Atari Jaguar #4: Atari Karts

Developer: Miracle Designs

Publisher: Atari

Release Date: December 1995

 Atari Karts is another example of a Jaguar game that started out with potential but ended being kind of sad. The name makes it sound like it’s going to be a celebration of Atari in  the vein of Super Mario Kart. Sure it could be derivative, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with copying a great game. Sadly, most of the Atari references were left out in favor of generic tracks with your typical 90s wacky racers. There’s a rooster wearing sunglasses! There’s a skeleton dude! There’s a woman! They did leave in Bentley Bear from Crystal Castles and a few references in some hard-to-read 90s text, but it’s mostly just generic racer. Working titles for it included Kart and Super Kart so I suppose it could’ve been worse. It really shows that by this point Atari had practically given up. With care and effort this could’ve been something special. Instead, it’s another sad chapter in the Jaguar saga quickly rushed out in time for one last desperate Christmas. By this point distribution was shrinking, so Atari Karts is now quite rare. I will admit that I played this on the Atari 50 collection on my PlayStation 5. If I ever do track down an original copy and discover that it plays different, I will amend this article, but I don’t think it would change my opinion much. Atari did an excellent job porting their Jaguar games even though it’s an extremely embarrassing moment in their history. They somehow knew that there were people like me who were buying Atari 50 basically to play less-than-stellar Jaguar games. I still feel like a richer human being because of it.

 Before I say too much, I would like to state that I am honestly not trying pile on Jaguar. I hate to pick on a console just because it has a bad reputation. Picking on easy targets adds nothing to the conversation, and I try not to do it on here. However, I have to admit that Atari Karts is not a very good game. Like all Jaguar games I’ve reviewed so far, it has nice visuals but doesn’t quite know what to do with them. It just has such a haphazard feel to it. It is set up like Super Mario Kart with different cups and a championship race against a boss at the end. However, unlike Super Mario Karts’ distinct personality-filled tracks the courses in Atari Karts are just curvy roads. They are nameless and interchangeable. The same layouts are used in multiple races, and I honestly haven’t been able to figure out if there are any repeating tracks or just very similar ones. I’m not even sure how many races were in each cup because they all go by so quickly without much fanfare in between. I think there are seven, but I could be wrong about that.

 

It is at least fast and fairly smooth. If you like short races than this is a good game for you. Each race is five laps, and I rarely had a lap that lasted more than twenty seconds. It does help speed things along, but twenty seconds isn’t long enough to connect with a track. You just drive on by and move on to the next one. Of course, laps last a little longer if you get hung up on the scenery or crash into an invisible wall. In a good racer the boundaries are clearly marked, but in Atari Karts it can be a bit arbitrary. Sometimes you can drive off the road and sometimes you can’t. There are also power ups just like in Mario Kart, but they range from useless to detrimental so be careful. I was never more annoyed than when I got a “power-up” that reversed my controls and made me crash into an invisible wall off the track. That’s just about the worst thing that can happen to you in a racing game. Then in the last second of the race I hit a speed boost and passed everybody to finish in first place. Hey, the game isn’t all bad.

 

Miracle Designs, the developer of Atari Karts, is the strangest part of the whole story. I noticed that Atari Karts felt familiar and noticed that Miracle Designs also made Miracle Space Race on PlayStation. It’s basically Atari Karts in space. Then I noticed that they made XS Airboat Racing. That’s basically Atari Karts in the water. Apparently, they kept making variations on Atari Karts over and over again. Of their nine games, seven of them are racing games, and I can probably imagine what they play like. For a mediocre racer that sold about 10 copies it sure got around. They showed up in odd places too. Merlin Racing is one of the handful of games released on NUON. Most of their PS1 games were released at the very end of the system’s life when no one was paying attention anymore. Somehow Miracle Designs limped along for almost a decade releasing basically the same game that nobody liked and didn’t sell. Then they released a couple of non-racing games and quickly disappeared. It’s a shame they couldn’t hold on until Wii came out. They probably could’ve done half a dozen Atari Karts variations on Wii.

 

I ended up having an okay time with Atari Karts which has been the story for the whole console so far. They could get developers who knew how to make games, but not very many who knew how to make games well. It’s a bit hard to rank because I had the same mediocre time with Cybermorph and Trevor McFur. I’m going to put it just under those two because at least an okay shooter is a little rarer than an okay racing game. So, of the four Jaguar games I’ve played none of them have made it into the green yet. I hope I find some soon because there are only 50 games. That’s like playing 80 bad NES games before finding my first good one. I can’t wait to see which Atari games has the worst good to bad ratio. It’s pretty stiff competition for every console they released after 1981.

 

Atari Jaguar Quality Percentage - complete lack of quality. Not even a little bit. 

Ranking List.docx