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 ^^;.
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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. While going through the effort to finish the two sequels to this game, I naturally thought of this game as well. It’s a game that never came out in English, as it only has 40 Pokemon out of the original 151, and is otherwise *very* content light beyond just free battling. For many years I’d known about this game, but I’d actually always been under the impression that it had no single-player content to speak of at all. Imagine my surprise when, in my researching the other two Pokemon Stadium games, I found that this game does indeed have SOME content to it, and credits to reach! Given that this is a really easily found game for 100 yen, it was a pretty simple choice to run out and grab this so I could get to playing it once I was done with the other two (and it also gave me an extra good excuse to play through Yellow version to get the last few TMs I needed to create my super team for this game’s league~). I played through all four divisions of the the level 1~30 league, and I did it on real hardware. As with the other two Pokemon Stadium games, I can’t really say how long it took me to beat this. Sure, I made it through those four cups in only 3 or 4 hours, but I also used Pokemon from my copies of Green, Gold, and Yellow to win it, and that’s not counting all the time acquiring and training up those Pokemon. This is another one I just can’t really confidently give a “time to beat” for at all, unfortunately.
As with the two sequels to this game, there is no story to speak of with this game. It’s an even more simple version of its successor (the one that DID come out in English), lacking 111 Pokemon or even mini-games to speak of. What it *does* have are some neat tools for looking at your Pokemon if you insert your GameBoy Pokemon game via a Transfer Pak, a way to play those GB Pokemon games via an internal emulator, a free battle mode, and a *small* handful of single-player content. There are two tournaments, one with one division, and one with four, and actually beating either will get you the credits. The former is a level 50~55 league with the Nintendo Cup ’97 ruleset, but the trainers you’re facing in that are entirely teams based on the ’97 championship finalists, so I chose to do the other tournament instead. The other tournament being a cup that uses the Nintendo Cup ’98 rule set (only 33 Pokemon allowed and a level limit of 30). That choice was made partly because I’m getting a little burned out on Pokemon stuff and partly because I’d yet to make a level 30s team, and that seemed like a neat challenge. But frankly, a more major reason I picked to do only this one was because this game has NO continues, unlike its sequels, so if you lose a match, you need to restart the WHOLE cup over again. Now, by a small miracle of luck (on top of all the effort I put into making my level 30s Alakazam, Jolteon, Tauros, Dugtrio, Starmie, and Exeggutor team as burly and mean as I could), I actually managed to go all four cups completely undefeated. This game *does* have rental Pokemon I could’ve used, but given the penalty for failure (and the small amount of actual content at play), it seemed more reasonable and fun to just make as mean a team as I could for this instead. I had always written this game off as just an inferior version made totally obsolete by its immediate sequel, but I was very happy to have been proven wrong in that regard. Part of that is due to the later Pokemon Stadium lacking a four cup tournament that uses the ’98 Cup rule set, which makes this game an interesting oddity for that alone. However, the much bigger point of interest that I discovered is that, unlike the second Pokemon Stadium game, this game *actually* plays just like the Red & Green era GameBoy games do. Pokemon Stadium 2 starts making a lot of changes to Pokemon fix up bugs in the original GB games, and that ends up making it a weird sort of half-step between the first and second generation Pokemon games. This game, however, is JUST like the GameBoy games, warts and all. The biggest ones I noticed are that psychic types are immune to ghost moves and hyper beam doesn’t need a turn of recharge if it gets a kill or misses. They’re ultimately very small changes, but they’re things I encountered a *lot* in the second game and I was always second guessing whether or not the rules were actually like the games I trained these Pokemon up in in the first place. While it’s hardly a top-tier selling point, the rule set for this game’s battle system so closely mirroring the games you’d use to play it does make it a worthwhile addition to any Pokemaniac’s shelf alongside its two sequels. Aesthetically, the game is really just a more simple Pokemon Stadium 2. The models are basically all the same, as are the animations, and there is only one battle field ever used for tournaments and such. The coolest part that I found that’s actually unique to this game is how the tournaments themselves are displayed. After winning a match and “getting a badge”, it actually affixes to an in-game hat your generic player model wears for the duration of that tournament! Not only that, but in the preview shot between you and the person you’re about to fight, it even still has the badges on your profile picture! It’s a very small thing, but it’s something I thought was cool enough to mention here x3 Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a game I really easily could just not recommend at all, but it’s both so cheap and such a unique little game in its rule set that I think it’s still something cool for big Pokemon fans to check out. Mind you, this still has a lot less content to enjoy than its sequels, as we don’t even have all the Pokemon to play around in in free battle, let alone mini-games at all to play with friends. However, if you’re into competitive Pokemon battling and want a very unique single-player challenge, then this is something you might get a good deal of fun out of (if you’re willing to use a menu translation guide to navigate it, at least ^^;). In the big string of old Pokemon I’ve been playing lately, I had a real hankering to play through the first gen of Pokemon again. It’s also been a *very* long time since I’ve played Yellow in particular, and last time I didn’t even use Pikachu in my party! It so happened that I also needed more TMs to complete a team of Pokemon for more Pokemon Stadium nonsense, so this all made for the perfect excuse to track down a cheap copy of Yellow and give it a proper playthrough this time~. It took me around 21 hours to beat the Champion, and I played through the Japanese version on real hardware (with a team of Pikachu, Blastoise, Hitmonlee, Mr Mime, Fearow, and Rhydon). A note before I begin is that I have already reviewd gen 1 Pokemon very recently, so I’m not going to be quite as exhaustive here, and I’m mainly going to be comparing it to that review or referring back to descriptions/statements made there previously (as I see little reason to just type out all the same stuff all over again for the heck of it).
