Care to elaborate on the hardware then? How can you quantify that?
There is absolutely no indication that its 3D capabilities were anywhere near what you could achieve on PlayStation or Saturn. Many of the system's games were flat shaded and built with very simple geometry yet still barely managed to reach a playable frame-rate. Many of its most well known games run very VERY poorly. AvP is a slideshow, Tempest 2000 ranges from 60fps when nothing is happening to 15fps, Checkered Flag runs at like 10-15fps most of the time, it's 3D fighters were all slide shows, Hover Strike is literally in the single digits, etc. Could more have been done with the system in time? Perhaps, but its complicated design and bottlenecks really held it back. Even the ports of Doom and Wolf 3D, which are praised, have issues. Doom runs in the low-res mode but the lack of music is the real issue - the DSP chip which usually handles music was used for other calculations and they didn't have the resources to run music during the game. Wolf 3D also runs at a very inconsistent frame-rate - if you place the camera near a wall, the frame-rate drops into the teens while picking up as soon as you move away.
Then you have 2D games. The best looking 2D game on the system is likely Rayman - but it's also missing visuals compared to the PC, PSX, and Saturn versions. Namely, backgrounds are reduced to a single layer without the more complex parallax scrolling. That's not even touching on the audio quality. It's shocking to me that 16-bit ports, such as Pitfall The Mayan Adventure, ran at 30fps on the Jaguar while the SNES and Genesis versions were a full 60fps. That should not have been a difficult port. What about the various other 2D games running at low frame-rate? 60fps was very rare on Jaguar. At least Super Burnout looks pretty slick and does run smoothly.
Quite frankly, I cannot think of a single game which demonstrates the potential of the system. PlayStation and Saturn demonstrated an immediate advantage even with their very basic launch games. You weren't going to see any 3D, texture mapped 60fps games on the Jaguar as you did on those platforms.
Then we have audio - which was almost universally poor in most games. Digital audio was horribly compressed, the music was of poor quality, and it ate into available resources. It's a problem also faced by Nintendo 64, really, but the Jag didn't have advantages elsewhere to counter it.
As for the controller, well, perhaps that's a bit harsh. I find it to be quite comfortable but the keypad isn't really that useful and the lack of shoulder buttons would become a problem for 3D games (pre-analog). The six button pad exists, and is rare, but it's still not a great pad. The d-pad is mediocre compared to the competition. But hey, at least you could reliably press the '0' button to enable or disable music in most games.
I think it's a fascinating machine but it was hastily assembled. The hardware design is a mess to design for while the actual industrial design is equally poor. The video cable literally attaches to exposed circuit board on the back - who thought that was a good idea?
This is hugely untrue as well. The GBA basically matches the Super NES in terms of capabilities (outside of audio). The Lynx was impressive for its day but ultimately limited. The biggest issue with the Lynx that I've found is that most of its games run at abysmally slow frame-rates. I own about 20 games for Lynx and I don't think a single one of them runs at a full 60fps. At best you get 30 but it's often much MUCH worse. It was neat seeing things like parallax scrolling in an early handheld, but that doesn't mean it's anywhere near as capable as GameBoy Advance.
If you want to talk about 3D? Well, perhaps the Lynx has an advantage there but I'm not really sure if that's an advantage worth having as 3D is poor on both platforms. For its time, what the Lynx could do was insane but it doesn't hold up and the GBA focusing on very high quality 2D is its strength. It could deliver beautiful 60fps 2D games with loads of parallax scrolling, detailed sprites, and a large color palette.
...but that's expected since GBA was released so much later. The Lynx was very ahead of its time and I'm happy to have a pair BUT it still struggled with performance to a disappointing degree. Most GameBoy games at the time at least ran at 60fps as did many Game Gear titles.
I can't help but feel that Atari simply didn't place the proper premium on a high frame-rate - 2D games running at 30fps and 3D games often at 15fps or worse on both the Jag and the Lynx.
Also, the low resolution look of GBA Doom is very similar to the Jaguar version which also runs in much lower resolution (equivalent to the PC version's low detail setting).
This is correct. 3DO was also very limited in terms of 3D and most of its games also ran at very poor frame-rates just like the Jag. These two systems were nowhere near the Saturn and PlayStation in terms of capabilities.
There isn't a single retail game or homebrew demo for any of them that can even match the best launch games let alone later titles released for those platforms.
