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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Blast Corps - BAAAAGGGGAGGGGGGG - 79% (17) (3 SR)
Bomberman Hero - ABAAAGAGG - 61% (9)
GT 64: Championship Edition - BBBBB - 0% (5)
J.League Eleven Beat 1997 - GA - 75% (2)
Lode Runner 3-D - BBAAAG - 42% (6)
Virtual Pro Wrestling 64 - GGGG - 100% (4)
Interestingly, despite the back and forth on quite a number of games in this topic, nothing qualified for the squiggle bracket.
Games for this topic:
1080 Snowboarding
ClayFighter: The Sculptor's Cut
Gex 64: Enter the Gecko
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Quake 64
Ridge Racer 64
This is another one of those topics where I feel like probably every game except Hercules could have been a headlining title if they were fewer to choose from. Also, I've actually never played Quake 1 in any form, so it'll finally be time to remedy that.
1080 Snowboarding - A
ReplyDeleteClayFighter: The Sculptor's Cut - B
Gex 64: Enter the Gecko - B
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys - A
Quake 64 - G
Ridge Racer 64 - A
I've never really been a fan of 1080 Snowboarding, but nevertheless I decided to give it another try and came away with pretty much the same impression I had before. By far the best aspect of the game is its presentation. It looks fantastic, with some pretty great visual effects, lighting, and a solid framerate. The controls are also generally solid, with one huge caveat. General snowboarding control feels good, though of all the games I've ever played, this game has by far the worst control for landing from jumps. No matter how much I play, I can never be confident I'm going to land jumps properly, it generally seems to be the case that the game likes you to tilt your nose a bit more forward than what seems correct, but even then this sometimes causes you to wipe out with no real explanation. Coupled with the fact that the game has a damage meter where you get disqualified if you take more than a handful of bad landings or wall bonks and this makes the game very frustrating to play. Even if you could overcome this issue with sufficient practice, I also simply don't find the game very interesting. Its gameplay, while mostly competent, is very by-the-numbers, and the game doesn't feel like it has as much personality as, say, MTV Snowboarding. I think one of the biggest issue is that the game mostly focuses on racing, and racing isn't what makes snowboarding interesting, it's the tricks. The best snowboarding games are those that either focus mostly on slopestyle or give you incentives to do tricks during races, of which 1080 does neither, and its trick events largely suck due to the aforementioned landing issue. Overall, it just kind of feels forgettable, even if it is very pretty.
Clayfighter has somehow gotten even worse in the transition to 3D. I figured that since the game was 3D now, they would have proper animations, or at least more frames, but nope, there's still only one frame of animation for virtually every move in the game. Besides visually looking terrible, this also makes the game virtually impossible to play as you can't react to moves to any degree, and even if you could the game has completely nonsensical framedata and hitboxes. It's basically a pure button masher in an age where most fighting games were becoming competent, and even among the sea of bad 3D fighting games this one really stands out for how terrible it is. Probably one of the worst fighting games of all time.
Gex 64 is incredibly derivative of Mario 64, copying many aspects of the game wholesale, except that it fails to copy most of the mechanics that were required for it to be a good game. For starters, this game has maybe the most blatant copy of Mario 64's progression system in any game, at the start of every level you select a mission, just like in Mario 64, and there's also even a 120-collectible remote to collect on every stage too. However, the game also has Super Mario Galaxy's problem where the levels are generally very linear, so doing the different missions involves a ton of retreading over the same areas, unlike in Mario 64 which features much larger, nonlinear areas where you don't usually have to go to places that aren't necessary for the star. The game also generally tries to control like Mario 64, but has terrible physics, in particular Gex's jump just feels bad, having very little hangtime in the air, and the timing on the double jump is overly strict. The camera is also pretty lousy, it generally does a good job of picking usable camera angles when you're crossing an area in the intended direction, but god help you if you ever need to turn around or explore. Probably the best thing about the game are its level themes, which are a bit creative, they're generally parodies of various fiction genres, but even then the game feels like it has much less personality than its predecessor, and Gex's lines seem more irrelevant too. Overall, I consider this a pretty big downgrade from the first game and probably one of the weakest 3D platformers of the era.
