Ultra Vortek

At a time when the world had fallen for Mortal Kombat-style fighting games and every console desperately longed for its own digitised, bloody clash, the Atari Jaguar arrived with its own representative of the genre. Ultra Vortek is a fighting game that tries to bring brutal one-on-one duels to the beast among consoles and offer beat-'em-up fans their portion of special moves and flashy finishers.

The gameplay honours the genre's canon. You choose from a gallery of fighters, each with their own attacks, combos and special abilities, and work your way up the ladder of opponents in best-of-two duels. The game bets on bold, digitised characters and flashy finishing blows, which were mandatory equipment at the time for any fighting game aspiring to attention in the wake of the phenomenon Mortal Kombat unleashed. Ultra Vortek tried to appeal precisely through its raw presentation and emphasis on flashy combat.

Ultra Vortek came out for the Atari Jaguar in the mid-1990s and belongs among the console's homegrown attempts to break into the hottest genre of the day. The Jaguar desperately needed strong titles to attract players, and a fighting game was a logical choice, because it was precisely this genre that drove sales across all platforms at the time. The game became one of the few beat-'em-ups in the console's library.

Culturally, Ultra Vortek is interesting as testimony to an era when the market was flooded with Mortal Kombat clones and every manufacturer wanted its slice of the digitised-violence pie. For Atari it was an attempt to keep pace with the competition in a field dominated by far larger and more established brands. Even though the Jaguar failed commercially as a whole, titles like this fill in the picture of the console's determined, if unsuccessful, effort to stay in the game.

Today Ultra Vortek is a curiosity mainly for collectors and fans of the Atari Jaguar, who see in it a piece of period colour and one of the few fighting games released on the platform. It is a reminder of a time when the competitive battle between consoles played out just as fiercely as the duels on the screen.

Why play it: For a portion of period Mortal Kombat-style duels and as one of the few fighting games in the Atari Jaguar library, which collectors and genre fans alike will appreciate.