25th April 2012, 5:57 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:The 360 version changed a few graphics, mainly "updating" the Rare logo (which is now still out of date, so I really hope they don't "update" it to their current abomination). The gameplay changes include better camera controls, proper implementation of "Stop and Swop", and changing note collection to be just like later games, all notes collected are permanent this time around. You listed it as an annoyance, so that solves it. I however would have appreciated "ghost" notes I could collect again and again, chiefly for the purpose of a "get them all in one go" run on each stage. There's certain ways stages need to be played in order to do that which were really challenging.Seriously, having notes which reset every time, in a game where it can be possible to get a LOT of them in a stage before realizing that you need a power you don't have yet in order to get them all, is just unforgivably annoying...
Quote:As above, all Nintendo owned imagery was removed. Controls were changed in the same way as before, and stop and swop was properly implemented, and greatly expanded on to boot. In fact, between the two games, there's actually connectivity between them and Nuts & Bolts, but as yet no port of the GBA game (or, as I imagine, a 3D remake ala RE: Chain of Memories) so no interlocking there.The GBA game never was supposed to connect to the N64 games, though, right? However, it was kind of neat that they finally got stop n swop in. :)
Quote:In retrospect, original games popped up a lot more often back then. Granted, Nintendo still tries new things every now and then, and Sony and MS seem to have put some money into supporting "unique" startups, but without a big name backing them, too many developers have to pick some variation of "retro" art style to get a game made these days. Heck even Inafune ended up having to go retro for two Megaman games just to get them made. It's a big shame Rare didn't do much bug testing on basic accessory compatibility though. Also, the graphics, even by N64 standards, aren't much to look at, so it's a good thing you're zoomed out and above the whole game. Still, fun and unique experience. Boom.I think the "fewer original games now" thing is because of budget. You can do original ideas in small-budget indie download stuff, but high-budget console games need to be safe because of how much money the games cost to make... there have been so, SO many studio failures and mass firings this generation, and it's because of the serious risk developers are in if their games don't succeed. You can't afford to not have a hit anymore, which means safer and safer games, unfortunately.
Quote:I should pick the latter of these up at some point. Hearing about it sounds like a very weird case of a game practically being released as a beta and then eventually releasing a "finished" version. Wish that would happen to Star Fox Adventures. That game looks better than a lot of Wii games but was otherwise very disappointing.Yeah, that basically is what happened, the second version is a fixed, complete version of the game as originally planned, essentially. It's definitely a good game worth playing, though pass on the first version, probably; they're too similar to make both worthwhile unless you really like the games.
And yeah, it'd have been nice to see an improved version of SF Adventures, sure... it certainly could have used it.
Quote:I think it's worth correcting matters about the XBox version. There is more censorship in it, but only the first time around. After beating the game, an option is unlocked to disable all the censorship, so the second time is less censored than the N64 version.Really? I've never heard that, but most people who play the game are going to see it fully censored...
Quote:Further, in what I consider something kinda funny since the 360 ports of other Rare N64 games were very minimalist in their improvements, the graphics in the XBox version were truly overhauled to take full advantage of the console. This was done by Rare as it was when MS first bought it, when they were working on Star Fox Adventures. As a result, the game looks absolutely amazing and is one of the XBox's best looking games with the same fur and grass rendering techniques used in SFA. Along the way, they added some more movie references, like converting a castle into a Van Helsing parody.I'd heard that the multiplayer was entirely replaced, but didn't know there were single player additions too, apart from the graphics. I don't quite know what you mean by "Rare as it was when MS first bought it", though... Conker for Xbox was a 2005 release, late in the Xbox's life cycle, and released well after two straight serious disappointments in Star Fox Adventures and Grabbed by the Ghoulies. Do you mean that this was from declining Rare, but from before MS basically finished them off? I guess that's true.