The story of Yellow is more or less the same as the original story in Red & Green, but with some interesting new twists. The whole gimmick of Yellow (or as it’s known here, “Pocket Monsters: Pikachu”) is that it’s the first Pokemon game but remade to be a bit more like the anime, and it achieves that about as well as it reasonably can, for better or worse. You don’t get a choice of starter, and instead you just get a Pikachu at the start. You not only can’t evolve this Pikachu, but he’ll also follow you around on the map, just like Pikachu does with Ash in the anime. You also have a few new touches, like Jessie & James (with their anime appropriate team) fighting you here and there, and a few characters like Brock and Misty having a more anime-appropriate outfit, but overall it’s still the same game, just with a few new touches. Gameplay wise, Pokemon Yellow still has all of the fundamental issues with balancing that the original Pokemon Red & Green have, so I’m not going to go over them again here. The important thing that *is* different, however, is that the game has been rebalanced in ways big and small to make it overall significantly harder. Some of these are the result of the base premise. You have only a Pikachu, so the first gym that has only rock/ground type Pokemon are REALLY good against your starter. If you don’t know that there’s a rare chance to get a fighting type Mankey in a side route on your way there, you’re gonna have a HECK of a difficult time beating the very first gym (as I did) because you’re fighting with a type disadvantage and a Pokemon that can’t evolve. Then there are changes in making certain gym leaders and such have teams more accurate to how they are in the anime, so Lt. Surge is actually made quite a bit easier due to the fact that his whole team now only consists of one quite burly Raichu. The other changes are more present in the later half of the game, with basically every gym from the fifth one onward having VERY significant power increases compared to the original Red & Green. Up through the Elite Four and even the champion, everyone has Pokemon roughly ten to fifteen levels higher than they usually do, and many of them have better put together teams as well. It makes for an interesting change to the normal Pokemon formula, sure, but I’m not sure I’d really call it “better” per se. Pokemon, especially with the very limited tool set of first gen stuff, isn’t something that often benefits significantly from being much harder games in this fashion, as all it really amounts to is making the player grind more as well as forcing them down choosing more optimal teams (rather than teams of interesting makeups or weird gimmicks). It’s not an impossibly hard game, sure, as I still beat this in the same amount of time that it took me to beat Green, even with my weirdo team full of sub-optimal move sets, but it’s still definitely more frustrating and less fun as a result of just how sudden a jump in difficulty so many of those late game gym leaders are (especially compared to the relatively unchanged levels of the Pokemon leading up to them). Aesthetically, this game is pretty much still just what Red & Green were with a few changes here and there. On the smaller side, we have some slight adjustments to environments. As mentioned earlier, we also have some new character sprites here and there to get them more up to form with the anime, and there’s even a new song or two put in to accommodate new characters like Jessie & James (who have their own theme when they confront you for a battle). On the more drastic end, EVERY Pokemon has been given a new front-facing sprite, though their back sprites (the ones you see when you use them) are still unchanged. This has the upshot of making everything look a lot more like what it looked like in the increasingly codified key art of the time, but it also does take away a lot of the janky charm that original Pokemon had with all of the weird, disparate art that it had. It also has the unintended side effect of a fair few of the back sprites looking VERY odd compared to the front sprites, because some of these changes are so drastic that the old back sprites just don’t look very cohesive anymore compared to their front views. Overall, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but I don’t think I’d call much any of it outright good or bad. It’ll really depend on what you like in particular about aesthetics of Pokemon of this era on if you like or dislike these changes. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While this certainly isn’t a bad game and it isn’t even a bad version of gen 1 Pokemon to play, I’d still very strongly hesitate recommending it, especially to a first-time player of this generation. While a lot of the balancing changes are going to likely be interesting to an experienced player, they’re just going to make the experience more frustrating and grindy to someone unfamiliar with the first Pokemon games. Aesthetic changes aside, this just isn’t a very great way to experience how the original Pokemon games were, and while this is still a neat and fun time in places, I found it to be a simply inferior experience compared to just playing the original Red & Green (which, over here at least, are just as common and just as cheap to get your hands on). Unlike with the third Pokemon Stadium game I beat last week, there’s really just no way to not put this game’s title in a way where it’s not very confusing on what I’m talking about XD. This is the game we know in English as just “Pokemon Stadium”, but in Japan, it’s the second of these games (and far more feature complete than its predecessor). Just as with the third game that I beat last week, this was another one I had as a kid and played the mini-games in a ton, but had really given up all hope of ever seeing the end of its quite hard single-player content. However, in the midst of my most recent N64 and Pokemon madness, I decided that, just like with its sequel, I’d sit down and finally see the credits of this game as well. I have no idea how to really say how long it took me to beat this game (given that it doesn’t record playtime and it’s also hard to say how much I should factor in the playtime of my Pokemon Gold and Pokemon Green ‘mons that I used for beating this in the first place), but it took me about a week of playing and grinding up Pokemon to finish it, at least. I played through the Japanese version and I did it on real hardware.
