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Last Topic's Ratings:
Cruis'n USA - BGAAAGGAAAGGGAGG - 77% (15)
Doreamon - AA - 50% (2)
Hexen - AGBBABGGAA - 50% {10}
NHL 99 - AAA - 50% (3)
WCW vs. nWo: World Tour - AGGGAAAAAA - 65% (10) (1 SR)
Wetrix - AAAG - 63% (4)
Cruis'n USA was looking like kind of a mixed bag at first, but it steadily improved as the topic went on. Hexen remained divisive the entire time, though.
Games for this topic:
Bomberman 64
Chopper Attack
Fighters Destiny
MRC: Multi-Racing Championship
NBA Jam 99
Virtual Chess 64
One thing that's pretty obvious with this topic is how many companies tried to do some very different things on N64 compared to what had been done on previous consoles. Many of the games here have some unique twists on old formulas that really showcase how N64 shook things up, even if it didn't always work out. Also, it really bothers me that Fighters Destiny doesn't have an apostrophe. Couldn't the Cruis'n series have spared one? They have tons!
Bomberman 64 - A
ReplyDeleteChopper Attack - G
Fighters Destiny - A
MRC: Multi-Racing Championship - A
NBA Jam 99 - B
Virtual Chess 64 - A
With the dawn of the N64 and the 3D era, many formerly 2D franchises seemed to feel the need to reinvent themselves for the third dimension. Some games made the transformation very gracefully, while others found a new but still successful formula, and still others struggled to preserve the factors that originally made them great. And then there was the Bomberman franchise. Bomberman struggled perhaps more than any other franchise, trying over and over again to find some kind of formula to bring the franchise to the third dimension. The first one is perhaps the most unusual. Like many early N64 games, Bomberman 64 re-envisions Bomberman with significantly more adventure elements, the stages are large and open-ended and crammed with secrets at every turn. To some degree this can work well, I actually think the idea to allow you to unlock visual customization options for your multiplayer character is very clever (and extremely ahead of its time), though unfortunately this is somewhat compromised by the fact that the multiplayer mode isn't very fun. The core game isn't terrible and still feels a bit Bomberman-y, though it's also often too hard, with attempting to get all the gold cards being a particular slog that I doubt many would put up with these days. It was an interesting effort with some good ideas and I did have some fun with it at the time, but ultimately it clearly wasn't the right direction for the franchise.
Chopper Attack is a pretty cool game actually, but I can see where it might have faced some problems back in the day. For starters, Chopper Attack is a twin-stick game, where one stick aims and the other flies. This is a pretty logical setup for more modern controllers, but obviously the N64 doesn't have a true "second stick", instead it has the C-Buttons, which are a bit awkward to use that way. This creates another game that plays much better on an emulator, where the C-Buttons can be mapped to a stick. Beyond this, it plays kind of like a slightly simplified version of the Strike games. You'll be piloting a helicopter throughout various missions, blowing up objectives (which are helpfully marked on a minimap that is always present) and dogfighting with various targets on both the ground and the air. As with Strike, combat mostly consists of locking on and firing missiles (though you do have an unlimited machine gun that has some use), but there's a bit more nuance to using missiles because in this game you're forced to buy your missiles before each mission and you have limited money (which is earned by completing missions), so figuring out which missiles to take and how many is vital. Unfortunately, you can't really know exactly what you're facing before you get there, so you kind of have to guess to some degree (or I guess you could just reset). For the most part the action is pretty fun, and I think this is a fairly easy recommendation to people who like this sort of game, but I could see how the N64 controller might get in the way to some extent.
Fighters Destiny is actually a much more interesting game than I expected. For starters, as you would probably not realize from its generic title, it's actually a very unique take on the fighting genre. Instead of just featuring the standard "KO" system that is in basically every fighting game ever, Fighters Destiny is actually based around a point system similar to Judo. You can earn points by doing things like knocking the opponent off the stage, depleting their health, having the most points when the round ends, executing a throw, and various others. The rounds themselves are short, but a match doesn't end until someone gets enough points, with a reset to neutral occurring after every point is scored. It's a fairly interesting system that feels unique. However, I do have some issues with the specific tuning of the game. For starters, you don't actually get many attacks, there's a high and a low attack button, but few options to bridge between them, each character only has a couple strings and special moves, it would be nice to have a bit more variety. I also feel that ring outs are worth far too few points, a KO is worth 3 points, but a ringout is only worth 1 (it takes 7 to win), so it can often be a good strategy to simply fall off if you're in danger of getting KOed. I feel like Ring Outs should definitely be worth 2 points, the same as a throw. Throws are also too easy to reverse, apart from a handful of situations where your throw is unreversable (I don't know what causes this), the reversal window is ridiculously long, so throws are almost never successful. Some kind of tweak to how that works would be nice. Still, a lot of interesting ideas here and I want to see what they do for the sequel.
DeleteMRC is a game that my friends and I always used to meme on back in the day, it was always our go-to example of a crummy N64 game, and in retrospect this is probably kind of unfair. MRC is a fairly basic "3-course" racing game with a somewhat unique gimmick - each course forks at multiple points into an on-road and off-road segment, and if you pick the more "off-road" friendly cars, you can take the offroad path, which is usually faster (although sometimes they may be vastly more difficult so you might want to stick to the road path instead), but the on-road cars are slightly faster overall to make up for this. The first thing you need to know about this game is that it has a somewhat unique control scheme. Whereas most games have a gas button and a brake button, this game has a gas and a skid out button. If you ever feel that you have too much control over your vehicle, just press B to vent excess grip. All kidding aside, for some reason the brakes in this game are absurdly unusable, if you need to slow down, just let go of the gas pedal, learning this makes the game possible. There's still not a lot of game here but it's tolerable fun for a few hours. It is clearly better than Ridge Racer Revolution, at least, which we rated last week.
NBA Jam 99 is a bit of a tough one to rate. Let's get this out of the way right now. This is not an NBA Jam game. It doesn't play like NBA Jam (it's a 5-on-5, sim style game, there's no turbo, there's fouls, and so on), it doesn't look like NBA Jam (it has very boring visuals and animations with no expressions of exaggeration of any kind), and it doesn't sound like NBA Jam (the commentary is very bland and repeats itself a lot). There is an "NBA Jam mode", but it just turns off all the penalties and rules, which you can do anyway in the main mode. So the question you're probably asking is "is it acceptable on its own merits as a Basketball game", and the answer is maybe. It's certainly not great, not one of the best basketball games of the era by any stretch, it's fairly dull and the pacing of the game feels a little weird (you can inbound the ball all the way to the backcourt, for one thing), but I suppose in a certain sense it is function, and the graphics look okay. However, is this really good enough for a game that carries the NBA Jam license? Does the fact that the game tries to call itself NBA Jam while completely failing to live up to any aspect of what that game was about matter? I feel like it actually does. If someone was buying this game, it was probably because they were a fan of NBA Jam. Couldn't the Jam mode have been 2 on 2? Could they have included a turbo move, or at least got the original announcer? I certainly feel like they could have done a lot more. It's probably telling that these games are completely forgotten today, if they could stand on their own they'd probably still have some fans.
DeleteVirtual Chess is another in a long line of Chess games that attempts to jazz up the experience by adding dumb animations when pieces get captured. As always, it adds nothing to the experience, and the animations aren't even very good anyway. As far as the actual game, it's tolerable but it's definitely very inferior to the SNES Chessmaster game we rated recently, there's far less options, not nearly as much to help teach you the game, and the viewing options are also kind of annoying. It's probably still A because it's still Chess but I wouldn't really recommend it.