An explanation of what’s going on here can be found in the intro post.
Last time, we looked at the Saturn in July 1996 with NHL Powerplay ’96, Galaxy Fight, DecAthlete, and Legend of Oasis.
When we last looked at the Jaguar, we were closing out 1994 with Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales, Kasumi Ninja, Val d’Isère Skiing and Snowboarding, Zool 2, and Iron Soldier.
Now, we’re entering into 1995, which is finally gonna be the Jag’s year, you’ll see, you’ll all see! We’re going to start by looking at the first five releases of the year with Syndicate, Troy Aikman NFL Football, Cannon Fodder, Theme Park, and Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls.
**This post was originally published on 8/27/2025 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Syndicate
Developer: Bullfrog Productions
Publisher: Ocean Software
Release Date: 1/27/1995
Time to Oppressing The Cyberpunks: 40 Minutes
I think I’ve found the copium that I’m going to go with for the Jaguar. Of all the console options available in ’94 and early ’95, this thing was the best possible system to port non-multimedia computer games. Most floppy-based games could be made to fit down to the 3 Mb cartridge, it theoretically had more processing power than the 3DO or previous gen consoles, and with the numpad it had enough available inputs to accommodate games made for clunky keyboard controls. Truly, the power of the Amiga can only be replicated by the Jaguar, never mind that this port came out a year after the original game dropped out of relevancy.
Not that Syndicate should need that many finicky inputs, since this is a relatively simple isometric point-and-click action game that can be thought of as the missing link between old school strategy games and what we think of as the Realtime Tactics genre popularized by Jagged Alliance. The fiddly bits are in the Bullfrog patented management layer between missions, where you mess with a map and research in ways reminiscent of the later XCOM, but menuing doesn’t need too many inputs so it should work on early-90’s gamepads. In all, it controls and runs as well as you could expect from an early console port of this game.
The game itself is fine, I guess. It would have certainly been eye-catching in ’93, since it’s an isometric, mechanics-heavy action game released a year before XCOM or Ultima VIII. I have to keep that in mind as I play levels that are relatively small and straightforward while spinning only a handful of plates with the management layer. Syndicate was a very early Molyneux game, and while the menus can sorta evoke a similar vibe to something like Theme Park, the style hasn’t really congealed at this point. You play could the original release running on DOS Box and have an ok time poking at it for a couple of hours. Many of the problems with the point-and-click combat, item usage, and UI can be chalked up to the game coming out slightly ahead of its time. Other studios with different or better ideas would launch their games in ’94, with the core genre conventions solidifying by around ’96. Being first to the party is noteworthy but you usually end up standing around awkwardly.
Not to mention that this Jaguar version is a 1995 release, at which point the game would have already been obsolescent. I’ve been saying that a lot with the PC ports on the Jag and 3DO, and I will likely keep using that critique because it’s a necessary reminder that these port jobs, no matter how competent, weren’t going to be killer apps.
Troy Aikman NFL Football
Developer: Telegames
Publisher: Williams Entertainment
Release Date: 2/1/1995
Time to Intercepting My Balls: 35 Minutes
Troy Aikman was born in 1966 in suburban Los Angeles and was eventually raised in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma. He would grow up to play football as a quarterback for first the University of Oklahoma and later UCLA. Over the course of his college career, he made it apparent to anyone paying attention that he was by far the most talented QB of his cohort and went as the first draft pick to the Dallas Cowboys in the 1989 NFL draft. He underwent expected rookie problems in his first two seasons at Dallas, namely repeated injury and not winning. Yet, after getting acclimated the hard way, he and the all-star team built around him took the Cowboys to two consecutive Super Bowl wins at the end of the ’92 and ’93 seasons. He saw more injuries in ’94, and the team would barely miss returning to the Super Bowl, but the next year he stayed intact and led Dallas to their last ever Super Bowl win in February 1996. Both he specifically and his team generally would decline through the late 90’s, leading to his retirement at the end of the 2000 season. Despite being medically beat to shit and unable to keep a marriage together, he’s had a 20+ year long career as a football commentator, got inducted into the Football Hall of Fame, and seems to be doing well for himself.