As with the other two Pokemon Stadium games, this game really has no narrative to speak of. It has a few mini-games (which are super fun to play, and I by and large prefer the ones in this game to the ones in the sequel) and a free battle mode to play with friends, and it also has a pile of single-player tournaments and challenges you can try your hand at if you’d like to see the credits. Just like its sequel, it has two rounds of this stuff: an easier first one, which I did, and a FAR harder second one which I have no interest in slamming my head against XD. That said, this game is definitely FAR easier to complete the first round in than it is for the sequel. That’s not to say it’s “easy”, per se, so much as it is to say that the second game’s balancing and AI teams are brutal, whereas this game’s tournament design as well as overall balance of AI teams is far more forgiving, and I found it a lot more easy to actually have fun even when using rental teams of Pokemon rather than my own trained up Pokemon. Speaking of the tournaments, that is a very important difference this game has with its English language counterpart. Both versions have the gym leader tower where you fight the Kanto gym leaders and then the Elite Four + Champion in little mini gauntlets with no continues. That’s all the same between both versions (and a very fun time!). Where the English port of this game has four tournaments (two with one division and two with four), the original Japanese version here has six (four with one division and two with four). While two of the single-division tournaments and one of the four-division tournaments are the same in each version, the English version’s “Poke Cup” is entirely exclusive to itself. The Japanese version, meanwhile, has three tournaments based off of official Nintendo tournaments actually held in Japan, and even the Pokemon present in several of those tournaments are based on teams actually used by finalists in those tournaments. My personal favorite of them was the Nintendo Cup ’99 one, which is the four-division tournament unique to the Japanese version. All 25 Pokemon used by the Nintendo Cup ’97 finalists are banned, so you’re left to make a powerful team out of the generally “Just OK” power levels of the remaining 125 or so. It’s a really fun challenge, and I had a blast putting together a team to tackle it with the weird and oddball restrictions it had. The other big point of difference between the English and Japanese versions is that a lot of the rental Pokemon (ones the game already has that you can build a team out of if you don’t want to build your own team in one of the GameBoy games and transfer it over) are actually *worse* in this version. A lot of them have a lot more sub-optimal and weak move sets than their counterparts in the international versions of this game. It doesn’t make the game *that* much harder, at least for the first round, but it certainly made beating the harder tournaments I needed to use rental Pokemon for that much more difficult to do XP The aesthetics of this game are pretty darn similar to the stuff its sequel uses, so I won’t dwell on them too much as to not repeat the same points again. The Pokemon are the main event, and they all look awesome! Once again, it’s no surprise that 50%+ of the credits for this game are the 3D modelling team, since they did a downright fantastic job bringing the original 151 Pokemon to life. The music is also really fun, with a bunch of really great versions of songs from the GameBoy games recreated here with the power of the N64. My main complaint about the aesthetics in this version specifically, is that the localization has better sound design, particularly in the mini-games. The localization went really hard in getting sound clips and voice talent from the anime adaptation to use in that version, and it has a very distinct point of nostalgia for me as a result. The Pokemon in the mini-games in the Japanese version, by contrast, just use normal little sound effects that are much more boring. It’s not a problem in the more holistic sense, but it’s something that *does* make me value having an English version to play via the Switch Online either way~. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I’d certainly recommend this game much more highly than the sequel due to the better difficulty balancing, this is still a very particular kind of game for a very particular kind of Pokemon fan. I learned a lot about how to play competitive Pokemon with the gen 1 rule set during my time with Pokemon Stadium 2, but if you’re not really caught by the idea of training up your own Pokemon team or trudging through the RNG of a rental Pokemon team, then actually trying to beat this game is likely going to be far more frustration than fun for even a big fan of Pokemon. That said, if that stuff *does* sound fun for you, then this is a game really worth checking out! Even if you don’t end up beating all of the single-player content to see the credits like I did, the mini-games and free battle stuff on their own make for a really fun time with friends, and they’re well worth checking this game out for, particularly if you have access to it via the Switch Online N64 Service~. Known in English as (very confusingly from the Japanese perspective) “Pokemon Stadium 2”, this, the third Pokemon Stadium game, has been one I’ve owned in some form or another for ages. I’d always written off all of these games as just too hard to bother with trying to ever finish to the point I saw the credits. Too much time to train up a team alongside historically having neither a working Transfer Pak nor the gen 1 and 2 games to use to do this stuff properly. However, with my recent Pokemon mania of playing through Pokemon Gold as well as having a Transfer Pak and even a copy of Pokemon Green as well as a link cable, I decided it was time to funnel my current N64 mania into a new mission: Finally reaching the credits of a Pokemon Stadium game. It’s sorta impossible to really try and calculate a “completion time” for these games, as I used both of my completed saves of Pokemon Green and Pokemon Gold to acquire and train up Pokemon to use in this thing, and that isn’t even counting the time I spent playing the game itself. At the very least, playing the Japanese versions on real hardware over the course of about a normal work week, it took me about six or seven days to get through everything with the teams I’d put together as well as using various rental Pokemon (as well as guides on how best to use them XP).
