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You might be fooled into thinking this game is based off the cult film starring Christopher Lambert but in fact it’s taken from the obscure animated cartoon series and even features full length Cinepak FMV sequences that help to tell the story as you play! Using a mix of polygon sprites laid over pre-rendered graphics it’s similar in both graphical style and gameplay to the Resident Evil or Alone In The Dark games. You start off in the village and must make your way to the castle defeating enemies and solving small puzzles as you go. At first you can just punch and kick but you can grab a sword as well as other items which you can use or store in your inventory. There is also food that can be collected to restore your limited energy, there are no lives. The biggest problem with Highlander comes in the controls which are very frustrating to start with and you will no doubt get a lot of cheap deaths so I recommend saving regularly! The graphics are beautiful and really show the system off, the sound is also just as good and the story of the game is great. Highlander seems to be a real Marmite game, you either love it or hate it, and personally I love it. One you get the hand of its controls it becomes a really rewarding game that you will spend many hours trying to finish.

Reboot are back with another 2600 port that has been designed to show budding programmers how to make a simple game using their own Raptor game engine. This time their inspiration was the Activision game Sea Quest, a firm favourite among many VCS fans. For those of you who have never played the original game I will give you a brief synopsis. You control a little sub and must try to rescue 6 divers and take them to the surface. Your sub also has limited air so requires visits above the waves to top up regularly. The sea is also inhabited by sharks who want to eat the divers and some nasty enemy submarines too. Thankfully your sub is equipped with a gun to shoot them out the water for extra points. There is also a pirate ship that patrols the waves above you and stops you resurfacing. As the levels progress the enemies get more frequent and much faster it becomes more difficult to save your friends. It’s very simple but thankfully just as much fun as the original game. It won’t offer anything new for owners of the original but hopefully help a few more people get into programming.

The cartridge version of Hoverstrike was without doubt one of the most technically impressive games released on the system. One of the view games to be developed in house at Atari it really showed what the machine could do in the right hands. However it was criticised for having a poor frame rate and slightly erratic controls. This enhanced CD version of the Battlezone update fixes both those problems as well as adding improved graphics, more missions, FMV, camera angles and wonderful CD soundtrack. The texture mapped polygon graphics in this game really are stunning and look better than many early PS1 and Saturn games. The lightning effects, especially on the night levels are genuinely jaw dropping. In fact everything about this game just oozes quality. There are so many great little features you will notice if you have already played the cart version like the pulsating craters and pumping wells. There are also a host of secrets to be found here too! The Jaguar seems to excel when it comes to these 3D search and destroy type games and Hoverstrike CD is right up there with the very best of them. If there ever was one game to show all your mates what the Jag really can do then this game is it.

The latest game for the Jaguar by Matthias Domin, this is his biggest project yet and is actually an upgraded conversion of Duranik's (Sturmwind, Alpine Games and Native) Atari Falcon game of the same name. In essence this is pretty much a straight clone of Taito's classic Arkanoid, which was itself an evolution of Atari's Breakout. For those who have somehow never played either game, you have a bat and a ball and must use them to destroy the rows of bricks above you. Each level has the bricks arranged in different layouts that become harder to destroy as the game goes on. The main difficulty comes in the shape of indestructible blocks that get in your way, thankfully the game also gives you power-ups to help you along the way. These are distributed at random when you destroy the bricks and must be collected using your bat. These powers include glue - where the ball sticks to your bat allowing you to aim it, magic - your ball will pass through any and all bricks without stopping and a crazy multi-ball too, which is very hard to keep up with! The most useful power-up of all though is the warp, this pink coloured icon lets you skip to the next level. Impulse X also includes handy level codes, high score web codes and a level editor that also allows you to save your creations to the memory track (CD version) or cartridge. Another nice touch is that this game supports a mouse (with adapter) and the Tempest 2000 rotary controller as well as a joypad! The graphics might not be anything special but they are colourful and do the job perfectly. The sound is wonderful though with a wonderfully melodic sound track by 505 Music. All in all I would say that Impulse X is one of the best homebrew games ever released for the Jaguar.

