Platform: Atari Jaguar

Developer: Attention To Detail

Publisher: Atari

Release Date (NA): 1993

Genre:  Shooter

Nerd Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed by Space Invader

There exists a movie from the ’90s called “10 Things I Hate About You.” You may well pretend not to know what I’m talking about, but I can see into your soul, and I know you’ve seen it, even secretly like it a little. Dammit, I’m not projecting … Ahem. In this movie, one empty-headed teenage character pontificates to another (and I paraphrase), “You can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever be just whelmed?”

If the teens in “10 Things” had access to a Jaguar, they’d know that yes, Virginia, you can be just whelmed, and its name is Cybermorph.

Where did you learn to fly?

It’s an apt enough introduction, because to truly understand Cybermorph, you have to understand the 1990s. It was an interesting time, nestled right in between 2D and 3D gaming. To us, the Sega CD may as well have been the monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” for though we whispered of it, nay e’ar did any of us ever touch one.

When someone mentioned a game had polygon graphics, the response was not “Yeah? They all do,” as of now, but “Awww… yucky polygon junk?! Ick!” Because polygons in the ’90s, well, looked like yucky, icky, blocky polygonal junk.

It was important medicine to be choked down as a building-block to modern games, but perhaps because of the aforementioned attitude, Atari didn’t pay much heed to polygons, and their machine supported polygons as if it was all just a phase, not unlike a father supports the angry phase of a teenage daughter who goes to school with the kid who wants to be whelmed. Ahem. In fairness, the Jag was engineered in 1991, years before its fateful release, so one may argue that who would have known, blah blah blah, and a hearty “yada yada yada.”

Numbers: The Jag could render around 35,000 polygons per second, which sounds impressive but looks like this:

But this is a review of Cybermorph, not a review of the 1990s. First the objective stuff. You control a ship running around various galaxies in search of stolen stuff the bad guys have nabbed. They’ve kidnapped people, plans, weapons, all kinds of stuff. Unfortunately, they’ve put them into little yellow rotating pods, so all the stuff you collect (by running it over with your ship) looks exactly the same.

Nothing compares … nothing compares … to you …

There are eight planets in a galaxy, and there are loads of galaxies, which means there are a lot of levels — no fewer than 40. I’ve had the patience to reach the second galaxy. The game is rendered in, say it with me class, polygons. Gourad-shaded ones, which was the trademark Jag polygon game look. Gourad shading essentially soothes the rough edges of the pointy, plain early 3D look of such games.

So, back when the Jaguar was breathing its dying breath, Kay Bee Toys was liquidating its inventory on the cheap. And I mean cheap. I think I got mine for $40, at the pleading of a friend who had undergone an identical investment. Naturally I’d been reading all the mockery of the ill-fated console for the past two years and thought his suggestion made him unfit for society.

However, my first impression was a good one. Said friend invited me over and powered up Cybermorph, scoffing “-this- is 64 bits?” As my last console had been the Genesis, which had sat collecting dust in the first non-video-game phase of my life, I wasn’t on the level of scoffing at the machine. I was too busy gawking at the shaded Griffin ship (as I would learn it is called) as it released from its pod, the camera rotating needlessly around it before zooming behind it. Skyler, a.k.a. green Sidnead O’Conner, popped up and said “Good luck.”

The 90s version of the future

Look that over for a second. A camera ZOOMED, and a voice SPOKE. Based on my antiquated expectations, this was heavy shit. Scaling and rotation were enough to impress me, but a free-roaming 3-D world with a talking robot? It wasn’t love, but I was definitely in “like” with Cybermorph.

As the summer progressed, my friend and I played our dead consoles, running up high scores and calling each other.

So many planets, so little time

“You killed me,” responded my pal after I reported a score of 300,000, a score he crushed the following week and I, to this day, have never bothered to top. These scores were not won by way of having fun, no no. Every structure and enemy in Cybermorph has a point value, and to run the score up, we wouldn’t leave a planet until every building, creature, satellite, radar – every structure was blown away, leaving us roaming barren, empty landscapes until finally moving on to the next world.

So let’s set the wayback machine to 1993 and think about what this game looked like in its era. The mag to which I subscribed, “Video Games: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine,” raved about Skyler as the coolest part of the game. Remember, in the 1990s, clear, varied speech in a cartridge game was damn near mythical. Remember, as well, that they were reviewing the version of the game that featured Skyler’s full speech set, which was double the size of the more common cost-cutting version that repeatedly spits “Where did you learn … to fly?”

Back when this was all fields

Betty Hallock, the magazine’s stock hot chick, gaming journalist (who now is a prestigious food writer) said that while you could really get into piloting the ship, it seemed somewhat lacking. She cited that perhaps her expectations of a 64-bit system were high, and it was difficult to discern what one could reasonably expect. Atari’s hype definitely made the machine seem like “The Matrix” come to life. Nevertheless, the magazine awarded the game a 7/10 rating, far more generous than the majority of more contemporary pondering.

Here in the future, knowing what’s possible, it’s pretty easy to focus on draw distance, frame rate, and polygon count, but you never saw any one of those terms in a 20^th century magazine.

All-in-all, I agree with Betty. Following Atari’s extremely aggressive ad campaign, Cybermorph falls short of expectations. It is, however, a good early example of free-roaming, creative gaming done right. It gets tedious, and Skyler does get annoying, so it won’t rank higher, however biased I am by my Summer of Jaguar, as it came to be known…

…Well, as it came to be known by my friend and me.

The T-Griffin, just contemplating on an angry green planet