It’s no secret that the Atari Jaguar was a terrible failure–one of gaming’s worst. The last dud in the sordid history of Atari’s Tramiel family ownership, the Jaguar followed the Lynx’s underrated hardware debut in the late 1980s with an early ’90s abomination of poorly designed hardware and software that barely competed against its 16-bit forebears, much less the higher-tech NeoGeo, 3DO, CD-I, 32-X, and Sega Saturn technologies against which the system was supposedly targeted.
When has any other game ever included offbeat, observant moments like these? These sequences are not only moments to breathe in between breathless action sequences; they are moments to truly imbibe the sadness and stillness that permeates the entire experience. In that sense, Heavy Rain is very much a game about depression.
Canabalt may be a simple 2D flash game, but it’s one of the best titles of this generation.
