A game you probably are more familiar with under the title of "The Game of Life," that board game is actually popular enough in Japan to have received Japan-specific editions as well as video games (of which this is one). I hadn't planned on picking this one up, but I'd heard it was quite neat and happened to find it at Book Off earlier in the month, so I figured I'd give it a try. Upon reflection, I actually had probably heard of the Taito-developed game released a year or so earlier, so I hadn't actually found the sick score I thought I had, but I bought what I bought, so I figured I might as well see what makes it tick XD. I played the game on real hardware, and I went through three games (two short, and one long) and spent about 11 hours doing it all, though I managed to win only the last of those games that I played (the 5+ hour long one).
There is no story to speak of, as this is a pretty straightforward adaptation of the board game. The additions present are largely in the execution of the gameplay experience, but the story is still the same. You start as a baby, and this game follows you through school and work all the way to the end of your life, and at the very end King Yama judges your soul and you get to see which part of the afterlife you end up in. It's just a board game, though, so it really doesn't need a story. The story is one you put together yourself as you rage at your friends for how much bullshit luck they happen into XD The actual gameplay is really just The Game of Life, though it is a very noble attempt at trying to make that (bad) board game more interesting. You spin the spinner, you get good events and bad events, you decide to go to university or not and you get a job, you can get cards to use when you want. It's nothing that different from many versions of the game, at least as far as the base mechanics go. For the more advanced stuff, they've put in a small handful of mini-games which you get to play now and then to upgrade your stats. That's right, there are stats in this version, smarts, body, style, and morality, and you'll need higher stats to both get certain jobs as well as get promotions in those jobs. You can also get married and have kids (if you get lucky enough to land on the romance spaces and get lucky enough events with them), and you can also buy things like pets or real estate or find things like skills or items, though this is still The Game of Life. At the end of the day, everything comes down to money, as that's the game's only real method of totaling up your scores, and that's really where a lot of the faults come into play. Now when we start talking about faults, we can't really ignore that, at its core, The Game of Life is a pretty boring board game. You can make little decisions here and there on how to use the special cards you find, what job to pick and when to change careers, and which path to take on the small handful of tiny forks in the road, but this is a game largely defined by how lucky each player gets and not much else. This isn't helped by just how badly the AI is at playing the game. They make utterly nonsensical choices constantly outside of cards with specific targets (which they always use to target the person in 1st place). They never buy real estate, and that's often going to be the metric that decides who wins, so they're actually really hard to lose to once you know what you're doing (especially because your standing only takes into account your current cash-on-hand total, not your net worth, for whatever reason). It's also really easy to get trapped into cycles of debt that are nearly impossible to get out of, as the game makes it VERY hard to get out of debt with your debt growing by 10% every payday regardless of your salary. I could list a bunch more little problems here and there, but it all comes down to that playing by yourself is awful, and the way the game works overall makes it not terribly fun to play with friends either. It has procedurally generated boards, and you can even make your own boards and make your own characters to play as, both of which is quite neat. However, on my copy, character creation simply doesn't work, so take that for what you will. Games also take like 2+ hours to play at the absolute shortest, so even if you're just playing with one other person, get ready for the long haul if you're playing this game. That's right, it's not just boring, it's also VERY long too XD The aesthetics, at the very least, are very nice. The 2D animations that play for your character during the good, bad, and otherwise events are very charmingly put together and it's always fun to see what weird nonsense is gonna befall your poor little fellas. The music isn't anything special, but it fits the tone of the game just fine, and the mini-games in particular have very fun little songs tied to them. Verdict: Not Recommended. While this may be about as noble an attempt as is possible (outside of the nearly useless AI) to make The Game of Life an interesting and fun experience, but there's only so much that you can polish a turd XD. It's a neat curiosity on the N64, but it's also just such a crappy time that it's not worth much more than being a neat curiosity, and your time is probably better spent playing any of the other myriad of party games that are on this console.
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I've played quite a lot of Star Wars games over the year, and I've been something of a fan of Star Wars for quite a long time too. In my head, I always knew that this game was quite popular, so I've been meaning to play it for absolute ages, but it's only now that I've finally gotten to playing it. I'm not the biggest fan of flying games, but given that this was more arcadey than sim-like, I figured this would be okay for me. It was clearly okay for me enough to beat it, at least! XD. It took me about 9 hours to beat the game's 16 missions, and out of those I got 3 silver medals and 6 bronze medals. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Rogue Squadron is the story of the titular squadron, who are a fighting unit in the Rebellion and then in the New Republic in the Star Wars expanded universe. This game has four chapters, with the first three having five missions and taking place in or around the respective first three Star Wars films, and the last chapter 4 only having one mission and taking place well after the 3rd film. You usually play as Luke Skywalker and it's following side stories around him specifically. The writing is nothing really amazing or exceptional, but it all makes for a fun time. This game exists to facilitate fun Star Wars Stuff, and the story does a very good job of allowing that. The gameplay is a more arcadey approach to a flight sim. You play in a series of missions with their own specific objectives, and sometimes those objectives evolve and expand as you progress through the respective mission. Your flying is far from complicated as far as flight sims go, but it's a lot more complicated than something like Star Fox 64. There are even some upgrades you can find hidden in some missions to empower your arsenal even further. They're quite hard to find and generally very well hidden, so I'd recommend a guide to find them, but there was no way I was ever going to beat the game without them. I'm not the biggest fan of this kind of game, and I'm also not super familiar with this kind of game in general, but with my limited experience with these kinds of things, I found it fairly well designed. That said, there are some design choices and hardware limitations that really harm the overall experience. The missions have basically no checkpoints outside of 4 respawn extra lives you get. Player information is also quite poor, as you only ever know your own health. The health of the thing(s) you're guarding, where objectives are at all, or even where missiles/shots are coming from is never made clear and it can make it very difficult to survive missions, let alone complete them. On top of all that, the very often poor framerate really makes the whole experience that much more frustrating than it already is. None of these are totally game breaking problems, but they definitely show just how badly the game has aged, and it'll all likely make for a very frustrating time for people more used to more recent (and better optimized) flying games. The presentation of the game is, like the story, perfectly suited to facilitate fun Star Wars Stuff. All the ships you fly and fight against are just like they are in the movies and such. The voice overs and VA are good quality, and the sound-alikes they got for the characters from the films sound spot on. It's a bit of a shame that there's no Japanese VA, because I can only imagine how difficult it is playing a flying game while hurriedly reading subtitles, but at least that's something you can justify by saying that it makes it more like the films if we keep the original English voices. The music is also taken largely right from the films, and the presentation is really just what you'd want from a space-flying N64 Star Wars game. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I will fully admit that this just isn't a game for me, the technical issues of the hardware its on make it a pretty difficult game to recommend. If you're a fan of flying games or a BIG Star Wars fan, you very well might find this game a lot of fun, but if you're just looking for some casual Star Wars fun on the N64, this game is probably going to be quite a difficult game to get through, and it's likely going to be a pretty tough time to find fun with it as well. Continuing my journey through the weird and wild pile of N64 games I picked up earlier this month, I decided to give a go on this one I picked up fairly spur of the moment. I hadn't originally planned to get this, but it was so cheap that I figured heck, why not take a chance on a weird anime game. It's not like the N64 has terribly many of these, after all, and this one is even developed by HudsonSoft! It took me around 2-ish hours to beat the game and unlock all the characters on original hardware.
