I'm still on my shit. I want to get Byron on every major game console, and this image is a step toward achieving that goal on the Atari Jaguar. (Now for the Herculean feat of actually making it appear on real Jaguar hardware.)
It's worth noting that I don't actually like this system. In fact, it's one of those rare game consoles that I have even less love for than the Nintendo 64. The Nintendo 64, in my estimation, was a fumble for Nintendo, not compatible with previous consoles and with significant hardware quirks that left it trailing far behind the industry leader of the time, the Sony Playstation, and the less popular but consistently entertaining Sega Saturn.
However! The Atari Jaguar is far worse, a limp rebadge of the Atari ST computer. (They didn't tell you this in advertising. They told you a lot of other things, mostly lies reinforced with badgering and insults. Ah yes, the time-honored marketing technique of bullying the customer into coughing up their lunch money!) Like the N64, it's chained to cartridges by default, and like the Saturn, the internals are a mess, with the aforementioned Atari ST hardware joined by a handful of support chips. And shocker, it wasn't really 64-bit, despite Jack Tramiel's insistence to the contrary. There are SOME 64-bit data lines, but not throughout the architecture.
The mediocre hardware coupled with disinterest from third parties meant that the few games the Jaguar actually had ranged from lackluster to "what the hell is this?" Trevor McFur, one of the whopping two launch titles, was on the WTF end of the spectrum, a side-scrolling shoot 'em up with cheap rendered graphics. It's at the same time too simple and too cumbersome to play, and the whole affair is topped off with cut scenes featuring animals' heads pasted onto human bodies. It looks ridiculous now, it looked ridiculous in 1993, and it's a piss-poor attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the furry pilots in Nintendo's Starfox.
So naturally I had to see how Byron would look in that context. I took an image of a brown bear cub with an upturned lip that looked like a smirk, then stuck its head on a Wal-Mart model of a baby in a footed sleeper. It more or less works. It's not any more absurd than the game's original artwork, anyway.
EDIT: Heaven help me, I turned this into a file that will run on an Atari Jaguar. This is not a fun platform, either for playing games or making them. Especially not making them.