Quote: At the same time, it's a good thing the game is funny on it's own, because movie references can only get you so far and less far as the movies become more and more dated (the big failing of the "Scary Movie" movies and spinoffs as well as, in my opinion, Robot Chicken). They also added some elements as well as taking away a few, mainly balancing difficulty throughout. Some dialog was changed, mainly for the sake of comedy, and there's a few other unexpected surprises. Also, yes, the multiplayer is completely different. It's a shame they didn't include the original multiplayer on top of it, but that's how it is. Fortunately the game supports system link, as Live support for original XBox games is gone. All in all, the XBox version really is a great version on its own, and considering how hard it is to find a cheap copy of the N64 game, a perfectly valid way to go. For the collector of fine Rare games, I recommend getting both.Given that I have it for N64, Conker is probably my least favorite of the four Rare 3d platformers for N64, and it's not cheap for Xbox, I've never had much interest in getting it... I probably would if I found a pretty cheap copy, though.
Quote:Rare did for kart racing what they did for platforming. Mario Kart may have single player modes, but for anyone who's played this game, it's clear that they barely "count" compared to the full fledged adventure and story of Diddy Kong Racing. The single player design is lightyears beyond MK and course design is top notch in a way that I consider matching MK64's setup. That said, in terms of basic mechanics Mario Kart 64 wins, and as a result that's the one I always played with friends. Modern Mario Kart games like the latest 3DS still haven't come close to this game's single player design.Yeah, it is kind of too bad that Mario Kart has never tried to do a hub-based world, it'd be cool. Even Rare didn't their second time, though -- Mickey's Speedway USA doesn't have a hub world. Well, one of their two GBC Mickey kart racing games does, but only the first one; the second one drops it.
I agree though -- in terms of basic mechanics, and overall track design greatness, Mario Kart wins, but it's great that DKR has such an expanded single player mode, it keeps you playing in single player for a lot longer than Mario Kart 64 will.
Quote:I too loved this game. Time has tempered that opinion, but I still stand by my opinion that this game was vastly underrated. I should add that as time went on, the biggest problem I've found isn't the need to switch characters so much as the general "feeling" in a level of being "incomplete". So many areas in a level are cordoned off no matter who you are. If they had to go with multiple characters, there were better ways to pull it off. It probably would have been best if levels were designed around a simple mechanic of being able to switch characters on a whim. Other complaints revolve around the need to collect SO much stuff just to "see the ending", but generally in these games that's the last thing I actually want to see. I had no problem with all that stuff in the game I had to find.I've never fully replayed DK64, but I have played a bit of it a few times, and it still seemed great... but yeah, it is true that I haven't tried to play the whole game again since finishing it in 2000 sometime.
As for the "cordoned off", thing, though, I just never had a problem with that. Each character has their own special powers, so you can only get to their areas with that character... it didn't feel like I was being "cordoned off", more that I was exploring the level again with someone else who can now go into new areas too. I do remember getting stuck a few times, and using a guide on occasion, but mostly I did it myself... I do admit that once I got it down to ~15 golden bananas left I did have to start looking things up online, though. The game doesn't tell you which ones you've missed, so it'd have been a complete pain otherwise to find the scattered ones I didn't have.
Oh, and I often appreciated being able to go somewhere else and do a different thing for a while, when I was stuck in one area. The game usually have plenty of different things you can do at any point, often in multiple levels, which is great.
Quote:While I enjoyed F-Zero on the SNES, a true 3D sequel is what I needed to really love the game. The only disappointment is that they never did release the 64DD in America so I never got to use the custom track maker. Further, they never gave us that ability in later F-Zero games.I think I like the SNES, N64, and GC F-Zero games about equally... I've ever been able to decide which order the three games should go in, they're all such great, great games. (Of course, I hadn't really played F-Zero for SNES before getting the N64 game; I got it years later, in the mid '00s sometime, and absolutely loved it.)
I do certainly agree that it's unfortunate we didn't get the 64DD expansion, though, it'd have been pretty cool.