This game doesn't really have a story, as such. For those unaware, B-Daman is a Japanese toy series that's all about little toys that fire marbles at other little toys (basically). It dates back to the early 90's, but it's never managed to gain much traction outside of Japan. Your main goal here is to beat all three ranks of the JBA B-Daman tournament, and you have a roster of characters from the Super B-Daman manga series to play as to do it. They have some banter with each other between stages (like in a fighting game), but overall there's just really little story here in the first place. However, it's hard to call that much of a bad thing for what's basically a glorified mini-game collection, and it sets up what it needs to do just fine. The actual gameplay is split across two main modes. On the battle mode, you have a 2 to 4 player mini-game that's something quite close to the block falling game from Kirby 64's multiplayer mode, where you move around a floating board packed with obstacles and try to bump each other off into oblivion. It's honestly really fun, and it definitely would've been the mode I played the most if I'd had this to play with friends as a kid. On the other side of things, you've got the single player mode which is also effectively a dueling mode if you're playing with another player. These consist of 11 different one-on-one mini-games, and each tier of the three tournaments just consists of beating AI opponents (of increasing difficulty) in three, seven, or all eleven of them. Their quality is bit of a mixed bag, but they're overall quite solid, and most of them would feel right at home in something like Mario Party 3's duel mode mini-games. Against another player, they'd all be quite good fun, but against the AI, the biggest issue is that there are some games they're good at and some games they're awful at, and if you picked a character with bad stats in a particular field (as each one has their own stat pool) some games are really horribly difficult to clear with certain characters. This reviewer's humble recommendation is to pick someone with an even balance in everything so you won't get screwed over by a game you happen to have bad stats for, since the AI will never be playing games they don't have good stats for (as each AI character always plays a certain game when you face them). The graphics are quite good and fun for what they are. They're very anime of the time, but they capture the style of the original art well. It has a very Mario Party vibe to it (though this game does actually predate that series by a little bit) from the mini-games to the music, and it's all around a really competently done thing. Verdict: Hesitantly recommended. This is honestly a really hard one to recommend, but also a really easy one. If you have friends to play it with and have a menu guide, this can be a pretty fun time! It sucks that you've gotta get through a decent bit of the story mode to unlock a lot of the duel mini-games, but they're still plenty fun for what they are. The biggest sticking point is that there's so little content that you're far better off just playing one of the three Mario Party games on the system. What's here is generally good fun, but there's so little of it that you're probably going to be left wanting, and I imagine for virtually anyone reading this that the license attached to it isn't going to be much of a pull factor for you anyhow ^^; Known in Japan under the hilarious title of "VIOLENCE KILLER: Turok New Generation", after I finished The first Turok, it was logically time to progress onto the other one that came out here. I wasn't a *super* huge fan of the original Turok, but I had more than enough fun with it that I was looking forward to this one, especially since I'd heard this was the better of the two. While my first impression wasn't amazing, I ultimately ended up having a pretty good time with it, especially after I finally ditched the super sensitive aftermarket joystick that I was using for Turok 1 and actually used a proper N64 controller for this one XD. It took me around 25 hours to complete the normal difficulty of the Japanese version of the game on original hardware using a guide a couple times and without using any cheats.
Where Turok 1 had almost no story in the actual game, Turok 2 has a fair bit more. Going away from the more mystical aspects of Turok and towards the more sci-fi parts, this starts a new holder of the title of Turok getting summoned to the Lost Land to save it (and the universe) once again. An ancient alien entity called the Primagen is attempting to destroy the universe with the help of several clans from across space and time, and it's up to Turok to stop them. It's pretty standard for the time and really nothing special, as basically all of the story here is just exposition, and when it isn't it's sequel baiting XD. That said, I do have to give massive props to Acclaim for actually dubbing the game into Japanese! This is the only western-developed game on the N64 I know that did this (and it wasn't super common on the PS1 either, in my experience anyhow), and I definitely want to give credit where credit is due for another excellent localization for the region when most companies barely bothered. Ultimately, the story is fun and good enough for what it's here to do. It's here to facilitate fun dinosaur & alien shooty-bang action, and that's just what it does. The gameplay of Turok 2 is fairly similar to the first game but also VERY different in a lot of ways that matter. On the more similar end, we have a shooter with several levels (6 this time instead of 8 like last time) with three bosses + a final boss. In each level, you have to collect a number of keys to unlock more worlds, and there are oodles of guns you can find and use to kill the oodles of enemies that are here to mess you up. On the somewhat different side, we now have mission objectives to complete in each stage, and you can't leave the level until the mission objectives are all complete. You also have holy eagle feathers to find to use to unlock special talismans that bestow special powers. However, all of that extra stuff is *effectively* just keys with extra steps. The mission objectives may as well just be more keys with how it's just more finding hidden stuff, and the talismans can only be used at certain points to access content you need to access (usually) anyhow for progression, so even though Turok 2 is dressed up like a more complicated game, this is just as much a key hunt as the first game. The level design overall is by and large better and more forgiving than the first game. There's a LOT less first-person platforming, thank gods, and there are also certain ammo and health points in each level that respawn resources infinitely, making it a lot less scary to go hog-wild with your big, fun guns than it ever was in the original Turok. That said, a key hunt is still a key hunt, and if you didn't like it in the last game, you're very likely not going to like it here either no matter how much better polished the level design is. The guns and such are switched up quite a bit too, but in ways that aren't obvious at first. We've toned down the number of weapons and also made UI improvements that make switching between upgrades to old guns as well as different ammo types WAY easier in a way that's really good. Certain guns like the mini-gun (or what approximates it in this game, anyhow) have also gotten HUGE buffs in power while others like the super OP grenade launcher from the first game have gotten insanely huge nerfs. Explosive weapons on the whole were things I found almost completely useless with how wimpy they were, and that was a big disappointment in just how much it limited my arsenal. On the topic of guns though, the big reason I had to switch to a controller with a proper joystick was because this game actually gives you a crosshair to aim with! This game on the whole requires you to have FAR more accuracy than the first game did, so it's a good thing it does. While there *is* still auto aim (which you can turn on and off whenever you want in the options menu) that is very helpful, things like head shots are now possible, and dynamically damaging enemies for different point values depending on where you shoot them can make them explode and die in all sorts of lovingly animated ways. However, that also brings about another big problem. The new "damage based on where they're shot" thing is ultimately more trouble than