The first Iron Soldier was one of the very first games to really show what the Jag could do. A simply wonderful mech game that featured 3D polygon graphics and a wide selection of varied missions. The second game is pretty much more of the same just with better graphics, better sound and even more missions. There are also some fantastic secrets including a new mech you play as! Get in your 42-foot mech, arm it with a series of powerful weapons and set foot into the war zone. Some stages require you to just blow the crap out of everything and some actually require you to protect your surroundings from attack! I found this second game a bit harder than the first game but not to a point its unfair and it does help that you can save your progress. The 3D graphics now have added texture mapping and look fantastic. There is a wonderfully moody CD soundtrack too and an awesome FMV intro. IS2 is a must have for all owners of the CD unit.

The Jagcode 500 was a coding competition for the Atari Jaguar held way back in 2007. It ended up with 2 joint winners and this CD contains both of those games! The first one is Martian Invasion by long time Jaguar community member Tursi. It’s a real hark back to the days of the 2600 only with more swanky graphics. You are in a ship flying towards earth and all you have to do is shoot down the alien craft for the highest score. The second game, Jungle Jag by Orion, is a very cute platformer where you must make your way through the levels collection diamonds. Out of the 2 its actually a shame that this game wasn’t worked on further because with more levels and some music it could make a really nice title for the machine. This compilation is out there to download for free, as is a nice DVD cover to go with it so its probably worth downloading to play for yourself.

Remember the fantastic Namco arcade game Pacmania that took Pacman into 3D? Well you will be pleased to hear that this is basically that game on the Jaguar CD! The gameplay is pretty much identical as you guide Pacman round a series of different isometric mazes trying to eat all the dots and avoid the ghosts. There are 2 slight changes in this game though from the original Namco game. The first is that when you munch a power pill it gives you a massive temporary speed-up on top of the ability to eat to the ghosts. The second enhancement comes in the form of the fruit bonuses that also work as power-ups in this version of the classic. The graphics are nice and colourful without being anything special and the sound consists of some cheery music and a few effects. One of the first Jag homebrews to be coded by Matthias Domin it’s a really fun title that barely pushes the system but can be had for free now so who cares. Download it for yourself, burn it to a CD and enjoy some Pacman pleasure on the Jag CD!

This game was one of the very first fully encrypted homebrew releases for the Jaguar CD. It is a sequel to the original Jag Mind that appeared a bonus mini-game on Starcat’s own Ocean Depths CD. The original Jag Mind played very much like the classic board game Mastermind where you had to try and guess a combination of 4 different colours in so many turns. You opponent would pick the combination and then tell you how many colours you had correct each time without giving away the order. In Bomb Squad the colours have been swapped for a 4 digit numerical combination and the scenario has you trying to defuse a bomb before it explodes. Rather than an allotted amount of turns in this game you have a time limit shown by a fuse burning down. Fail to beat the time and its BANG! Game over! The single player mode with you trying to beat the CPU keeps score and also allows you to save this onto the memory track cartridge! What’s better is that there is a 2-player mode where you each enter your own code using the Jaguar’s numerical pad and then both frantically try to guess each others code first! This certainly adds a lot more replay value to the game and is a nice addition. The graphics in Bomb Squad all look very nice with use of digitised images and good colour choices. The music here is excellent and really makes use of the CD medium. Overall this is not a game that is going to set the world alight or one that gives you a reason to own a Jag CD. But for those who are already lucky enough to own one this game can be had very cheaply and is well worth adding to your collection.

Before I tell you anymore about this I just want to point out that this is a technical demo and not a game and is in fact one of 4 very similar “planet scape” voxel engines for the Jaguar. This was released around the same time as Groovybee’s Mars Rover demo but is far more impressive. It is much smoother and less blocky than Mars Rover and also has the addition of some sprites that have been dotted around the landscape to add a little more imagination. There isn’t much more to it than that, all you can do is move around in different directions and explore the valleys, mountains and rivers that make up the alien world. I was very impressed with the game graphically and the weird colours actually make it seem very ethereal. It’s worth burning this to a CD and seeing what it’s all about as it’s certainly an impressive engine and I can’t wait to see what Dr. Typo does with it, Rescue On Fractalus anyone?