Quote:The biggest problem with JFG's collection quest for me wasn't that I had to get so much. It was that I had to comb over so much territory I'd already gone over with very little that was new to find all those things. Add in character switching JUST to get through a gate after passing through the SAME areas once again and it got old. I don't mind collecting, but give me something new to see while doing it. Also, give me a hint that "this will be on the test". I'd have started getting Tribals sooner if I knew they actually were recorded as saved.The problem was that you needed 100% in order to fight the real final boss. That was the problem. And yes, that Kirby 64 does the same thing IS an important complaint about it too... it wouldn't be so bad in either game if you didn't need 100% to progress.
Quote:I really enjoyed Kirby 64. Heck, it was a game I won in this very forum's old contest. That said, it isn't nearly as good as my personal favorite, Super Star. As you point out, Kirby moves slower, but that's something I can deal with. There's also the matter of Kirby's limited flying, and how to "compliment" that restriction, they built all the levels much flatter. I enjoyed the crystal hunt, but the game itself just wasn't quite as well polished. Add to that the lack of "hats" and even Kirby's "look" wasn't quite right. A great game with an inventive mechanic (note that to "make" that mechanic, they just cut out a large number of Kirby's traditional moves, most of them ended up being wrapped into combo abilities), but there are better Kirby games.Oh, gah, limited flight... I think I'd managed to block that from my memory, I hated it so much. I need to go back and add in to my review some bashing of that miserably terrible design decision, certainly... Kirby should ALWAYS have unlimited flight in a Kirby platformer. Always, no exceptions.
As for cutting abilities to turn them into combo powers, perhaps they did, but had any Kirby game had anywhere near 64+ powers before Kirby 64? I doubt it.
Quote:Calling this the "best console game ever made" really stretches things for me. I have a hard time agreeing with that considering the vast bredth of games dismissed in a single sentence. Further, as I've collected more and more old PC and console games, I've found the distinction means very little to me. It was an incredible game that manages to stand up pretty well these days, and it invented a number of mechanics that have shaped how 3D games are made, but "best"? I still go back to Link to the Past and Link's Awakening, and have a hard time deciding which of those Zelda games is my favorite. I play Super Mario Bros. 3 at least once a year all the way through, and still consider it one of the best Mario games, competing POSSIBLY with Yoshi's Island and Mario World, but edging out ahead to me. As inventive as OOT was, the simple fact of the matter is I've had opportunity lately to watch younger gamers play some of these games for the first time. These kids had Ocarina of Time 3DS on one side and more recent Zelda games like Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword on the other, and most of them said that they had a lot more fun with those latter games. Does that mean that Ocarina of Time is WORSE than Twilight Princess? Well, I'm not going to say that. I personally prefer OOT, but it does mean that yes, the Zelda series has made some strides in controls and overall "feel" of moving around since the N64 days, and that's what kids noticed. No, they weren't complaining about the graphics. They didn't just put it down 5 minutes in because it looked bad. They put it down partway through the second dungeon because they wanted to play more Skyward Sword. Admittedly, Skyward Sword to me is probably the game I'd place closest to taking the throne from OOT as my personal favorite 3D Zelda, but my point is our past can cloud us to certain things that fresher eyes can see. I wouldn't dismiss the opinions of kids so soon either. After all, we were all young when we first decided games like Mario were "awesome", and that kid is the one we're summoning up when we "remember" the games as being "awesome".[quote]Perhaps that's what made it great, but it's also the game's biggest problem.
Maybe I'll expand my OoT "review" there eventually, there is more I could say about it, sure. I mean, I do have my problems with it, such as how I've always disliked the Jabu Jabu's Belly and Forest Temple dungeons but liked the Water and Spirit Temples, or how outside of the towns there's so much less to do in the overworld than there is in LA. But still, it is my favorite console game... (note "console", though; Starcraft is my favorite game overall.)