it's worth for my money, as it mostly just lead to enemies sometimes dying in just one shot, while other times they'd take half of the max ammo for a gun to kill because the game just decided that they hadn't been hit in quite the right way for whatever reason. It's a neat idea, but on the N64's hardware just doesn't allow for the degree of accuracy you'd need to really have a system like this pay off. On the subject of hardware, this is also a good time to bring up just how bad the slowdown can be, because especially when you're moving fast and there are a lot of enemies on screen (which happens quite often), it can be REALLY hard to actually tell what's going on because the framerate just tanks that badly. This wouldn't be *so* bad if actions weren't linked to framerate, as you'll often start moving more slowly while enemies get slowed down less, making the player get punished by taking more damage whenever the framerate starts to dip. It's not a game-destroying problem, but the framerate and inconsistent damage stuff were both things that annoyed me very greatly the whole game, and it's something even the most fun and powerful guns in the game couldn't fix. Graphically, Turok 2 is quite a nice looking game. We're firmly into the mid-life of the N64 by this point, and we've also got the RAM expansion pak to play with, so Turok actually has some really nice looking resolutions to play with if you've got it. Oddly enough, the resolution actually gives you more to *see* on screen, as it effectively zooms you in if you're on low resolution mode, and even more oddly, your resolution mode doesn't seem to have any impact whatsoever on improving the framerate (sadly). Enemies are animated and designed really well, and all six levels have very unique and cool looks to them too, and I also loved the music. There are some really wild picks for the songs in this game, and it's overall a really diverse soundtrack compared to what I would've otherwise expected, with some levels having stuff that sounds like it'd be right at home in a Zelda game, and others sounding like they've been pulled right out of a Rare platformer. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as this absolutely is better than the first game, and it does pick up a fair bit once you hit level 3 or so and start getting some access to bigger and more fun guns, this game has way too many issues to recommend very confidently. Just how difficult it is to aim as well as how frustrating the framerate issues so often make combat makes this a far more frustrating time than it really feels is necessary. The newer remaster is honestly SO different that it's frankly closer to a modern reimagining than a simple remaster, but it takes these pieces and does things that are so much more geared towards a modern notion of a fun time with an FPS that it's really hard to recommend not just picking up the newer remaster unless you're a really big retro FPS fan and simply must see what it's like on the original hardware. This is a game I’ve effectively owned in one form or another digitally for quite some time, and it’s also one that I’ve been meaning to get to actually playing forever. Recently, though, my partner needed a palate cleanser from the visual novel she was playing, so she decided to play through this. I love being able to chat with her about stuff we play together, and given that I was in the mood for something of a palate cleanser myself, I thought what better time to finally give this a try. It took me about 1.5 hours to beat the English language version of the game after doing as much around the island as I could be bothered to do (and getting 17 feathers in the process).
A Short Hike is the story of Claire, whose aunt May has taken her to a favorite family nature park. On this island are many hills, including the highest point on the island, Hawk Peak. Claire is awaiting a very important phone call, but the island has basically no cell phone reception. Her aunt tells her that the only place on the island she’s likely to get signal is at the top of Hawk Peak, which luckily for her is only “a short hike” away. And so our hero sets off on her (relatively) short journey to the top of this nearby mountain to get the reception needed to receive this phone call. A Short Hike is a relatively simple and short game both gameplay-wise and narratively, but it’s a very heartfelt little adventure all the same. What you choose to do, where you choose to explore, and whom you choose to help on your way up the mountain will very much make your Claire’s journey feel unique unto itself. There are all sorts of friendly tourists and staff around the island to talk to, help out, and play with, and their dialogue is so fun and charming that I had a lot of fun just finding new people to talk to. Another game I played earlier this year, Lil’ Gator Game, clearly takes a LOT of inspiration from this, so it was hard not to compare the two, but as the sort of progenitor to that later (and for my money, better) game, I think A Short Hike is a lovely story about reflecting upon growing up and how you relate to other people. As for the gameplay, A Short Hike is mostly about exploration. Your only real goal is to make it to the top of the mountain, but to do that, you’ll need to be good at climbing. While you can jump and glide right from the start, if you want to be able to jump again in mid-air or scale walls, you’ll need to find a gold feather, and you’ll gain more mid-air jumps and climbing time the more feathers you collect. Exploring around the island, you’ll find all sorts of other folks to help or interact with, and they can give you little side quests that’ll reward you with money, feathers, or other goodies. Exploring is often its own reward as well, as you can find money, tools, and even gold feathers just lying around to add to your arsenal of treasure hunting. The island is big, but not overwhelming, and it makes for a fun little adventure even if you’re just trying to get to the top as fast as you can. Now I played this on PC, and while you *can* use the arrow keys, I very quickly abandoned them for use of my Xbone controller. The platforming and such is hardly difficult, and there isn’t even really a fail state to worry about at any point, so if you don’t have a controller available, it’s not the end of the world. That said, using a joystick was just so much better than the arrow keys that I really have to recommend using a controller for this if at all possible. The presentation of the game is absolutely adorable. You can tell that the creators are huge Animal Crossing fans, as all of the animal fellas populating the island often look like they could’ve popped right out of it x3. Solidifying that theory for me was how you can not only find a shovel to dig up buried treasure, but the X’s on the ground look just like the Animal Crossing ones, and the shovel sound is even almost exactly the same to boot x3. This isn’t a bad thing at all, though! They do a great job of making that style feel fresh to this game (which the very different mechanics from Animal Crossing also help a lot with), and the very chill music helps add to that whole vibe wonderfully as well~. Verdict: Recommended. This wasn’t a game I super duper loved and adored, but I’ve had a lot of competition for that sort of thing this year. As it is, A Short Hike is a bite-sized narrative and gameplay experience that achieves what it sets out to do very nicely. The story is cute, the gameplay is fun, and if anything, it was just a bit too short and left me wanting more! Which, out of any problem a game can have, I think leaving you wanting more is far from the worst one you could possibly be stuck with. The Turok games are ones I’ve heard about but seen very little of for ages and ages. Up until now, the only thing that I really knew about this game was that I’d heard it had some quite annoying first-person platforming in it. In my recent haul of a pile of N64 games, this and its sequel were to of the quite cheap N64 games I’d gotten my hands on. I always love to see how western games localized for Japan end up looking, and especially given that only these first two Turok games (while not Rage Wars nor Turok 3) ever made it over here, that made it even more tempting to pick these up and see what they were like. It took me around 17 hours to get through the game on normal difficulty. I played through the Japanese version and used no cheat codes while playing on real hardware.