There really isn’t any story to speak of for any Pokemon Stadium game. They’re really just Pokemon battle simulators that have a bundle of single-player content as well as a free battle mode along with some mini-games if you’re hanging out with your friends and want something fun to do. The battle mechanics for those multiplayer modes are also very clever. Your moves and Pokemon are actually hidden behind what are effectively spoiler windows unless you decide to show them, so your opponent has no idea what Pokemon or moves you’re picking despite the fact that you’re both using the same screen to play. Up until this point, the most time I’d actually spent with this game was by far concentrated in the mini-games, and while they’re indeed really fun, they’re never gonna help you reach the credits XD. As far as the single-player content goes, you have two main areas: the Gym Leader Castle and the Stadium. You’ll need to clear all of both areas to see the credits, and there’s actually an even harder version of everything you can unlock *after* the credits, but beating the first round of content was so hard, I had no intention of playing the second round if I had already reached the credits XD In the Stadium, you have four tournaments, with two of those having four divisions (for a total of ten cups of eight battles you’ll need to clear to win this). You have the four divisions (which are basically difficulties) of the Nintendo Cup, which is any Pokemon allowed from levels 50-55. Then there’s the Little Cup, which is only Pokemon of level 5. There’s the Ultra Cup, which is Pokemon leveled 1 to 100 ( though all of your competitors have only level 100 Pokemon). Finally, you have my personal favorite, the four divisions of the Challenge Cup, which is basically a card draft type of tournament. You’re given a random team of six Pokemon, and it’s your job to try and use them to win the next eight battles with them. That one is great fun! I trained up my own team to beat the Nintendo Cup, and then I had to use rental Pokemon (ones the game pre-provides for you to use, but are generally less good than any team you’d properly prepared yourself) for the Little and Ultra Cups. Those last two were easily the hardest and roughest parts of the game and not only because I had to use rental Pokemon. It’s largely because, if I hadn’t, grinding up a suitable team for both would’ve taken untold hours of work, and I had no interest in doing that. By and large, the stadium section is really good fun for the fun parts while being pretty miserable in the worse parts due to the RNG that’s required to win. Granted, that goes for any time you’re going to be using rental Pokemon in this game, but the Little Cup having so little room for error (as you’re all basically minimum level) means that it’s mostly an exercise in getting lucky enough to win no matter how well prepared you are. The Gym Leader Castle is exactly what it sounds like, for the most part. You have the eight gym leaders from Johto as well as the Elite Four + Champion in little mini-gauntlets, and beating the gauntlet will clear the stage. There are two or three normal trainers before the gym leader themselves, but those trainers are usually so easy that they feel like something of a waste of time before the actual challenging gym leader. There are even the Kanto gym leaders to fight afterwards, but they’re generally a lot easier and also have no gauntlets to go through. This ends up making it feel very much indeed like playing actual generation 2 Pokemon, where Johto is the actually challenging part, and your run through of Kanto is more like a victory lap XD. Unlike in the stadium cups, where beating a round without having any Pokemon get KO’d gives you a continue to use if you fail, there are no continues in the Gym Leader Castle, so it can be pretty unforgiving. The one nice thing about the Gym Leader Castle is that you can use whatever Pokemon you like in terms of both actual Pokemon as well as their respective levels. The AI trainers you fight against all have Pokemon of the same level as your highest Pokemon, so just bringing in a team of level 50 Pokemon (likely even the same ones you’re using for the stadium’s Nintendo Cup) makes this a very fun and challenging trial to overcome. Overall, the single-player content’s design is a very mixed bag. If you’re using rental Pokemon, winning is often simply down to just getting lucky enough. That then goes double for the more poorly designed tournaments like the Little Cup. Even if you’re using a team you trained up yourself, just getting unlucky can mess you up way harder than in normal Pokemon games, as these games actually mirror official tournament rules in that you don’t get a choice to swap out Pokemon when you KO one of your opponent’s Pokemon. Another very annoying difficult spike is from how you bring a team of six, sure, but then you choose only three of them to actually battle with (and so does your opponent). This means you can have an immaculate team prepared, but since you just got unlucky with your three picks verses what your opponent picked, you’re super dead anyhow. Pokemon is always a game of luck, to no small degree, so this stuff admittedly *does* go with the territory. Picking unluckily can screw over your AI opponents just as much as it can with you, of course, though I’m not about to admit that they don’t cheat sometimes here and there in knowing what you’re going to do before you do it. Team building is also fun, but it’s also very strategic. This is tournament rules Pokemon, and if you’re going to build your own teams in the GameBoy games, you need to build teams to win, not just ones with Pokemon you like (because the AI is absolutely here to win, no bones about it ^^; ). If that’s your kind of deal, then the single-player content here will likely be a good and challenging time, but if this all sounds dreadful, then it’s likely you’re going to have more fun just messing around in the single-player mode than actually trying to finish it in any respect (which, in my opinion at least, is the far more fun option to take XD). As for the presentation, they absolutely knock it out of the park. The announcer over Pokemon matches makes things feel very silly and extra high energy, and the music is a ton of really fun renditions of tracks from the GameBoy games. The actual visuals are quite limited, of course, as this is largely just a battle simulator, but the Pokemon do look pretty damn good. By the end of your time with this game, you’ll be able to very well appreciate just why nearly half the credited developers on this are 3D modelers for the Pokemon XD. All 250+ are animated and rendered in delightful detail, and watching them fight and use their moves is always really fun. I’d actually never registered my own Pokemon to be used in one of these games before, despite having played them in some form for over 20 years now, and I really do have to say that it was an absolutely thrilling experience seeing my lads I’d spent so long training up burst onto the screen in 3D. The presentation does exactly what you’d hope it’d do, and it’s awesome. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While the multiplayer content is super fun and enough of a reason to check this game out all on its own, the single-player content is difficult enough that it is likely to really turn off completionists. It’s usually well polished, and certain parts like the Challenge Cup tournament are such unique game variants that I’ll just replay on my own for fun, but the luck required to actually overcome the difficulty present in the hardest tournaments is really just more trouble than it’s worth. At the end of the day, this is a very easy game to recommend to just try out and play, but it’s a much harder game to recommend you try to beat. This is a game I picked up for 500 yen *ages* ago during a different N64 kick of mine. Finishing up Pilotwings 64 the other day, my friends in the voice chat I was in were talking a bunch about racing games, and it got me thinking of this yet unplayed N64 racing game I had lying around. It seemed like the perfect time to finally pop this game in and give it a proper shot. While it’s certainly not as famous or talked about as Rareware’s other N64 racing title, Diddy Kong Racing, it’s nonetheless a Rareware game from back then they made nearly nothing but hits, so it seemed high time I finally check it out. It took me about 7 hours to get platinum or gold rankings in almost every normal non-mirror race (which I didn't bother with), and I did it in the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Though a racing game, Mickey’s Speedway USA actually does have a narrative to it. Displayed through the confusing choice of late 90’s computer GUI interfaces, we see Mickey going outside to play with Pluto, only to find a note. The note is from the dastardly Weasels, and they’ve stolen Pluto and his diamond-encrusted collar and are driving cross country with him! They even send you picture postcards they’ve custom made as you go through the game of the Weasels torturing Pluto at different locations, and it made for an extremely uncomfortable and very badly aged attempt at humor ^^;. At any rate, Mickey hits up his friends as soon as they can, and with the help of Professor Von Drake, they get into go-karts and start doing races to get good enough at driving to catch those Weasels and rescue Pluto. It’s a weird narrative with some very badly aged aspects to it, but it’s a fine enough excuse for a racing game, I suppose XD The game itself gives you the choice of six racers with three actual stat variations between them (Mickey’s stats are identical to Donald’s, for example) with another three unlockable throughout the game. You then have five different cups of four races each, and you have three CC ratings to play each race at. While getting the highest score total in one will get you a gold trophy, getting first in all four races gets you a special platinum trophy. Platinums are usually what you want for unlocking new characters, but there’s actually a tenth character waiting for anyone dedicated enough to both have the GBC version of this game alongside the tech to connect it up to this game via an N64 Transfer Pak. Pain in the butt special unlock conditions aside, it’s overall a very familiar formula for anyone who’s played a kart racer before. However, while this game has some special aspects to it, I think it ultimately doesn’t impress too terribly for a game coming out as late as 2000 (some 3-ish years after Mario Kart 64 and even a year after Crash Team Racing). At least for me, I’m not a huge fan of different characters with different stats, at least not like this. The unlockable characters in particular feel like pretty straightforward power upgrades, and there felt like very little reason to use older characters once I’d unlocked even my first new one. The tracks themselves are okay, but they’re both a bit barren as well as being very short. Most of them have very little in the way of obstacles or interesting sections, and you’ll get through all three laps of most of them in less than two minutes, and you’ll likely be looking at sub-minute times for many tracks on anything above the lowest CC ranking. This is, of course, with the exception of the last cup's tracks. First of all, to even unlock the final cup, you need to find a hidden car part in each of the four previous cups, and those things are hidden quite well to impossibly well, and finding them without a guide back in the day must've been absolutely miserable. As for the cup itself, it REALLY feels like they were compensating here for how relatively uninspired the previous tracks mostly were XD. They're *packed* with narrow corridors with slow-down parts on both sides and so many bottomless pits that the CPUs fall off of them constantly. Generally weak track design was a very big sticking point for me in a lot of this game, and even though I'm not the biggest Mario Kart 64 fan, I found myself wishing for its track design quite a lot during my time with this game. As for the CC rankings themselves, I hesitate to call them “difficulties” as such, either, as honestly the CPUs appeared to more or less always be playing just as well. They seem to be more difficult the more difficult the tier of cup you were challenging was, but outside of that, they never seemed to be more intelligent or better at the game whether I was on the highest or lowest CC ranking. Those CC rankings themselves are also no joke. The CC rankings in Mario Kart change your speed, sure, but to be perfectly honest, I never even realized it until very recently because the changes in speed never felt that great. In this game, it is absolutely impossible to ignore just how great the speed difference is, because you’re going like twice as fast even just going between the first and second CC rankings (though there honestly felt like much less of a jump between the second and third rankings). It’s an interesting idea, sure, but it just doesn’t compensate for much when the game seems to lack drift boosting and is also generally laden down with poor AI and fairly mediocre track design. The number of players is also something interesting. Six players feels a little small for a kart racer, though with tracks this small perhaps it just works better? It also easily could’ve been a technical concern, as this game’s