As for it versus other Zelda games, though, I'm sure you remember that I don't like LttP nearly as much as that. I mean, after beating it on the SNES a couple of years ago I can now admit that it is actually a really good game, but still, I'd rank stuff like OoT, LA, TP, OoA, etc. above it for sure...
As for Skyward Sword, it is a great game, I agree, but I don't think I could put it above either OoT or TP; TP's my second favorite 3d Zelda. OoT has a better story than TP, and better characters (Midna's great, but the rest of the TP cast is lacking compared to OoT, and yes, that includes Link) too. I also love TP's huge world full of stuff to do. SS would be next, though, certainly above WW and MM.
Oh, as for dungeons, OoT has the hardest dungeons of any of the 3d Zelda games, I absolutely believe. WW of course is nearly challenge-free, but TP and SS are a little tougher and could have been hard, but they made some design decisions that make things a lot easier, like having you start from the door of a room when you die, instead of the beginning of the dungeon. That sure cut down on the difficulty. At least TP dungeons were hard enough to actually kill me once in a while, though... that never happened in WW. But still, I died quite a lot more in OoT than any of the other 3d Zeldas.
Oh, and yes, probably nostalgia is a factor here, I admit. Can't help it... but it is a great game.
[quote]I've said it before but I loved this game and part of what made it great WAS the deadly time limit. Our opinions are simply different on this, and I accept that.
Quote:However, I should correct some things here. No, you don't need to beat the "entire" dungeon over again, just the boss. Once you beat a dungeon, a warp point is made teleporting you right to the end. It bears noting this in your review, as well as the fact that pretty much any thing that needs doing in the game nets you some sort of item that alllows you to skip to the next part next time you reset the clock. It's true that until you get to those points, you do need to do things over, but there's plenty of stuff one can make happen again and again much quicker the second time around.Sure, sure, so you don't have to redo everything in the dungeon, just go back to the dungeon, walk through all the rooms fighting enemies until you get to the point you were at, and pick up from there... I have heard that that's how it works, but described it that way anyway because that's only minimally better, and you still do need to redo stuff, which is really stupid.
Quote: That said, losing arrows and the like on reset is something they never should have done. That didn't add a thing to the experience. I know it's just a disagreement of taste on one level, but as I've said before I can't help but feel you just stopped too soon when you reset. The biggest advice to make the game fly by I can give isn't even the reverse song of time. It's that you shouldn't reverse time until you complete whatever section you are in and get SOMETHING out of it, be it a quest item, a heart container, a mask or a song. If you play it that way, you should never find yourself needing to repeat some huge thing.The problem is that that's not how I want to play a Zelda game. With MM, the game forces me to always pay attention to the clock. I can;t just play; instead, I have to look at the time all the time, go for one specific goal, and try to do it, only to see whatever I accomplished wiped away (apart from that logbook entry) as soon as I reset time. It's just so, so frustrating. I hate the constant time pressure, and I hate not being able to just play the game, but instead being forced to have to play by the game's clock and stick to certain missions.
Oh, and some of those sidequests can get confusing, unless I use a guide to tell me what to do, which sometimes feels like cheating... heck, I know that when I first played the game I used guides sometimes in the dungeons, because I felt that much pressure to finish them in one try and not be forced to redo the things if time ran out. That is NOT good game design, regardless of how much exactly you have to replay the problem is that you have to replay so much at all!
Quote:Anyway, I personally loved all 4 of the vast dungeons in the game, but then again I always stuck around until I beat the dungeon. The first time through, I only ran out of time in one of them, the last of them, and even then I had gotten far enough to get the mirror shield which meant I barely had to repeat anything there and could continue off into the rest of that dungeon.Last I checked, I was at the halfway point of the Stone Tower Temple. I'd quit in Ikana Canyon before reaching the temple, back in '01, but some years later got myself into the temple at last. There's a save point at halfway, when you flip it over, but I never bothered to go back and finish that temple, or the game. And as I said before, back in '01 at least, I had to use guides several times in the first three temples, to finish them without running out of time, my memories tell me that, though I don't remember any details.