The actual IP for Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (or as the game was called here, “Space Time Soldier: Turok”) was actually originally from a comic that started in the early 50’s. Upon learning that this was a property originally created in the Golden Age of comics, that made everything about it make a LOT more sense XD. You play a Native American dimension-hopping warrior that carries the name (and title) of Turok. It’s your job to protect the universe from all manner of danger that may threaten it, and in this case, it’s the evil Campaigner who threatens the safety of the universe. His aim is the legendary Chronoscepter, an artifact so powerful that it was broken into 8 pieces to keep it from ever falling into the wrong hands. It’s Turok’s job to traverse the Lost Lands at the edge of the universe and stop the evil Campaigner in his quest for universal domination! That’s the story as well as I can remember it, at least, as it’s not really very important. Virtually all of the plot is in the manual, and it doesn’t really relate to the gameplay at all. However, this being largely an action-game, it’s difficult to call that a terribly serious problem. We don’t need much story to think about if we have enough things to shoot at, and Turok follows this philosophy very well. The premise and presentation of certain enemies certainly has a not insignificant problem with casual racism, but it’s also nothing that will read as particularly special in that regard for anyone familiar with western media from the 1990’s. It’s certainly not “good representation” by any stretch for any of the groups portrayed in this game, but it’s hardly unique in that regard, so I can only hold that against it so much. The gameplay of Turok is a first-person shooter that clearly takes a lot of cues from stuff like Doom (as so many FPS of the time did) while also injecting some of its own ideas here and there. You have 8 big ol’ stages to travel and explore through as you search for the special keys that unlock successive stages as well as pieces of the Chronoscepter (if you happen to want a big Final Boss Deleter after the end of stage 8, which I did, and it was very appreciated to delete that awful bugger). You’ve got over a dozen weapons to do it with, and there are about a dozen or so enemy types that will try and keep you from your goals. It’s not super novel in the ways it does this stuff (especially with just how many of the weapons feel like they were pulled straight from Doom, even down to which guns share which ammo types), but I say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Levels are fun to explore, enemies are fun to shoot with your guns, and the boss designs are (for the most part) fairly good, even if their limited AI often gets in the way of them being any more challenging than the normal enemies you have to deal with. The problems that this game *does* have are largely where it tries to innovate. The biggest thing its trying to do towards that effort is have fun in 3D spaces, and that generally amounts to verticality and platforming, and the platforming in this game is pretty darn rough. You not only are locked to a first-person perspective, but you also can’t see your player model. Your biggest savior here is the map that you can pull up that overlays on top of your vision. While you can use that little yellow triangle’s position relative to the edges and platforms around it as a pretty darn good platforming aid, it isn’t perfect. There are plenty of places (both secret and otherwise) where the map just doesn’t show you where the platforms are, and just getting good at vibing out how far you can jump ends up becoming a very important skill in Turok, map or no map. Aside from that, the issues are largely either subjective on my part or just mean design on the game’s part. It’s weird to say, but unlike a game like Doom or what have you, where there are only a fixed amount of enemies per stage, Turok has enemies spawn in but not respawn. What I mean by that is, while enemies will be preexisting in stages and more enemies can and will warp in to replace them, it’s seemingly up to the game’s whimsy which enemies happen to spawn and when and where. I can’t count how many times I thought I’d sussed out which enemies in an area would get a replacement spawned in for them after I’d killed them, they’d end up not getting a replacement spawned at all. Thankfully, you can at least hear the very distinct sound of an enemy teleporting in, but that still doesn’t stop the game from enemies spawning or jumping down behind you SO often in ways you could barely expect. This lead to me developing an adaptive strategy, often rushing forward with reckless abandon just seeing what enemies (and traps) lie in wait for me until I died, then loading my previous save so I could more smartly deal with what I needed to and ignore what I didn’t. Figuring that out in and of itself was at first frustrating, but it ultimately became a kind of fun in and of itself. It’s certainly not how I’d prefer to play a game like this (especially with this control scheme), but I’d have a hard time saying whether it’s outright good or bad. However, just how difficult enemies can be to deal with is something that wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if you were playing on hardware with a bit more accuracy. On something as accurate as a mouse & keyboard I would’ve had a lot less trouble, but with the awkwardness and relative imprecision of an N64 controller, I had a lot more trouble ^^;. Now, part of this is down to me using an aftermarket replacement joystick that’s far too sensitive, so aiming was always going to be a bastard on any shooter I played on this thing. But even outside of that, the auto-aim the game employs for your hitscan weapons can feel very arbitrary in its usefulness, and this is made no better by the lack of an aiming reticle for your guns. You can usually make do with how the yellow triangle that shows where you are on the map, as it’s *roughly* in the middle of your vision, so it’s a kind of makeshift reticle. However, that’s going to really start losing its effectiveness once you need to use non-hitscan weapons like the grenade launcher or the rocket launcher (the latter being so difficult to aim that I virtually never used it). Then there are other issues that arise from the limitations of the controller as well, which really just boil down to “the N64 simply doesn’t have enough buttons”. Using the C-buttons to move and the joystick to aim was always going to be an imperfect solution, but this goes for double when A and B are your buttons to scroll through your weapon wheel. This is a double problem if you happen to be using the left handed mode where the D-pad moves you instead of the C-buttons (which I found woefully inferior due to the precision they want out of the button presses, so I gave up after an hour or two), but not being able to both switch weapons and move (or turn) at the same time makes a lot of encounters against spongier enemies a lot more punishing than they need to be, even if you already know what’s coming. The worst part of all of that is how awful they make strafing side to side. If you double tap left or right, you FLY very far in that direction. I have absolutely no idea why they did this, as there are virtually no spaces large enough where that’d actually be an advantage, and it’s not like your normal strafe and forward move speeds aren’t fast enough already. All this amounts to is a ton of unnecessary deaths off of the game’s MANY narrow bridges over bottomless pits because you dared be slightly hesitant with a rightward strafe (and it’s not even like the game has a multiplayer mode that’d make this more advantageous against other players either). At the end of the day, Turok’s controls are a really mixed bag. To a large degree, there’s not much I can fault it without just wielding 20/20 hindsight like a hammer. Given that you need Z to fire and R (or L) to jump, there’s really no better solution they could’ve used with this controller for switching guns. Perhaps less guns overall (and given how useless so many of them are, I wouldn’t say that’s a bad idea) would’ve helped a bit, and I’d say the level and game design with the platforming sections and enemy spawn stuff also make this just that much more awkward to deal with. That said, this was a still very young genre when this game came out, and there weren’t really enough games that gave you this degree of movement freedom to know that all this stuff was a poor idea. I think it’s still a *bit* too forgiving to just file it all under “well it’s an old game, so it’s gonna have old game jank”, but I do think that Turok is very much like most FPS games from this generation of gaming. You’ve really just got to be ready to hop back into an era when controlling an FPS on a console was still a bold new science being explored, because if you’re not ready for that, then trying pretty much any FPS on the N64 is likely going to be bad idea, dinosaurs or no dinosaurs. Aesthetically, Turok is a very impressive looking game at the time. They used state of the art motion capture technology for the human enemy animations, and it REALLY shows with just how fluid and nice looking their animations are (for both fighting and dying!). It’s a bit annoying still that one or two death animations make it look like enemies are still alive, granted, but overall the care and attention put towards enemy animations was time well spent. Levels are well detailed and varied looking, but many worlds *do* share a lot of textures, so remembering your way around can be a bit tricky. Using your map is essential, because not using it means you’re probably going to get lost quite a bit with just how similar levels can look at times. The music is very nice and fits the mood very well, and the only downside I can start to think about here is the draw distance. The draw distance fog is VERY close by, which can make some platforming quite awkward (especially with how the colored fog can make the map harder to read), but it fortunately only rarely makes enemies harder to fight. 