framerate is REALLY good, especially for an N64 game (though perhaps it just feels that way because I’d just come off of playing Pilotwings 64 XD). It likely also needs that framerate for JUST how fast it has you going on the highest CC ranking, of course. But even still, it's a blessing in disguise, ultimately, that you have those smaller player numbers. Six players including yourself might also feel like a small number because this game just generally has a very lackluster item pool that is at the same time very poorly balanced. You have equivalents of Mario Kart’s green shell, a crappy red shell, a good red shell (which is very rare and is like a blue shell for specifically the guy ahead of you), an oil slick that’s basically Mario Kart’s banana peel, a turbo boost that’s one of Mario Kart’s mushrooms, a rain cloud that slows everyone and keeps them from using items, and an invincibility item like the power star in Mario Kart. The thing with the power star item in particular is that these tracks are so small that if *any* AI gets them, it's basically an "I win" button for them, since particularly on harder tracks it's hard for it not to be something that gets them so far into the lead that you have no chance at all to win. It can be extremely disheartening to be doing well on a later track and then just get victory robbed from you by an invincible jerk at the last second, and it makes the already frustrating final tracks in the game that much more difficult to put up with. At the very least the game *does* have an in-game infinite retries of a track cheat to get past this crap reasonably XD. Overall, the item pool is just yet another way where this game feels like more mediocre and far less polished Mario Kart 64. Like the track design, it's not the worst I've ever seen, sure, but it's not exactly justifying my choice of kart racer compared to the N64's more famous entries in this genre (which this game is so blatantly copying). While the execution may be mediocre, the presentation is far less so. The story scenes are very well animated an illustrated, and the characters themselves look awesome. Unlike a near-launch title like Mario Kart 64, you and your fellow racers are actually 3D models, not just 2D sprites, and they look great too. I never play Goofy, and I certainly don’t like losing, but it nevertheless always makes me smile to see the way his ears flap in the wind behind him when he passes me, just like they do in the cartoons~. Additionally, while they weren’t redubbed for the Japanese release, the characters also have quite a few voiced lines of dialogue they’ll shout (a bit too often, frankly) as you race. There are a lot of generic ones, of course, but there are also a really surprising amount of ones particular to specific character interactions, and it makes for a very unique feeling racing experience on the console. On top of the generally good to very good music selection for the game (if you can hear it over all the mid-race racer chat), and the presentation is easily one of the strongest things this game has going for it. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This certainly isn’t a bad game by any means, but it’s just really not impressive enough to really go out of your way to try and hunt down. For big Disney fans, I’m sure this will be a really cool and fun time, but as far as kart racers go, this is a thoroughly mediocre one even for the time, and that goes double for a console like the N64 that has SO many excellent racing games of all stripes on it. It's also quite a tough and relatively frustrating one if you're going to try and see the credits, though I'd say that there's plenty of fun to be had without seeing the credits, of course. This is certainly a neat entry in Rareware’s history, but for all but big Rareware, Disney, and/or N64 racing fans, I wouldn’t really say this is particularly worth going out of your way to acquire or go out and play for any reason beyond engaging with it as a curiosity. This is a game I’ve seen around in Book Off and such for super cheap for years now, but I’ve never really paid it any mind. It was only a few days back that I actually sat down and looked up what this game actually was, and much to my surprise, it’s a Mario Party-clone by HudsonSoft!? Now, to be more accurate, though Hudson did co-develop it, so far as I can tell, the main developer was Bandai, and this shares virtually no staff the series that would eventually be Mario Party (as this came out in 1997, one year *before* the first Mario Party). Regardless, seeing how weird and bad these types of games can be is something I love doing, and it just so happens that my partner also is a huge Tamagotchi fan, so snagging this for the 100 yen it was going for was an absolute no-brainer. This game doesn’t really have a single-player mode as such, and you can actually view the credits whenever you want in the options menu, so I just played until I won a round and called this one “beaten” (and then played a few more rounds after that for good measure). I spent about 4 or so hours playing it on real hardware.
This game actually *does* have a narrative of sorts despite such a thing being so generally unnecessary in a party game like this. Professor Banzou, the man who discovered Tamagotchi, is brooding on a bridge, cursing his bad luck with the ladies despite the great discovery he’s made. All of a sudden, a tiny spaceship full of Tamagotchi (in the middle of fighting over food) fall down from orbit and crash into his head, knocking him into the river. As he’s shouting at them for hurting him, he’s struck with a brilliant idea, and runs off to his laboratory to begin work. A week later, he’s developed a new type of Tamagotchi House, a large-size one that can accommodate four Tamagotchi at once! And such is the excuse for why four Tamagotchi are about to compete to see who can grow up the fastest in this giant new Tamagotchi house XD. It’s a very silly story and not really necessary to make the game work or anything, but it’s very charmingly animated (not to mention totally voice acted, which is pretty darn impressive for the N64 in ’97), and it sets up the action just fine. The actual gameplay of Tamagotchi 64 (as I’m going to be referring to it here for the sake of brevity) is certainly Mario Party-ish in that it’s a four-player board game with mini-games as well, but it’s ultimately not *that* much like Mario Party (and is a lot more like later Tamagotchi party games would be, as it so happens). Your goal, as eluded to earlier, is to be the first to completely grow up, which here means to fill up the power meter four times. The game has only one board, and the four of you go around this board by