Oh, and I do remember that the water temple was by far the worst of the four. I like the OoT water temple, it's actually one of my favorites in the game, but the MM one is not good.
Quote:I loved this game, and for the same reason I loved F-Zero X. Their SNES incarnations felt like they were trying to do more than they could with Mode 7 and the N64 versions seem to "realize" the vision far better than the SNES ever could. It's why I never bothered with the GBA versions of either series. I hear they were actually pretty decent, but honestly it would have felt like taking a big step backwards to me. That said, I actually felt the Wii version was underwhelming and consider the Gamecube version to be superior. The DS version was nice, but I've decided the 3DS game is probably my current favorite. I recommend trying it if you haven't as they manage to work in all sorts of mechanics from across the series, including reintroducing the "hop" from the N64 game and the speed up coins from the SNES/GBA games.I have two of the GBA F-Zero games... as much as I love the SNES game, I think the GBA games are kind of bad. They made the games much harder to control; gone are F-Zero's great, simple, and easy to master controls, and in are much harder ones that take more skill. It's just not nearly as fun. As for MK for GBA, though, yeah, I haven't played that one either.
As form newer MK games, I'd play the 3DS game if I had a 3DS, sure... but yeah, the Wii and DS games are both fantastic. As for the GC one, I had a somewhat low opinion of it back during the GC generation, and never actually bought the game though I did play it a few times. I got it .. sometime last year, I think, and it's actually good, better than I was expecting. It's still the worst of the 3d Mario Kart games, but it is fun.
Quote:Mega Man 64 - This is a very, very (three years later) late port of Mega Man Legends from the PS1. It's a solid, but unenhanced, port. All of the voice acting is still here, which is nice, but the failure to give the game true analog controls -- instead, the analog stick controls Mega Man as if it was a d-pad -- is a pretty serious letdown. This game released in 2001, over 3 years after the PS1 release... there's NO excuse for not giving the game analog controls, none! Apart from that though, the graphics at least do benefit from the N64's hardware features, and the game's the same. It's not very Mega Man like, and has little in common with the great platformer games, but on its own it's a decently fun game. I didn't go into this expecting very much, but while it definitely has its issues -- the controls, not being very Mega Man like in gameplay, not getting powers from bosses, etc -- as a standalone title it was more fun than I expected. One player, on-cart saving.You seem to have forgotten a comment on this one, if you had one... that's my review there. :)
Quote:I enjoyed this game. I got it along with Quest 64 (ugh) during the N64 days and this was the clear winner. It didn't come close to Zelda, but it was fun in it's own right and had such an insane feel to the whole thing that I couldn't help but enjoy it. I mean you're a crazy faced kid using a smoking pipe as a weapon with hair as big as himself together with a fat effeminate guy, a ninja girl, and some sort of Pinocchio guy in ancient Japan saving the world from Opera singing aliens and along the way you ride in a pop song spouting actor who's also a GIANT ROBOT. The game makes NO sense and I love it.Yeah, it's a pretty good game, particularly for 1997 -- both the graphics and gameplay (lack of lock-on, I mean) are quite dated compared to OoT, but for a pre-OoT effort at something like that, it's actually pretty good. The silly story and crazy, fantasy-ancient-Japan world are great, too. As I said I do like GGA more, both because it's a better game (different genre, but better game) and because it's the one I played first, so I have a lot more nostalgia for it than I do this game, but once I played MNSG, I certainly liked it a lot once I got used to the graphics and iffy 3d combat.
