hardware. Also let me know if there are particular games or systems you'd like to see.
As always this is uploaded under the Fair Use Policy - no money is being made from this video.
Stay strong, stay safe and stay healthy - Grey Fox