rolling a die and landing on spaces. There are spaces that just make your power meter go up and down, ones that give you special item cards to use whenever you want, and even ones that activate a mini-game for you all to play, but no matter what you land on, you then get to take care of your Tamagotchi. Just like the little PDA-like toys, Tamagotchis have food and play meters that need to be taken care of, and when they’re sick they need curing, when they’re bad (refuse to eat or play) they need scolding, and when they’ve pooped you’ve gotta clean it up. This is used by expending caring points, and you get a big refill of caring points by passing Go at the start of the board (or by landing on special fitness spaces). While it’s all a bit complicated when you write it out on paper like this, it’s actually quite self-explanatory in practice. You generally want to feed your Tamagotchi when it’s hungry because that’s an easy way to get power points, and the play option (while costing less) activates a simple mini-game that can be lost, earning you nothing. Keeping your play and food meters high means you get more power points (I think?), and it’s just generally good for keeping your Tamagotchi happy and growing. However, despite how simple the gameplay actually is, the devil is reallly in the details here, and this game has some *very* stiff problems when it comes to its execution. While there are little things like the lack of a pause button that just sorta generally suck, the main issue with this game is that a *LOT* of your ability to win is based on how lucky you’re getting. Where you’re landing will dictate a lot of how much you’re growing (or not growing), and how good your luck is there will determine the pace of the game a LOT. You don’t have a star to purchase like in Mario Party to aim for, so that really focuses a lot of the game’s momentum on turn-to-turn gameplay. This means it can feel really discouraging if you’re just having awful luck and/or the other players are beating up on you a lot (with card-items or other such things). Compared to something like Mario Party, where there’s a (usually) skill-based mini-game at the end of every turn, mini-games in Tamagotchi 64 are very rare, as they require landing on a special space to activate. This isn’t even mentioning how the mini-games themselves may not be awful, but they do suffer very badly in a non-multiplayer environment. The CPUs are just SO impossibly good at so many of them that it feels pointless to even try a lot of the time (and these CPUs also lack any difficulty selections either). The icing on the cake there is that not only do the mini-games have no practice option, but they also don’t have a prompt to go past the instructions screen to start playing them. That instructions screen is only on screen for 3 or 4 seconds, so you better read and understand them quick if you wanna actually have a chance of winning! <w> Summing it up succinctly, there just isn't a lot a player can do to actually affect their chances of winning. Just *so* much of the game is simply down to luck that it makes you wonder why you should even try when you're losing. By that same token, the games are so generally short that you really may as well try, as the other players may soon tumble into the same bad luck that's been ruining your time for the past however long soon enough XD. I have my suspicions that there's an internal catchup mechanic where the computer will give good fortune to a certain player to make it so the end game has a *bit* more tension to it, but that's just a hypothesis, really. While simply getting lucky enough may be fine for a very simple children's board game, it makes for a very unsatisfying gameplay loop for a video game (especially playing by yourself against CPUs), so if you're going to have a really fun time with this one, friends are very highly recommended. The presentation, at least, is very well done. Not only are the opening and ending cutscenes voice acted for Professor Banzou and his assistant Mikachu, but the game has a great and pumping soundtrack too. I can’t help but watch the intro every time I boot up the game because the music is just so much fun x3. It even has a vocal track that plays during special scenes, which is an achievement in and of itself for the N64. The graphics are also really good. They’re very evocative of both the general art style of Tamagotchi as well as of the little digital pet toys themselves (with the play-command mini-games even having bleep-bloop sound effects to go with them just like the digital pet toys do x3). The game’s screen has the board game down below and a little view to the pets themselves up top, and watching their idle animations (from feeling hungry to just playing around in a giant udon bowl) while they wait for their turn is absolutely adorable. Every Tamagotchi has bespoke animations for those little idle bits as well, so it really makes them come to life in a way that fits the setting perfectly. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This isn’t a bad game, and I definitely feel I got my money’s worth for the 100 yen I paid for it, but it’s definitely difficult to recommend at the end of the day. The relatively unsatisfying gameplay loop combined with only a dozen or so mini-games and just a singular board to play on means that the game starts to feel stale quite fast. While what’s here isn’t necessarily awful, even on its worst day, that doesn’t really change how there are still much better options on this console for party games in a board game style. If you’re a big Tamagotchi fan or a big Mario Party fan, then this one might be worth checking out, but if you’re more of a casual party game fan (and especially if you have no one to play with), then this is probably a game that’s going to end up giving you more frustration than fun at the end of the day. Recently, some friends of mine have been playing (or replaying) through a bunch of old Pokemon games, and it really got me in the mood to play some myself~. They had been talking a lot about how generation 2 in particular was a really weak generation with a lot of really annoying design decisions. It’s been at least 15 or more years since I last played through Gold or Silver myself, and I certainly didn’t remember it being that bad when I was a kid, so Pokemon Gold seemed like a great fit to scratch the Pokemon itch I’d been feeling. It took me about 25 hours to beat the Elite Four and the Champion, and then it was around the 36 hour mark that I beat Red at Mt. Silver. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware via my Super GameBoy (with my team being composed of Golem, Typhlosion, Magneton, Alakazam, Slowbro, and Pidgeot).