99 times out of 100, you can see enemies before they can see you, and picking them off while they’re still out in the fog can be a very valuable strategy when the environment allows for it. The first footage I saw of this game made it seem like the draw distance issues were going to make playing it a horrid experience, but I was very thankful with just how wrong I was on that front. I can’t say the draw distance (and the slowdown issues that appear when there are a LOT of enemies on screen) aren’t a problem at all, as they obviously are, but they’re far less of a problem than you might imagine they’d be, and they’re way less of a problem than the stuff with the controls or the platforming issues. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Had I played through Turok on PC, I imagine I would’ve liked it a fair bit more (not to mention completed it faster XD). That said, I still had a good time by the end of it. It was very back and forth, with getting used to the controls/platforming and figuring out that often running was a far more valuable strategy than fighting being their own respective trials to overcome, but once I started getting the feel for it, I was having quite a good time despite how difficult the game was. Figuring out how to get past what was in front of me despite the control issues and enemy ambushes turned into a fun challenge all on its own, and I’m genuinely looking forward to playing the sequel (and not just because I’ve heard that it’s such a better game XD). If you’re into retro console FPS or you’re like me and you just want to check out some classic, lauded N64 games, this is one definitely worth checking out. On the other hand, if all that you’ve read about me complaining about the controls and the game design have made you recoil in horror, then this might be one you’re better off trying out on PC (if you end up playing it at all ^^;). Even outside of my recent kick of playing a bunch of N64 games, this is a game that I’ve had my eyes on for quite some time. Ever since I played through the other three N64 Bomberman games a few years back, I’ve had this one on my to do list, but it’s just been too expensive to justify picking it up. Recently, I finally decided that I’d waited more than long enough, and I bit the bullet on paying the 2300 yen for this bad boy to see what it was all about. This is a tricky one to call “beaten” in a couple ways, but the biggest reason is because there is actually no way of wiping the preexisting save data on the cartridge, so the previous owner’s memory was still there and there was nothing I could do about it ^^;. As such, I can’t really fairly give a time beaten for this one, though I did play both the mini-games and classic single player mode until I got the credits in each, so I’m comfortable calling that beaten enough. I did it all with the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Bomberman 64 doesn’t really have any story to speak of, so far as I’m aware. Perhaps there’s some in the manual, but at least as far as the game itself goes, there is no story here. The “Bomberman Land” (of which this would end up being one of the first in that sub-series) section has a sort of narrative as you collect more medals and unlock more of the park, but that’s *really* stretching it on what we’d call a “story” ^^;. But this is Bomberman! We don’t need a fancy story to enjoy our Bomberman, or at least I don’t, and it’s very hard to begrudge the game for focusing what it’s good at. This is a perfectly fine Bomberman delivery device, story or no story, and I’m plenty happy with what’s here. Despite being on the N64, this is an entirely 2D Bomberman game, so if you want traditional Bomberman goodness on your N64, this is your only way to get it. It’s something of a compilation of different games and game modes that make it somewhere between a “Greatest Hits” compilation and a survey course of 16-bit era Bomberman stuff. As such, we have a single-player mode where you go through 10 stages and then fight a boss (where you’re ostensibly trying to get the fastest clear-time you can). You also have a 4-player battle mode that you can access alongside that one as well, and it will be very familiar to anyone who’s played a multiplayer Bomberman game before. After that, we have Panic Bomber, the Tetris-like falling block puzzle game that they made for Bomberman, which you can play whenever you like. You also have a SameGame puzzle game, and I’ll admit I have no idea why it’s here (at least in terms of its relation to Bomberman), but it’s here if you want to play it! XD. Lastly, you have Bomberman Land, which is a big theme park that you can walk around and play a couple dozen mini games in to unlock more games until you reach the end. As far as Panic Bomber and SameGame go, they’re very good little adaptations of their respective games. It’s a bit of a shame there’s no multiplayer aspect to Panic Bomber, but if you want score attack, this game can give it to you. The Bomberman Land mini-games are also sadly all single-player. That in and of itself isn’t a crime, but with Bomberman as a franchise being SO obsessed with multiplayer, it’s a bit of a shame that all of these decent little mini-games (virtually all of which are put together with assets completely unique to themselves) have no party element to them beyond just trying to beat your friends’ scores. There’s also the issue of justifying their inclusion in the first place. It’s a bit lost on me why the Bomberman Land stuff is even here in the first place. They’re not particularly Bomberman-y, and just tacking on a mini-game collection to a Bomberman game compilation seems like a very weird choice to me if it came at the cost of fleshing out the multiplayer or classic single-player modes a bit more. A lot of effort clearly went into this, but outside of the neat little spectacle of it existing in the first place, I’m not convinced it really adds much to the overall package. Speaking of which, the classic multiplayer mode itself is a pretty well put together thing for what it is, but anyone familiar with 16-bit era Bomberman games is going to find it *very* lacking. There aren’t many map types or power up types, and there’s even only one kind of Louie to find. It’s a perfectly serviceable multiplayer Bomberman game, mind you, and it having native 4-player support (without the need for a multitap) is in and of itself something to set it apart from basically all previous Bomberman games, but it’s not really going to wow anyone who’s even somewhat familiar with other games in this series from this or the previous console generation. The classic single-player mode is what I went through a lot of myself, and properly beating it is when I was comfortable calling this game “beaten”. It’s only ten stages, but you go through them along a bit branching path system, where you go into either an up exit or a down exist after destroying all the enemies in the stages, and that will bring you to the corresponding next level on the tree. There are eight different end points on the tree, and getting to the end gets you one of four different bosses (with there being a respective easier and harder version of each, getting us a total of eight different fights). Beating every single level on the tree at least once gives you the final boss fight once you’ve beaten the boss typical to that route down the tree, and he’s a tougher fight against a big guy who has all of the powers of the other four bosses and then some. As far as single-player classic Bomberman content goes, this is easily some of the easiest stuff they’d ever done, and I’m totally okay with that. With just how merciless the 16-bit era game final bosses always are, I was totally cool with the bosses here being glorified 1v1 multiplayer matches against special opponents, and it made for a really fun time! Like with the other modes, it’s certainly not going to match up content-wise to most other Bomberman games, but it’s a well put together and very fun version of this kind of Bomberman, and my five or so playthroughs through it (to mop up the stages the original owner had missed) were all good fun~. The aesthetics of this game are very nice. They’re very Bomberman, especially in the modern style they’d start using in the 2000’s (especially in the Bomberman Land series), but they’re very cute and well done. The music is also very Bomberman, to put it as simply as I can. It’s nothing super awesome or unique to write home about, but really to be expected from a “Greatest Hits” Bomberman game like this. It’s all done very adequately, and there’s really nothing to criticize either way. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is one where your mileage is *really* going to vary based on what you want from your Bomberman and how much other Bomberman you have available to you. If you only have an N64 and it’s your main multiplayer console of choice, you might have a lot of use for a survey course of 2D Bomberman stuff like this (especially with 4-player support that needs no multitap). However, if you’ve got one or two other Bomberman games (either older or newer), chances are there’s not much this game can offer you that you don’t already have. It’s certainly a neat oddity on the N64, especially when put aside the other Bomberman offerings on the console, but there’s just nothing particularly unique or worth experiencing for the price tag compared to all of the similarly priced Super Famicom, PS1, or Saturn Bomberman games out there (and that’s not even mentioning more modern Bomberman stuff). This game is a jack of all trades and master of none, and while it isn’t a bad game, if you’re at all familiar with Bomberman, the good times you have with this will likely just remind you of better Bomberman games you could be playing rather than continuing to play this ^^;. Having been something of a fan of the F-Zero series for a long time now, I’ve always been somewhat curious about the very aesthetically similar Wipeout series. Though it’s even appeared on Nintendo consoles (with Wipeout 64 being effectively identical to XL here just with the tracks mirrored), it’s always existed in this space of “Sony’s F-Zero” in my head. Given that it’s a western-developed title, I was somewhat surprised to discover that they were released in Japan at all, and this was the first (and so far only) one of them I’ve ever been able to find locally at anything accepting a reasonable price. Being in quite the mood for racing games still after Diddy Kong Racing, I decided to finally pop in this game to see if I could finish it. I didn’t 100% it, and frankly I likely never will, but I was able to get gold on all six tracks of the arcade mode, and that’s good enough for me XD. It took me around 6 hours to complete the arcade mode in the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Wipeout is very much a video game’s video game in just how little premise it needs. It’s future racing with flying F-1-ish cars. There are different companies who are represented with different cars, and the tracks themselves do technically exist in or around real world places, but that’s just about all you’re gonna get with Wipeout XL’s writing (if you can even call it that). But this is a PS1 racing game! As long as the cars are fast and the tracks are fun, you don’t really need any more than that for a good time, and Wipeout XL is absolutely not an exception to that rule. It’s fun future races, and we don’t need much more excuse than that to have some fun racin’ action~. The actual racing of Wipeout XL is *very* different than what I was expecting for someone otherwise only familiar with F-Zero. Frankly, it’s almost a Yakuza and Shenmue situation, where despite their significant aesthetic similarities, they’re almost nothing alike when you start getting into what actual gameplay involves. Wipeout XL, as mentioned before, has only six tracks in the normal arcade mode as well as four different cars to pick from (though more tracks and cars are unlockable if you’re a mad enough lad to brave the super hard challenge modes you unlock after you beat arcade mode). Your goal is to go around the tracks and get first place, of course, but the actual way that the racing is put together makes it very different from any other racing game I’ve played (which is admittedly not terribly many <w>). The first and most major thing I’ll point out is how braking works. Rather than just a normal braking feature, Wipeout has you using R2 and L2 for a right and left “air brake” specifically, cutting off the acceleration to your right and left sides respectively. This effectively means that you right brake to turn right, left brake to turn left, and do both if you want to do a general brake. It doesn’t sound like a huge deal on paper, but in actual practice, this amounts to a TON to get used to, and it really makes Wipeout feel like a beast all its own as a racing game. It also means the skill ceiling on just how good you can get at these tracks is pretty damn high if you put forward the effort to memorizing them (which you’ll need to do at least a bit if you want any hope of beating arcade mode, let alone the post-arcade challenge modes). However, this also means that the skill floor is quite high as well, and more casual racing game fans are likely to be turned off by just how brutal Wipeout’s harder courses are to complete. The other thing that makes Wipeout quite different from something like F-Zero is that, while this game does have shield energy that is the difference between car life and car death, it also has weapons Mario Kart-style. Run over a colored tile on the track, and you’ll grab a weapon power up of the corresponding color. There are quite a few different power ups at play (from standard boosts, missiles, and shields to a difficult to aim instant-kill beam to even an auto-pilot feature), and they really add a whole new flavor to such a fast-moving racing game. Not only do the Wipeout cars go fast, you see, but they also actually get faster on their own as the race goes on, so between all the weapon-ing and high tech air braking you’re doing, there’s a lot to sink your teeth into if you’re willing to put the time into it. All that said, that high skill floor comes with a few other causes as well. For starters, Wipeout XL is 12-man races, and you always start at the back. You’ve got some pretty stiff competition to overcome if you want to see first place. On top of that, it’s also kind of a fake 12-man race. Something you’ll discover quite quickly as you get better is that it only *appears* to show all the other racers at the start. Let the guys more than a couple places ahead of you disappear over a hill (out of the view of the camera), and they’ll have literally vanished by the time you crest the hill moments later. Only 3 or 4 other racers *actually* exist at a time, and that can make for some pretty frustrating experiences trying to pass those buggers on the harder difficulties, just waiting for them to spawn in so you can actually pass them. On top of that, the computer is also not out here to win. They’re here to make YOU lose. They will actively focus you down with any weapon they can get their hands on, even passing up attacking fellow computers right in front of them just to fire a homing shot directly back into your face. This is aided a little bit by there being a lot of power ups the CPUs just can’t get at all, with their arsenals generally being restricted to standard or homing missile types as well as the ever deadly mine spreads (so they can’t get the big earthquake weapon or the instant death gun, thank goodness). That said, the big pain in the butt here is also that those jerks don’t even need to pick up weapon power ups to actually get weapons (though they can still snipe weapon tiles from you by running over them just before you, of course). The computer just automatically is given weapons periodically, and you can tell this very easily by the announcer very helpfully saying the weapon they’re about to use a second or two before they’re about to use it. This factor, combined with how you have shields and can therefore die, means there were tons of times where I just happened to find myself behind a recently spawned pack of 3 racers who all unloaded homing missiles and mines into my face at once resulting in me going from 80% or 100% shields to 0% in an instant. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you just how frustrating a racing experience that can make for, and just how badly the CPUs cheat was a big reason I had no interest in pursuing victory in anything beyond arcade mode. Cheating computers aside, the aesthetics of the game are incredibly cool. They build futuristic cityscapes and wilderness tracks that look super cool as they zoom past your car, and the flying future cars themselves look pretty darn snazzy too. This is all on top of a very pumping EDM sound track that, while not my particular favorite kind of music, certainly fits the gameplay very nicely. The game also runs really well, and while tracks take a good few seconds to load in, they never need to again once you’re there, and they even restart really quick too. I never had to worry about just driving into a blank void because I happened to take a corner too fast, and that’s pretty darn impressive for a game with such fast speeds not on the N64. The only real issue I could say (apart from the lack of any kind of mini-map making the memorization of tracks that much more of a necessity) is that the colors and such can get a bit *too* loud at times. It can be difficult to actually parse the track and the cars at times because you’re going SO fast and the colors are so all over the place, which doesn’t make for a very difficult time when you’ve learned a track a bit, sure, but it does make the process of learning a track that much more difficult. Last but not least is the very funny product placement in the game, with Red Bull energy drink ones being the most prominent. They’re not so funny in a vacuum, sure, but when you consider that this game came out in ’96 despite Red Bull not being sold here in Japan until 2005, it’s hard not to giggle about for me x3. That does speak to, however, just how poorly a localized game this is in the first place. While the packaging and manual is thankfully translated into Japanese, there is literally no Japanese text in the actual game whatsoever. This isn’t the *worst* problem in the world for a racing game, but for one like this that requires setting up type of race, car you’re using, and track before you actually hit start to initiate it all, it must have been a real pain for players back in the day who didn’t have terribly great English skills. I’m certainly used to western publishers not giving much of a crap when localizing their stuff for Japan, but Psygnosis hit an all new low for me with this one. Frankly, it’s no surprise that these games were so unpopular (and are therefore now so rare) in Japan on the PS1 when SO little effort was put forward into actually making them playable for a non-English speaking audience. Hesitantly Recommended. This is far from a bad game, but it’s one that I think only pretty serious racing game fans will really like. The skill ceiling is high, but the skill floor is also very high, and the big cheating AI only compound that skill floor’s difficulty even worse. There’s a lot of fun to have here, but casual racing fans are likely going to find this one a bit too difficult (and a bit too content light) to really get much fun out of. That said, if all this sounds fun to you, it’s well worth checking out! You just might find an all time new favorite series buried here among the zooming fury of the far flung future~. This was another game that I picked up in my recent N64 haul, and it’s also another white whale of a game from my childhood. Like the Pokemon Stadium games, this was a game I played a fair bit when I was younger, but it was just SO hard that I thought there was never any way I was ever going to beat it (as a kid or as an adult). Even picking this game up again now, I thought I’d still never be able to beat it. I wasn’t even going to pick this game up again (despite its 300 yen price tag) recently until my friend Psy convinced me to pick it up, as it’s one of his favorites. I was still in a bit of a slump for what I was going to play next, and after picking this up for a little, I decided to toy around with it and see just how far I could get, even though I was super ready to eventually hit a point where I’d just have to put it down and call it quits. After about 10 or so hours with the Japanese version on real hardware, I actually managed to do it! I beat Wizpig and saw the credits, and managed to get 43 balloons (dipping into the post-game extra world to do the base races at least once) by the time I was done with it. Like with Pokemon Stadium I’m certainly not going to try to do the post-credits extra challenges all the way, but I’m incredibly proud of myself for sticking with this one long enough to actually complete it where my younger self never could~.
On Timber the Tiger’s island, the denizens run about, race vehicles, and play all day. That is until one day the big magical bully Wizpig comes along and starts ruining things for everyone. Until someone can beat him in a race, he won’t leave either! That’s where you come in! Picking one of the eight possible racers (whom you can swap between whenever you want on the title screen), you’ve gotta complete all the challenges around the island and kick that big awful Wizpig’s butt! It’s a quite complicated setup for a racing game of this era, admittedly, but that’s because this isn’t just a racing game. It’s an *adventure* racing game. What exactly that entails is a lot of what makes DKR such an odd and novel experience. For the racing parts, it’s a quite solid cart racer with really polished tracks. While it does have items, it’s not like how something like Mario Kart 64 does. Instead of random item boxes, there are differently colored balloons you can pick up while you’re racing, and each one gives a different respective type of power up (reds give missiles, blues give boosts, etc.). While it’s a bit of a bummer that they’re *quite* so specialized compared to Mario Kart powerups (none of them have different directional capabilities the way you can fire a green shell forward or backwards, for example), they make up for that with a risk reward system of upgrades. Keep collecting the same kind of balloon, and your item will increase in strength. It’s a very neat system and allows for tracks to be much more heavily curated as to when players can have things like missiles, boosts, or traps, and give the game a very different kind of feel than something like Mario Kart 64. One neat thing that it borrows from Super Mario Kart (but actual Mario Kart games actually use very infrequently) is the banana system. In Super Mario Kart, if you collect coins around the track, it’ll slightly increase your speed. Bananas do the same thing here, and the more you have, the faster you’ll go, adding another bit of strategy to each map. Do you go for bananas for extra speed, or race more efficiently to just get ahead in the first place? Or do you just go for powerups and try to win that way? This is made even more interesting when combined with aspects of DKR that it lacks compared to Mario Kart 64, such as drift boosting. Even though it came out barely a year later, the thought and ideas presented here make it a *really* different feeling kart racer than Mario Kart 64, and it does a great job giving a new and fun spin on this formula that I honestly think I overall prefer, at least in the broad strokes of things (especially as someone terrible at drift boosting XD). The last really cool aspect that it has as a racing game is that it’s not just a cart racer, at least not in a literal sense. In addition to races that use your little carts, you also have races in airplanes as well as races in hovercraft, and the three vehicles handle *very* differently and make for some really cool variety in the types of races present. Sure, you’re probably familiar with how to drive a kart racing car, but can you translate that into the far more momentum-based driving of the hovercraft? Can you translate it to the twists and turns (and near lack of breaking) that you have in an airplane? DKR ends up having a ton of actually great variety in its tracks because of this, and it’s one more thing that makes the whole thing feel like such a special little racing game for the time. As for the adventure aspects, there’s a lot to describe here. Rather than just a menu to scroll around to pick your races and what not, DKR has a hub area just like a game like Mario 64 does. Your goal here is to collect golden balloons, and you get those sometimes by special races in the hub world or just finding them hidden in the hub, but most of them are from winning races and challenges. There are four worlds (with one extra one unlockable after you beat the credits), and each one has four races each (with each world and each race having a required number of balloons you need to have to access it in the first place). Beat each one once, and you’ll get a balloon each time. After that, you’ll need to race the animal boss of that world, who is a special race with special mechanics, and they’re generally quite tough. After that, you need to go and do all four races *again*, but this time with a special rule: There are 8 N64 coins hidden in the race, and you need to collect them all AND win against harder-than-last-time AI in order to get your balloon. Only after THAT can you go race the animal boss *again* (where they’re usually WAY harder) and then you win one of the four tokens that you’ll need to race Wizpig at the end. To top it all off, beating the animal boss that second time unlocks a Trophy Challenge, which is basically a grand prix of all that world’s races for one last big trophy (not a balloon), and you’ll want those trophies if you want to get to the last post-credits extra space world. Those trophy races, despite being against the hardest type of AI racers the game has, are ironically not very hard at all, as the CPUs are actually still just as vicious in regards to one another as they usually are. As a result, the same guy isn’t always getting the same places, so you don’t actually need to place first or second that many times to win even the hardest of them. Not really a complaint, but something that’s odd all the same. If my exasperation didn’t quite come through in the last two paragraphs, the only thing that really needs explanation here is that a lot of the “neat” and “unique” ideas that make up DKR are often what make it such a difficult game to recommend. Most of these ideas of adventure game and racing game melding are certainly “neat”, but it’s a lot harder to argue that they’re particularly “good” ^^;. The N64 coin collecting challenges are a neat idea, but the also just take so much of the fun out of kart racing. Especially in certain stages where you can *really* tell that these stages were specifically designed to make the coin challenges a nightmare, it can really start to grate on the fun aspects of an otherwise really solid racing game. Same thing goes for the animal boss races, including ol’ Wizpig himself, who are dastardly difficult and 100% deserve the infamous reputation they’ve caused this game to have. Heck, even just finding your way around the island to the different worlds can be confusing at times. On top of that, you have the actual way the game works under the hood which makes all of that that much more frustrating. The AI cheats, sure. That’s likely no surprise at all, as that’s how basically every racing game works, especially on the N64. What’s a bit more annoying is *how* they cheat, especially when combined with the other mechanics at play. One thing that can *feel* like cheating is certain badly explained mechanics. Racers actually have different stats for max speed, acceleration, and handling, but they’re just hidden away in the manual, not the game. The correct way to boost, on the other hand (laying off the accelerator until the flame behind you goes away) is never explained anywhere though, so far as I can tell. That’s just bad communication of information, however, and it’s not what I’m talking about here when I say the AI cheats. Compared to something like Mario Kart’s item system, it’s very easy to observe when the AI is cheating itself items it shouldn’t have, such as when it gets automatic tier 2 or 3 trap items from green balloons despite only grabbing 1 of them (because it’s the first green balloon of the race). Similarly, sure, bananas can make you go faster, but I cannot count how many times the AI just inexplicably was FAR faster than me despite having no bananas while I had over 10 (a very high amount). Even outside of just how frustrating the animal boss fights can be, at least they’re not other cart racers. There’s some expectation that they’re operating on unfair or different rules from the player. The actual racers, however, are both observably quite bad at actual racing (hence why the coin challenge AI *feel* so much harder than the actually-better-at-racing Trophy Challenge AI), and their cheating is so obvious that it makes it all the more annoying when you just can’t quite beat them at a particular challenge. The actual recycling of content is quite clever, especially when it comes to using new vehicles on different tracks, but the way it’s all executed ends up very consistently turning a fun time into a frustrating time. The aesthetics are, very predictably for a game from Rareware, really excellent. The racers themselves are all 3D models, no 2D tricks here outside of how certain things like your wheels render, and the tracks are all distinct and fun and colorful. The music is also, of course, freakin’ fantastic. Even in the little breaks I took between the three play sessions I beat this in, I just couldn’t get the sound track out of my head, and even despite all my issues with the game and just how relieved I was to FINALLY beat Wizpig and see the credits, I nevertheless STILL went back to check out the last extra world at least in part to see what new music it had! While this is far from my favorite N64 game, this is easily one of my favorite sound tracks on the system, that’s for sure. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a weird thing where if you’re trying to play this game for multiplayer stuff, it’s an excellent game and very highly recommendable. It’s a very well put together kart racer with a ton of personality and a stellar presentation, albeit with battle maps that are a little wanting. On the other hand, if you’re trying to play the single-player content, you’re in for a VERY rough time with a LOT of caveats to your enjoyment. Rare was never great at balancing their games, and DKR is no exception to that. If you go in with your expectations tuned accordingly, I think you can still have a really fun time with this one (especially if you’re a racing game fan), but if you’re a more casual racing game fan and/or you MUST see the credits of any game you start, I think Diddy Kong Racing is probably a game you’re better off not playing, as it’s far more likely to bring frustration rather than fun. In a bit of an early Christmas present to myself, I recently picked up a big pile of cheap N64 games that I’d been meaning to nab from a local used games shop. This was one of those games that I ended up picking up, as it’s always one I’ve been meaning to pick up and play all the way through. Or at least it *was* one of those XD. During the course of playing it, there were just too many things that seemed far too familiar, and while I’d originally assumed that I’d only briefly played Pokemon Snap but never ultimately finished it, I now think that I actually have played and beaten this game before at some time in the past XD. Regardless, that was so long ago I could barely begin to guess when it was, and I also had a great time (re)playing through it now! It took me around 4 or so hours to beat the game while snapping pictures of 58 out of 63 Pokemon, and I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The story of Pokemon Snap is one of main character Todd Snap (yes, really) who is a photographer in the Pokemon world. During one expedition of his, he manages to snap what he thinks are photos of the mirage Pokemon Mew, and it’s his mission to take a proper photo of it someday. Here is where Professor Oak enters our story, as he leads our main character to the ever so creatively named Pokemon Island. Using the auto-progressing vehicle, the Zero One, he wants you to photograph all sorts of Pokemon to help complete his Pokemon Report on what lives on the island. It’s a fairly threadbare story, but it more than adequately sets up the premise for your photo snapping adventure. The actual gameplay of Pokemon Snap is, as the name suggests, “snapping” photos of Pokemon to submit them to Professor Oak. However, there’s a big difference between a good photo and a bad photo, so it’s up to you to aim for as high a score as you can for each shot you’re going to submit (as only one photo per Pokemon can be submitted at the end of one of the game’s seven stages). You’re judged on how big the Pokemon is in frame, how they’re posed (are they doing a special action or at least facing the camera?), whether they’re centered or not, and how many other Pokemon of their same species are in the frame with them (if possible). It’s something that doesn’t sound that ultimately great for a video game, admittedly, but it’s a much more addicting score attack kind of game than it first seems. The rules are simple and intuitive enough that they’re easy to grasp even for someone like me who’s far from the biggest score attack or photography fan <w>. The Zero One also always follows a track in each level, and the same Pokemon appear at the same times, so there’s always an opportunity to try again if you mess up a particular trick or shot you’re trying to do. You even get more tools like Pokemon food or a Poke Flute as you progress, so there’s also a lot of value in revisiting old stages to find new secrets too~. It’s remarkably simple and as fun as it is novel, and it’s a gameplay loop that ends up working really well~. The aesthetics would need to be pretty darn good in a game all about looking around and taking photos, and they thankfully achieve that really well! Despite the first (two) Pokemon Stadium games predating this, I’d wager almost none (if any) of those models were reused for this. You need to be so much more up close and personal with the Pokemon, and you also need the Pokemon themselves to be much more expressive (not to mention do things like ambulate around, which they never do in the Stadium games). The end result is a bunch of Pokemon that move great and look awesome, and the polygonal look of the N64 gives the whole thing a very fun retro charm on top of it all. The soundtrack is also great, with a lot of new very Pokemon-y feeling tracks to help make your adventure that much more fun~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really great, super clever little game! It’s not too long, and it’s not too deep, but you can go really nuts with trying to improve your scores and find extra Pokemon if you got really into it. A bit like Pilotwings 64, while this certainly wasn’t my favorite game ever, I can absolutely see how this could be someone’s favorite game ever if it hit for them the right way. But even then, this game is so unique and fun that it’s well worth trying out, especially if you’re a Pokemon fan (and especially if you have the Switch Online N64 service, which this is also on~). |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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