Quote:Another game I dove into for a long time when it came out. I even got the 360 remake. Goldeneye was the innovator, but this game perfected it, and as a result I consider it superior in about every way to Goldeneye, which is saying something. Unfortunately this game was released a little too late in the N64's lifetime to garner the sort of reputation that Goldeneye did, hence the "minimalist" remake where Goldeneye got the full treatment. I have little doubt it'd have taken off just as much if not more had the N64 been around a few years longer. The 360 version takes the time to fix the few flaws it had, such as frame rate issues and implementing a true online multiplayer experience. While the 360 version did update character models, there are some glitches in the cut scenes when someone's hands don't line up just right. Also, the mouths still aren't animated so the updated models are a little more jarring because of that. I'm not asking for the jaws to be rendered with their own polygons, but at least go the route of some early 3D games and make the mouth an animated texture. That worked pretty well in games like Mask of Eternity.I didn't get PD until I found it for $10, in Nov. '01 the same day I got my Gamecube... I wasn't an FPS fan, so I didn't buy those games for full price. Actually, I think the only FPS I ever paid full ($50 or more, I mean) price for was Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which I paid $55 for (for the PC) for some reason. I did like it though.
Anyway, as for PD, I did like it once I played it. I'd played through Goldeneye of course (borrowed it from a friend), and liked but not loved that game. On the note of Goldeneye, I think Goldeneye's good but somewhat over-rated. It was good for 1997 but isn't anywhere near as good as PD. Also, today, I'd much rather play any of the other three N64 FPSes of 1997 -- Turok 1, Hexen 64, or Doom 64 -- over Goldeneye. Of course, the fact that I own those three games but not Goldeneye does suggest that as well. :p
PD was better than GE for sure, though. Better graphics, better gameplay, better multiplayer, more options, better story and characters, and more. It ended up being pretty good, for a console FPS. And yeah, the N64 controller is still my favorite, for console FPS controls... I have of course never liked dual analog. I'm probably just about the only person who prefers Turok-style N64 FPS controls to that. :)
Quote:While OOT and Prince of Persia Sands of Time were big parts in shaping modern 3D games, Mario 64 is arguably the first one to truly "get" what the shift meant. Early Crash Bandicoot and a small handful came close, but Mario 64 was the first to finally establish that, hey, 3D games could be genuine GAMES, worthy of admiration and truly fun. Previous abortions like Bubsy 3D and Prince of Persia 3D showed that no one really understood how the look, feel, control, and VIEW of a 3D game ought to be.You're right, Mario 64 set a new standard. I think that 3d games before it actually could be good -- there are some good examples of 3d games from before Mario 64 for sure! -- but it redefined 3d gaming, and exceeded everything that had been done before as far as 3d gaming went. I mean, I think Bug! is a great, highly under-rated game, but it's no Mario 64.
On that note though, I don't really like your examples, because I actually kind of like both of those games... I admit I've only beaten a couple of levels of Bubsy 3D, but it's actually not that bad. I BADLY wish it had analog controls, they'd help immensely, but I like the huge levels, the intense focus on challenging platform jumping, and more. The partially textured, partially shaded look looks pretty nice too, in retrospect, though I'm sure it hurt it in 1996, when people wanted textures. The controls are on the slippery side, but you get used to it, probably. It's not a great game, I guess, but I can see the effort they put into it, and I like more about the game than I expected, certainly.
As for PoP 3D, I haven't played the PC version, but I do have the improved Dreamcast port, PoP: Arabian Nights, and I think it's a pretty good game. It's very much like Tomb Raider, of course, and is a very slow, deliberate game, but it's a lot of fun, and is a serious challenge as well. I think it's a good game, and would rather play it than the newer PoP games, actually... somehow PoP: Sands of Time and its sequels just never caught my interest at all. They're radically different games, though, with less platforming, a lot less puzzles, and a lot more hack-and-slash action.
I must admit though, the more I play early Playstation and Saturn games, the more I get used to them. Well, some of them; others are still bad. But yeah, Mario 64 did redefine gaming, that is absolutely true. It's also one of the greatest games ever made.