DeleteHercules is okay. It's clearly very heavily inspired by Zelda, though it's worse in virtually every way. Many aspects of the game feel somewhat unpolished, such as the combat, which always feels a bit "off" and has somewhat lousy hit detection, and the camera, which shifts positions far too quickly when you move around (though thankfully you can quickly recenter it whenever you need to). Easily the biggest issue with the game though is that it's extremely heavy on fetch quests and dialogue triggers. For example, your goal in the first town is to battle the cyclops, but the path to him is locked. To battle him, first you need to talk to a woman to find out she is missing her cookbook, then check a shelf in a house to find the cookbook and return it to her to get a key, then talk to the guard in the tower to find out he lost his teddy bear, then open a chest to get the bear, then return it to him to finally get the key to battle the Cyclops. This might not be too obnoxious if you could pick up the book or the bear without talking to their respective owners, but you can't, in fact if you check the bookshelf before talking to the woman Herc won't check it again after she asks you to look for it and you're stuck (I'm not sure if you can reset the game to fix this, I reloaded a previous save), and Herc will refuse to pick up the bear until you talk to the guard (thankfully, in this case he will take it even if you checked it beforehand). This kind of thing goes on throughout the entire game and probably takes up about half the game's playtime. Luckily, the game does have kind of a dry sense of humour that does help make this somewhat less tedious, and the game does try to innovate in some ways, for example there are situations where you need to switch characters to access different areas (though they play very similarly). Oh, and you can jump in this game, so that's one area where it improves over OoT. As long as you use a guide it's playable enough, and it benefits from having relatively few competitors in its genre besides Zelda.
Well, clearly I've been missing out, Quake is pretty great. It is effectively a slightly upgraded version of Doom, which was obviously already a classic. It now feels "fully" 3D, with levels that feature much more verticality and even swimming. Compared to, say, Duke Nukem 3D, the levels are probably a bit less visually interesting in design, though I feel like the game feels a bit more mechanically polished as a trade-off. The game also runs great (at least in single player), with a consistently smooth framerate and clear, not overly-dark visuals (this gives it a bit of an edge over Doom 64), though there is a bit more load time than I'd like between levels. The best thing about this game, though, and what puts it in the top eschelon of N64 shooters is how configurable the controls are. You can configure absolutely everything, including the functions of each individual direction on all of the system's input devices. This means you can finally have proper, modern dual-analog control! You have no idea how good it feels to have left stick strafe and right stick turn, I think this might actually be the only N64 FPS where this control scheme is available. As for multiplayer, this is the one area where this game faces a major downgrade. The game only allows 2 players and only deathmatch, and the framerate is also somewhat worse. Still, as a single player game, this is right up there with Goldeneye and Perfect Dark IMO.
DeleteRidge Racer 64 is a tricky to rate. It gets a lot of things right, compared to the previous Ridge Racer games there's much more content, and it has a much more sensible progression structure as well. I particularly like the way you unlock new cars by beating them in a race, this always feels satisfying. Graphics are also pretty solid, the cars and environments look quite nice for their time and the framerate is also pretty decent. The drift system is also refined compared to the first game here, with it starting to resemble the way it works in later titles, though the way your grip kind of "snaps back" after a while feels a bit strange, it's not quite as good as it will be later. So why would there be any doubt over its rating? The problem is that the game works well during the early stages, but as you get farther in the game, the speed of the game gets cranked up to an absolutely preposterous level that effectively destroys the game. It eventually gets well beyond F-Zero speed, in courses that are in no way designed for it, being very narrow, full of sharp curves, and with walls that sap a ton of speed with even the slightest contact. The drifting mechanic is completely useless at this point, it will just instantly slam you into a wall, so you're forced to rely on the game's extremely twitchy handling for everything and it saps pretty much all the fun out of the experience. Even if you somehow stick it out to the end, the final course is also unreasonably dark, and when you're going that fast you really don't need to be straining to make out the walls. I remember back when I played through this game I eventually came to the conclusion that it was actually the worst game in the series due to how detestably unfun the last few classes are, which is probably unfair as the beginning is very solid, but it definitely gets less enjoyable the farther you get into it. At least the later games in the series were able to build on this game in ways that made them much better overall.