Really, the worst thing that can be said about Aikman’s performance as an NFL quarterback is in convincing the entire US that the owner/manager of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones, knew how to run a football team. After buying the withered remains of “America’s Team” shortly before the 1989 NFL Draft, Jones worked with former University of Miami coach Jimmy Johnson to rebuild the Cowboys. Johnson knew enough about up-and-coming football talent for the duo to assemble a historically all-star team anchored by the offensive trio of Aikman, runningback Emmit Smith, and receiver Michael Irvin. That knowledge of the best young players available in the late 80’s and early 90’s led to Dallas’ dominant run in the mid 90’s. Yet, since both Jones and Johnson were belligerent assholes, their partnership fell apart around the same time their young stars stopped being young. The team’s decline would have been predictable, as all things eventually fall apart. Yet, Jerry Jones’ insistence that it was his own judgement which led to those few glorious years has led to almost three decades of irrelevancy for the Cowboys. Maybe it would have been better for the city of Dallas in the long term had Aikman and his teammates not been generational talents.
Perhaps the second worst thing associated with Aikman is Troy Aikman NFL Football. This is an also-ran Football game originally released on the SNES a few weeks before the 1994 NFL season, when Aikman and his Cowboys were looking poised to be the first three-peat in NFL history. The studio who slapped this thing together were a subsidiary of Tradewest and the job likely took less than six months. Even still, Tradewest had some experience making bargain bin Football games so the whole package coheres enough to exist. The game has all of the modes and gameplay options you would expect from the genre, even if the presentation and simulation quality didn’t come close to contemporary Madden or produce as much fun as Tecmo Super Bowl. It was a middling game that existed with a famous guy’s face on it.
Yet now we’re talking about the Jaguar port in February 1995. The season is over, Aikman doesn’t have the level of cache he did six months ago, and this is a last gen game in every way that counts. While I would personally rather play this than the 3DO Madden, that choice is one between different severities of unpleasant. The Jaguar is in its second year on the market and it’s only now getting a real sports game. Not only that but the game in question is a forgettable last gen snoozer. This isn’t a good look, but I suppose we’ll talk more about that later.
Cannon Fodder
Developer: Sensible Software
Publisher: Virgin Interactive
Release Date: 2/17/1995
Time to Committing Sensible War Crimes: 15 Minutes
When we last saw this game on the 3DO in 1994, I wrote a lot of unkind words about it. While I stand by my assessment of the game specifically and England generally, I do recognize that my review was a bit too vitriolic in tone. The reason I wrote that way was because it’s fun, you should try it sometime. Now, since I’ve already let loose on the Dallas Cowboys this time, I’m in a more sanguine mood to discuss the 1993 “Amiga” “classic” that is Cannon Fodder.
The point-and-click interface is still a bad way to control a top-down Run’n’Gun action game, and the humor is still pathetic and toothless in a similar vein as the Lemmings or Bubsy games. Otherwise, this is a fully functional port that runs well enough and plays as fine as possible for a game reliant on an onscreen cursor. 1995 is, again, really late for an Amiga port to come out on anything, so this would be skippable catalog filler for any console that had a catalog of any reasonable size. But this is the Jaguar, so Cannon Fodder being a fully featured and functional video game automatically qualifies it into the top half of the system library. The 3DO got Star Control II, and the Jag got this thing. I will continue to assert that this console was neat and deserved better.
Theme Park
Developer: Bullfrog Productions
Publisher: Ocean Software
Release Date: 3/1/1995
Time to Playing This Game For The Last Time: 20 Minutes
This is now the fourth time I’ve covered Peter Molyneux’s Theme Park for this blog series. We all know what this game is and that you should go play Planet Coaster or Rollercoaster Tycoon instead, unless you’re a weird game history nerd. The only things to note about these versions are that either the emulation for this game is messy or the original port was technically messy, and that the numpad on the Jag controller actually benefits this game’s playability. Besides those two points, this is just Theme Park, which like the previous games automatically qualifies it as a top-half Jaguar game for being a fully functional product. This is the last time we will see this thing because there was blessedly no N64 port, so to honor reaching the end of this journey, go look back on every other time we’ve seen this game:
- PS1: Part 006
- Saturn: November 1995 (Part 1)
- 3DO: 1994 (Part 13)
Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls
Developer: Telegames
Publisher: Williams Entertainment
Release Date: 4/1/1995
Time to Not Avenging My Girlfriend: 35 Minutes
The Double Dragon franchise keeps trying to die, but it isn’t allowed to. Technos’ original 1987 arcade game is extremely important because, despite not being the first Beat ‘Em Up, it established and solidified just about every core gameplay convention of the genre as an immediately fully formed idea. All Beat ‘Em Ups are Double Dragon likes, and that original game saw a level of success in its own time commensurate with its importance. Technos rode that success as hard as possible with three direct sequels released over the following five years with innumerable ports and original side games for just about every conceivable platform. The genre had evolved past the core Double Dragon formula by the time Super Double Dragon released in 1992, with Technos then squeezing the last of the money out of it by licensing the IP out for a terrible animated show in ’93 and an even worse live action movie in ’94.