Quote:It was a big stumbling period where the average review of a new 3D itteration of a platforming series generally ended with "this game should have stayed 2D". In fact, the stigma of a 3D conversion lasted a LONG time after those failed attempts up to and including fears of how Metroid Prime would turn out. As a result, a few hidden gems were avoided just because of it. Mario 64's biggest failing is that it still had a few rough edges of it's own. The game's camera was an amazing innovation, but by today's standards is pretty clunky, not even allowing full 360 spins and instead having "dead ends" in the spin that require spinning back around the other way to get to the angle you want at times. All the same, what it did, it did well enough to be a truly amazing game that paved the way for all of Rare's platformers.Metroid Prime did end up way better than expected, yeah, avoiding pretty much all of the pitfalls that led many other series to fade in their transitions to 3d... indeed, incredibly impressive work in that game.
Quote:Freakin' Smash Bros. N64 owners tended to have Goldeneye, Mario Kart, Mario Party, and THIS. Yes, even over Ocarina of Time and Mario 64, for the more "casual" multiplayer N64 owners, this got picked up really fast. No wonder. It's all of Nintendo's biggest stars together at last... to beat each other up. The original idea of a purely Mario cast just wouldn't have been as interesting. This game spawned one of Nintendo's most system selling series, with the later games dominating both Gamecube and Wii sales charts. Nowadays you mainly hear from Melee purists complaining about Brawl ruining everything, but back during Melee's rise the 64 purists complained about Melee. Heck, to this day I still find a 64 game purist dragging in an N64 to "put those youngins in their place" with "the only real Smash Bros.". Those peeps are simply amazing at this game. I still pop it in every now and then, as some of those level designs never had their like made in the newer versions.Most casual fans have Mario Party? I don't know, I'd guess that they'd have Madden and Tony Hawk, over Mario Party. But yeah, SSB is certainly one of the most popular N64 games, for any audience that owned the system, I agree. And it deserves it, it's a great, great game. Melee's the best game in the series, but while it's much more slowly paced than Melee or Brawl, and has a lot fewer characters, it's still a good game. However, like all SSB games, it's FAR better in multiplayer than single; SSB games rarely have much of any lasting value for me as single player games. Even in multiplayer, I remember many, many times in college where I wanted to play SSB(M, mostly) a lot less than many other people... still, they ARE quite good games. For a few matches at a time, preferably.
Quote:I got addicted to this game back during the N64 days. I've played a number of Tetris variants that mostly failed to capture the thunder of the original, but this one came close to me. The premise is simple: take block and move them around the surface of a sphere, matching them up to break apart sections until the core is revealed. To all those topologists out there, yes, this is actually mathematically impossible on the surface of an actual sphere, where you can't have squares of the same size across the entire surface that also all meet together perfectly along the edges. The game is actually a "cheat". What you are really doing is moving blocks along the surface of a toroid, or "donut" shape Along that sort of surface, lines perpendicular will still cross each other again but parallel lines never will, and so it really can be covered entirely with blocks of the same size meeting perfectly at their edges. To make it look like a "sphere", the game is rendered using a highly distorted "fisheye" effect, making the donut look like a sphere to the untrained eye, though one that appears "strange" in a way the uninformed could never put their finger on and generally summed up as "because it's digital". One could pick robot "characters" that basically determined the "stats" of your cursor, such as how fast it scrolled and how quickly it could "drag" blocks, or how many "levels" "up" the "sphere" it could "hop". That's a lot of "quote marks". I got obsessed with the game for a long while. I should play it again sometime to see how it holds up... "The New Tetris" wasn't nearly as "new" as this game.Tetrisphere's great, yeah... I didn't know that it's actually a donut shape and not a sphere, though, that's pretty interesting information. The game's really nothing like Tetris, though; it's just another block-dropping game with Tetris's name pasted on it. Of course, that IS what it is -- the game was originally its own thing, and was being developed for the Jaguar, when Nintendo saw it and bought it up for the N64... well, they made a good choice, it's great! But yeah, it's not Tetris at all in gameplay.