Space Ace (Atari Jaguar CD)

Space Ace – Jaguar CD

https://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/184658586146/techturd-space-ace-jaguar-cd

Space Ace was the follow-up to Dragon’s Lair and released less than a year after that game in 1984. Both games were originally arcade games and later received various ports over the years, some more true to the arcade than others. What made these games unique for the time was that they were Laser Disc based. Action unfolded on the screen with animation just as good as any animated movie and at various points you would have to make a decision and react quickly and accurately to continue on. These games could be quite difficult but they didn’t have much in the way of replay value.

Early ports of Space Ace for computers like the Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS and DOS based systems were significantly altered due to memory and especially storage limitations. Any attempt to port this game before CD-ROM drives became popular had to be more limited. The first CD-ROM version was for the Macintosh and it contained most of the scenes from the arcade version but the video was downsampled. Later, CD-i and Sega CD versions came along that were mostly faithful to the arcade version (especially the CD-i version). There have been a number of ports since including the Atari Jaguar version (box cover above) and versions for the Wii among others.

The Atari Jaguar version gets pretty mediocre to poor reviews but it isn’t so much that the Jaguar version is particularly terrible, it’s that Space Ace is not quite as good as Dragon’s Lair and these types of games really appeal only to a limited audience. If you like these old laserdisc games than the Atari Jaguar CD version is a lot better than most of the older ports. Of course, these days you can emulate the original with Daphne and that’s going to be as good as it gets. Still, the Jaguar version is reasonable trade-off. It can be had relatively inexpensively and if you have a Jaguar it’s more convenient than using Daphne.

The above images are from the Atari Jaguar version of the game.