Another very early homebrew game for the Jaguar this was originally included as part of the BJL development kit and is a now available as a free download for the Jag CD. In case you hadn’t already guessed it’s basically just Tetris with no real bells or whistles. It starts straight from the game screen and is pretty much identical to the Lynx version, called T-Tris, except for a really nice tune that plays throughout. There is a pretty basic info section on the left that breaks down your points, level and what shapes you have had. The graphics are colourful but simple and as I said there is great music but this does get a bit repetitive after a while. The one thing that annoyed me about this game is, just like the Lynx version, when you press down the block shoots straight to the bottom not giving you time to move it like the original Tetris. That said its still Tetris and its still a lot of fun to play so for a free game you really can’t go wrong

What we have here is a couple of demos written by Jeff Minter for Atari to use to show off some of the capabilities of the system. They were found on the hard disk of a computer that was recovered from the old Atari offices in Sunnyvale, California and released into the community by Glenn Bruner. The first demo is Flying Robots and shows of the 2D sprite power of the Jaguar with loads of sprites zooming around the screen with all sorts of scaling and warping effects. The second demo demonstrates the 24-bit colour capabilities of the Jaguar by showing lots of nice looking pictures and then manipulating them in different ways and adding some animation sequences. Overall there isn’t a lot more to see other than that. As it’s just a demo it’s rather hard to rate but it’s always nice to see something by the legend that is Jeff Minter. It also gives a nice insight, and some history, into the very early days of the Jaguar when people were still getting to grips with the hardware.

Everyone loves the classic Jetpac by Ultimate Play The Game. First appearing on the Spectrum, and then ported to pretty much all the other 8-bit computers of the time, it was the game that really put the company now known as Rare in the spotlight. It has also appeared as a homebrew on many more modern systems and the Jaguar is no exception. This is pretty much a straight port of the Spectrum game coded by Cyrano Jones, now better known as main coder in Jag development group Reboot. All the Speccy graphics have been recreated perfectly including the title screen that just has the Ultimate logo removed and replaced with D-Bug’s. The only real addition to the game is some nice mod music that plays during the game. So if you like the original Jetpac then you will love this too, it doesn’t really add anything to the game to take advantage of the Jaguar (except the music) but also doesn’t really lose anything either. It is also available to download for free so is worth a look.

Somewhat of a tribute to the classic arcade game Time Pilot this game is also the first homebrew game to be compatible with the rotary controller! The idea is simple, to move your ship around and shoot everything that trying to shoot you. The ship moves 360 degrees and the screen scrolls as you move around. Your craft is always moving so you will need to move constantly to avoid the alien ships and enemy fire. As well as the enemies there are also little men who appear from time to time holding a bunch of balloons that you can grab for extra points. If you shoot the balloons by mistake he quickly falls to his death but it is possible to catch him if you are quick and near enough. Once you have cleared a certain amount of enemies a really big mother ship appears, if you can destroy this then you move onto a new level that has all new graphics and a slightly harder challenge. The one problem I had with this bit is that while all the small ships are viewed from above the boss ships are viewed from the side and it looks really out of place at time. I realise they were trying to stay faithful to Time Pilot but it doesn't quite work with such huge sprites. The graphics are pretty simple and many seem to have been recycled from other games but I will say that I really liked the warp section in between each level. The sound is also pretty simple with a pretty standard title tune and just a few sound effects and samples in game, I think it would have been nice to have had some banging music during gameplay to accompany the frantic action. Despite faults Kobayashi Maru does have many positives too. The game plays really well and has that come back for one more go factor. I also liked the way it saves all the scores to the memory track. It’s not the greatest game in the world and it doesn’t do anything new but it is a lot fun and that is what counts, plus you can't go wrong with time pilot right? There is a an earlier version of the game that can be downloaded for free or a full retail release that includes several bug fixes and gameplay tweaks.