Profile Atarian: Taz

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Taz likes video games!
by Taz

November 3, 1996

I've always loved video games. One time when I was about three, my mom took me with her to a mall and I vanished while she was shopping. She panicked when she turned around and realized I was missing. Turned out I was in the arcade mesmerized by Space War, Asteroids, Berzerk and others. My parents were baffled as to how I knew where the arcade was. Soon afterwards, my dad bought me a Pong machine, my first home video game console, and then later an Atari 2600, which provided me with years of video game mania.

As I got older, I still dropped by the arcades. The worst group of arcadians I've ever met was at Cornell University. There were so many of us that someone joked about us forming a fraternity. We often hung out in the arcade beating, shooting, or blowing each other up; playing cooperatively; figuring out patterns to various games; and trying to reach the ending to other games like Neo-Geo's Magician Lord and Capcom's Street Fighter 2 - later I earned the nickname, Blanka (guess which character was my favorite).

When the Atari Jaguar was released, a friend of mine in med-school told me about this new game console he bought and kept raving about the "awesome 64-bit power which hasn't been harnessed yet." However, the Sega Saturn, Sony PSX, and Nintendo 64 were being developed at this time, so I decided to wait a while and observe how the video game industry would change before I purchased a next gen console of my own. In time the Saturn was the rave when it was first released, and then the PSX hit the market like a bomb. Most of my friends had either a Saturn, PSX, or both, so I usually played their machines instead of getting one of my own [he-he-he]:)

I soon realized that a lot of the games for these 32-bit systems were just "eye-candy" to me and had no replay value (ie. boring!). Later, Dave Davis at Bits-of-Fun had the best sale on Jags I've ever seen, so I got one of my own along with Tempest 2000. It was a breath of fresh air and offered games that not only were appealing to the eye but also got my adrenaline running. Some of my friends told me I was crazy, I wasted my money, or that Atari was dead, so I showed the Jag to one of my friends who owns a Genesis, SNES, Saturn, and PSX. After playing Tempest 2000, Defender 2000, AvP, and Hover Strike, my friend actually found the games *too hard* (wimp)! He liked the Jag, however, he wouldn't get one at the time since it looked like the Jag was on its last leg.

Atari Corp has been merged with JTS, but Atari and the Jag are not dead yet. I am looking forward to the Jag games (probably some of the best) that are still yet in development and that are being released (Towers II, Zero-5, Worms, Breakout 2000).I especially look forward to blasting my friends into space dust in BattleSphere.;) Although there aren't shelves of games available for the system, the few games that are available for the Jag are quality titles that I can play over and over again. The Cat still has nine lives.