The final nail in the coffin for the franchise should have been the release of Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls for the SNES and Genesis in late ’94. This was a Fighting game not made by Technos, but instead by our friends at Tradewest, with no connection at all to the game series anyone actually cared about. It was instead based on the animated series no one liked. Billy and Jimmy Lee are on the roster, but there’s no Abobo or anyone else a potential player would care about, with the game instead relying on generic jobbers from the show to fill out the rest of the cast. Even worse, it was a bad enough fighting game that its infamy is remembered even to this day. It is firmly in the annals of F-tier fighting games spoken of in the breath as Rise of the Robots, Criticom, and other abysmal trash.
This should have been where the series died, yet that original Double Dragon is too important and nostalgic to just leave alone in the dustbin of history. Following over 15 years of occasional remakes and ports, the license began bouncing around various studios that were convinced they could do something with it. This has led to at least 4 attempted reboots and continuations of the original Double Dragon games since 2012 with varying results. Somehow this franchise is too important to stay dead.
To illustrate how dead this thing is supposed to be, let’s dig deeper into Double Dragon V. The 16-bit releases of this thing are infamous for having generic characters, boring stages, bad sound design, crummy special moves, uninteresting game flow, and mediocre overall feel. These releases lacked any depth or originality in their gameplay design and were universally considered 5/10 kinds of games. They did feature a story mode, though, where you play as one of the Lee brothers going through pre-defined stages with a simple levelling system, so at least there was that.
For as bad as those versions are, we didn’t play either of them. No, this is the Atari Jaguar and given some number of months of extra development to port this thing to the next generation, Telegames made several changes. All their work made the game demonstrably worse. First, this version is missing the story mode for no particular reason. Something like half the roster is gone, it has visual updates to all of the sprites, backgrounds, and character portraits that actively make them look worse, and the controls have been mapped in the worst way possible. Instead of porting over the Genesis three-button control scheme, this game uses a six-button scheme that uses the A,B,C buttons as well as 1,2,3 on the numpad. This is extremely awkward and effectively leaves the player fighting with half the inputs tied behind their back. Not only does this thing suck, but it’s barely playable.
This is bad enough to weigh like an albatross around the neck of a game catalog this small, yet it somehow isn’t the worst game we’ve seen on the Jag. In fact, this is the best Fighting game we’ve encountered so far, since it’s nowhere near as rancid as Kasumi Ninja nor as bleakly uncooked as Dragon. Sit on that for a minute. We’re over a third of the way through the Jaguar library and Double Dragon V is technically the best Fighting game on the system, while someone somehow had already conned Street Fighter II onto the 3DO. What are we even doing here. Are we truly fell creatures living beyond redemption?
It’s all uphill from here, right? Anyway, let’s update the Ranking of all Jaguar Games and scram.
1. Wolfenstein 3D
…
4. Syndicate
7. Theme Park
8. Cannon Fodder
10. Troy Aikman NFL Football
17. Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls
…
22. Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales
Next time we’ll fly back over to the Saturn in August ’96 and look at Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996, Alien Trilogy, Alone in the Dark: One-Eyed Jack’s Revenge, and NiGHTs Into Dreams.
After that, we’re coming straight back to the Jaguar by looking at the rest of its releases up through June ’95 with Hover Strike, International Sensible Soccer, Power Drive Rally, Pinball Fantasies, and Super Burnout.
You can find me streaming sometimes over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. Those streams have us looking over the games covered in these entries along with whatever other nonsense I have going on, such as my effort to play through every PS1 JRPG and Genki racing game.
Also, I’m on Bluesky now for reasons of self-aggrandizement, though I need to post more often.
I also randomly appear like a cryptid over on the Deep Listens podcast network. Be sure to check out their podcasts about (supposedly) obscure RPGs, real video games, anime I’ve never heard of, Canadian sci-fi, and sometimes sports!
You can watch the stream archive featuring these games below.
Fifth Generation Gaming 
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