REVIEW: "Downfall" for Atari Jaguar

Once the undisputed king of the North American video game market, Atari's downfall in the early 1990s was slow, painful, and awkward. The company was devoting most of its attention to its line of Amiga computers, which left its video games division underfunded and understaffed. Nowhere is there a more obvious piece of evidence of this identity crisis than the Atari Jaguar, Atari's last and least successful video game console. Released in 1993, the Jaguar billed itself as the world's first 64-bit system. Though the system did see some great games (including one of my all-time favorites, Tempest 2000), lack of developer support and mediocre processing power had killed the Jaguar by 1996, having sold less than 250,000 unites.

Despite its status as a footnote in technology history, the Jaguar maintains a devoted base of fans who continue to develop homebrew games for it. Why anyone would do this is beyond me, as the Jaguar's odd CPU structure and limited graphics memory make programming for it an exercise in frustration and self-torture. Nevertheless, Jagware, a prolific programming collective that's released numerous other Jaguar games, has just announced its newest release: Downfall.

Downfall is a simple game that bears a striking resemblance to Man Goes Down, another homebrew game for the Atari 2600 written back in 2004 by Alex Herbert. The player controls a man continuously falling down as platforms scroll up the screen; you must survive as long as you can falling downward onto the platforms without falling off the screen. In this way it somewhat resembles the old NES game Ice Climbers, except in the other direction and without the cutesy cartoon characters.

Downfall's simplicity won't convince the uninitiated to immediately order a Jaguar on eBay, but it is a fun little diversion on an emulator. The scrolling background is detailed and highly fluid, controls are simple (though I can't imagine how it plays on the actual Jaguar controller), and the background music is catchy and clearly rendered. It is, however, ridiculously easy, and since the game has no variations or extra modes, you've pretty much seen all there is to see after about 15 minutes of gameplay. It almost resembles a programming exercise more than a full-fledged game.

A worthy effort for an perenially unappreciated console, but I certainly wouldn't spend money on a cartridge version. I'll stick to Tempest 2000 for my taste of early-90s Atari.