Being a Pokemon game and such an early one, there isn’t a ton of story here, and the story really isn’t the focus of the game, but what’s here is certainly interesting in several respects. Taking place in the Johto region, the one adjacent to the west of Kanto (where the first game takes place), this is the rare Pokemon game to actually be a narrative sequel to the previous one, taking place three years after it. It’s hardly high art, and a lot of it is no doubt due to cuts that were required as a result of trying to fit all of Johto AND all of Kanto onto one lil’ GameBoy cart, but it’s nonetheless very interesting to see not just all the new places, but how all of the old, familiar locations in Kanto have changed too. As with how the first generation of Pokemon had it, it’s a fun and light guide through the new region along your trainer’s journey to be the new best trainer around, and it does that job very well~. As for the base mechanics, Pokemon is still very much the same as it was the last time around, save for a few additions or changes here and there which have varying degrees of significance. On the more light side of things, the new gimmick of an in-game clock give us both events related to days of the week as well as a day and night cycle. It can be a bit of a pain to wait for the right day of the week to get a particular item or to wake up early in the morning enough to catch a certain Pokemon, but it’s not all that important most of the time, and it adds a good bit of extra flavor to the experience. As for more significant changes, the new Pokemon (just about 100) do a good job of helping flesh out some types that were underrepresented in the last generation, and a bundle of new Pokemon moves help expand out on several types who had woefully poor move pools in the last game too. It’s hardly perfect, as there are still a good few types who are nearly nonexistent or totally useless, but the introduction of dark and steel types (as well as re-balancing how some other type interactions work) have done a lot to break psychic types’ stranglehold on the greater strategy of Pokemon. Another significant addition to that effect is that “special” is now two stats, “special attack” and “special defense”, and that means that a lot of preexisting Pokemon are either now a lot better or a fair bit worse as a result of how they’re more or less resistant/adept at using special-aligned attacking moves. We’re still a couple generations away from solving the bigger problems with types and special/physical attacks (move category is still dependent on type and not yet linked to the individual move instead as it would be in Pearl & Diamond), but this is a good step in the right direction that adds a good deal of strategy beyond mere type advantage. The bigger changes and issues with Pokemon Gold (and Silver), however, are present more in the nature of its execution rather than how the mechanics work on paper. A large amount of strange and questionable design choices end up making this game feel very awkward and overly convoluted compared to games before and after it. Most prominent among these issues is how the distribution of Pokemon (and the types thereof) is handled. Many Pokemon (both strong and weak, both old and new) are not in Johto at all, but in Kanto (meaning they’re found in the later third of the game, and after the Elite Four, one of the game’s biggest challenges). Additionally, evolution stones, which are used to get many water, grass, fire, and electric type Pokemon to their final and strongest evolutions, are virtually nonexistent. The only way to get them is through a rather obtuse method once in Kanto or through being very lucky with certain very poorly signposted RNG mechanics involving specific NPCs back in Johto. Kanto as a whole has an incredible paradoxical nature to it. On one hand, it was absolutely purposeful to put it in here. After the credits roll for defeating the Champion, going over to Kanto gives you new story events and unique NPC sprites to see, tons of new music to listen to, and a ton of new Pokemon to catch. That’s all saying nothing of just what an incredible programming challenge fitting Kanto on the cartridge alongside Johto was in the first place, of course. On the other had, it feels like a serious afterthought with just how poorly balanced it is. You’re likely already going to have a somewhat difficult time with the Elite Four with just how much higher level they are than you are that point (roughly level 40 to 50), and yet the first five gyms you’ll encounter in Kanto have Pokemon that average around level 35, making them an absolute joke to any trainer who beat the Elite Four to get there. Wild Pokemon are also generally incredible low level, the levels they would’ve been in Pokemon Red & Green, so you aren’t getting challenging encounters anywhere other than the last three gyms and the final battle with Red. Going through Kanto is still fun and interesting, of course, but it’s difficult to ignore just how strangely balanced the whole experience is. Looking back at your initial adventure through Johto, a lot of the new Pokemon are just very poor at doing what they’re meant to do, and the change to the special stat means that a lot of old favorites that were great before are now awful because their stats have been gutted. By the same token, it can be very discouraging to find a favorite Pokemon only to realize later that they require an evolution stone to evolve, so they’re just really not worth using. It’s very easy to end up feeling quite boxed in to only a few actually viable Pokemon due to the statistic shortcomings of some and the inability of many others to evolve. Numerically speaking, almost all of the electric, grass, water, and fire types you’ll find in Johto need an evolution stone to evolve, and only one or two (if even that) end up being reasonable to use at all. The types used in many of the new gyms as well as in the new Elite Four make certain types like Grass feel ultimately quite useless, and the game, while not being *that* hard as far as Pokemon games go, is left with some oddball balancing issues as a result (and the relatively slow leveling curve doesn’t really help matters either). These aren’t fatal problems for the overall design of the game, but it just ends up making the overall experience feel a lot more frustrating compared to earlier or later Pokemon games. The presentation is, as one would expect for Pokemon games of the era, absolutely excellent. The new music is great, and the new takes on old tracks in Kanto are really well done too. The graphics are also excellent, with the new Pokemon art being really well done while having a much more unified style than the first games had. While I do miss the charm of just how weird and disparate the original first generation art was, it’s hard to be upset with new sprites that look this dang nice~. The game looks great in color, of course, but I do want to mention just how surprised I was by this game’s Super GameBoy compatibility. The SGB’s interaction with black cart GameBoy games (that being ones that are in compatible to be played on an old monochrome GameBoy as well as are proper color games on a GameBoy Color) is super variable with some games not using it at all, but this is easily one of the most impressive uses of the hardware I’ve come across. While the overworld you’re walking around in is virtually always in some shade of color-tinged monochrome, battles are actually entirely in color. It’s not a perfect recreation of how the game looks on a GBC, but you’d be hard pressed to spot the difference most of the time. I thought I might be longing for the color that a GameBoy Player or similar GBC-like device would add as I played this on my SGB for the novelty of it, but I was very pleasantly surprised with just how much effort clearly went in to making this game be an impressive color experience for SGB owners as well~. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a really weird one to recommend, because your mileage is going to vary a LOT depending on how tolerant of the shortcomings in its execution you are. The second generation Pokemon games are absolutely not bad games by any stretch, but a lot of their weaknesses are most prevalent in comparison to their sister Pokemon games. While this is a fun game that I quite enjoyed my time with, it’s really hard to argue that I wouldn’t have probably had just as good if not better a time with virtually any other Pokemon game due to just how generally better designed they are. This is absolutely a Pokemon game worth checking out for fans, but if you’re someone who’s more tepid on the series, then this is very likely you’re going to find is worth skipping even if you’re generally okay with the poorer quality of life features found in these old GameBoy RPGs. |
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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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