It's a true shame that a great company like Atari put out an awful system like the Jaguar. Indeed, thinking that the once-mighty company was reduced to one that couldn't manage to market a console for anything is a sorrowful thought, indeed.

Of course, it wasn't that the Jaguar was a bad system, exactly. It's just that there were a bunch of rotten to average games for it. Zoop is one of the few Jaguar titles that escaped the "rotten" tag, but it's as average as can be.

Now, some may remember the hype surrounding this puzzle game when it arrived in the 1990s. We were led to believe that Zoop represented the future of gaming (or something along those lines) and was as addictive as crack cocaine. Neither claim was true, of course, but Zoop isn't a bad game, at all. It's just very, very average.

Oh, and while this was ported to many consoles and computers, the version for the Jaguar is no better or worse than other versions of the game out there. That fact kind of sums up the whole Jaguar experience, doesn't it?

Let me explain. Atari often claimed (probably incorrectly) that the Jaguar was a 64-bit system and, therefore, was capable of playing very advanced games. The technological sophistication of the Jaguar, in fact, was touted as the primary selling point of the system. Atari bragged the Jaguar was streaks ahead of the console's chief competitors, the Sega Genesis and the Super NES -- both 16-bit systems.

But, here's the problem. Zoop (and many games for the Jaguar) looks a hell of like something that could be played on a 16-bit system. The graphics are flat as can be, and it looks like a game the Super NES could have handled with ease. You would expect something more sophisticated from the "advanced" Jaguar, but that's just not the case.

At some point, I suppose I should actually mention something about the actual mechanics behind the game, so I'll go ahead and do that now. As I said, Zoop is a puzzle game which -- like many games of its time -- was touted as the successor to Tetris. In Zoop, the player controls a ship which occupies a box in the center of the screen. The player's task is to blast various objects from overwhelming the aforementioned box.

The objects, see, advance at the player from four sides. Now, here's the trick. The objects are various shapes. Let's say the player's ship is red. If he blasts a red shape, it vanishes. If he blasts one of another color, however, his ship takes on that color. So, the strategy which must be used involves whittling down objects that are the same color as the player's ship and switching to other colors in an efficient manner.

And, efficiency is crucial. The game starts out slowly, but the pace picks up in a hurry. Of course, the player is doomed to failure, so the object is to ward off the inevitable as long as possible.

Like I said, this isn't a bad game, but it's not a great one. And, certainly, Zoop doesn't exploit the capabilities of the Jaguar at all. The wacky tunes sound fine in the game, and the control is tight. However, in the end, this comes across as a very average game that could have been done well on a Genesis or SNES. As I said, a lot of games for the Jaguar turned out that way, thus adding to the frustration of Jag owners who got to watch their friends have a lot of fun with allegedly inferior systems. The hardware specs don't mean a damn thing if there isn't enough good software to take advantage of it.


Recommended: Yes