Tendo City - Nintendo 64 Reviews

Perfect Dark

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 09:57:50 +0000

Soon after the success of Goldeneye, Rare's star team began work on it's successor, Perfect Dark. It's development had numerous delays brought on by inside challenges however. Midway through the new game's development, key members of the original Goldeneye team left to form Free Radical. Fortunately, they had completed a lot of the preliminary development work that the remaining members could build from. Numerous designs from other departments at Rare were brought together to form a new star team. They had a basic outline, but they opted for a "add whatever you think is cool to this game" approach at this point in development. Whole new gun modes, weird interactions, the plot growing even more bizarre, and plopping in numerous gameplay modes and graphical tweaks. They did all of this right up until the very last moment. As an example of the sort of madhouse environment at work here, the well praised reload animations were done by one programmer on a whim a few weeks before the game went gold.

This also resulted in one of the longest threads here at Tendo City. The anticipation for Perfect Dark was met with delay after delay, while all these troubles and oddities behind the scenes were hidden from public view. Fortunately, when the game finally came out (a year after the release of the Dreamcast and the start of the next generation of consoles beyond the N64), all those delays and additional work turned out to be worth it. However, the question that comes up is this. Should the game have been delayed into a Gamecube launch title, like both Star Fox Adventures and Eternal Darkness? Were the performance hits taken by pushing the N64 harder than it had been up until that point worth the, at the time, amazing visuals? The good news is, we have the best of both worlds now. The game has been ported to the XBox 360 since then, with smooth 60FPS gameplay and enhanced textures and models. I'll be focusing most of my review on the N64 original, but I'll have a section at the end regarding the 360 version afterwards. It's that second version that's delayed this review for so long, what with it's added "Award" challenges and new 201% completion rating challenge. With all that said, let's get started on what is often considered to be Goldeneye's superior and see if it lives up to that reputation.

--- Story ---
It's the year 2023. The world belongs to a consolidated collection of mega corporations who's inventions revolutionize both civilian and military activity. Global conflicts now focus on information. Megacorps are developing advanced AI who's morality is questionable. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is vast. The U.S. President appears to be a tool of the corporate class and even agents controlling the NSA seem to have heavy ties to them. Pollution, war, and the steady effects of climate change still run amok. In the midst of all of this, rumors of unidentified flying objects and even deeper secrets the governments seem to have witnessed have recently resurfaced thanks to odd videos.

Anyway, enough talking about the news, let's get onto the game's story. Why yes, I DID rush through both Goldeneye and Perfect Dark's modern ports in this specific year JUST to make that joke in this review, but it is stunning just how well this absolutely ridiculous game's initial story lines up with the actual year 2023. As to the rest, yes the story is ridiculous video gamey tropes. The original concept was inspired by a combination of James Bond, X-Files, and Cyberpunk. They had the idea to make the lead character a woman right from the start. They simply thought it was about time they had a female lead in one of their games and worked around that. "Wokeness" has always existed, and we're richer for it. There are conflicting reports on where the name came from. Originally some developers said Joanna Dark was supposed to sound like Joan of Arc, but a few years back another developer revealed that this was just a happy coincidence they later capitalized on. The name for the character stemmed from the game's name, and the game's name was simply mashing together a bunch of cool sounding words until they found something they all liked the sound of. In any event, what we get is a complicated setting involving two megacorps at war with each other, each secretly allied with one of two alien groups competing to reach a hidden ancient weapon on the sea floor. It's themes are largely incidental to the setting they wanted to play with. The whole thing is pretty self aware with Joanna's own reactions to how much stranger and stranger events get playing a bit of comic relief. Unlike Goldeneye, which had a movie to fall back on if players wanted some more backstory, Perfect Dark had to expand it's cut scenes to develop things a bit more. The cut scenes were fully voiced, but the developers still had to keep them short both to avoid losing player interest and to conserve limited ROM space. They opted to have almost every line of dialog simply push the plot forward. There's almost nothing to really latch onto for character exploration here, but fortunately there are a few interesting moments. For my part, I love the moment Cassandra reveals just what kind of person she is simply by revealing she is willing to sacrifice her own life to save one of her enemies if it means getting revenge on the group that betrayed her. For the rest, you get a selection of cliché characters with not all that much depth to them, but they play the roles well and they're fun enough. Elvis in particular is a rather adorable alien buddy that's generally enjoyable every time he's in a scene. By the end of all this, Joanna manages to single handedly slay the leader of an alien empire and allow her ally aliens to bombard the capital, saving the sector. Typical stuff. The game does do it's best to try and hide a lot of the story twists and turns, but the ad campaign more or less spoiled a lot of it before the game had even come out. Elvis' head is right there on the box and numerous promotional materials make it very clear this will eventually involve aliens. All in all, the story is the bare essentials, but I'd say it's more interesting to follow along than Goldeneye's if only for the creative mashup of genres. Like Goldeneye, it's enough to keep you following along to see where it goes next, and nothing more.

--- Visuals ---
A few years had passed since Goldeneye had introduced mocap to FPS games and the genre on PC had expanded by leaps and bounds since then. The likes of Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, and System Shock 2 had released the previous year. Further, a competitive to the "female lead secret spy shooter" space would release only a few months after Perfect Dark with No One Lives Forever, and Free Radical's own first Time Crisis came out around the same time as that, so Perfect Dark was racing against it's own subgenre, just barely beating those two to market. Visually, it couldn't compete in a lot of ways with any of those titles, limited by the N64 hardware as it was when the Dreamcast was already out and the PS2 was right around the corner. However, it still managed to introduce effects not yet seen in other shooters of the time. It managed to simulate real time lighting effects throughout levels based on destroying light sources by creating multiple light maps per level and using that to base what is and isn't lit up. Further, blood effects were expanded to stain surroundings, though in a limited way compared to what later games would do, and the game layered on numerous trippy visual effects in many of the special weapon modes, such as fisheye stretching when using a Slayer rocket or after images when punch-drunk by fists or a neutron bomb. It did all this while greatly expanding the size of various levels compared to what they were in Goldeneye. While Unreal was still champion of raw visual fidelity at this point, Perfect Dark still managed to do JUST enough to catch interest at the time.

However, this came at a cost. The N64 simply didn't have enough memory to handle all this AND all the large levels in the game at once. The game required the recently released "Expansion Pak", which plugged into a slot on the top of the console and doubled it's memory. This was advertised as making the system "run faster", but this isn't accurate. All it provided was additional memory but the system ran just as fast as it had before. Some games could use this extra memory to store higher resolution textures and thus perform at higher resolutions, but the clock speed was unchanged. In fact, running at that higher resolution would often slow games down more than they already were, and thus it was often recommended to either disable the high res mode or simply swap back to the jumper cart to force the game to play at the lower resolution in order to boost performance. In the case of Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong 64, and Majora's Mask, the memory requirements of the games' designs required more memory to run at all. Perfect Dark in particular did have a high resolution mode, but it's hit on performance is bad enough that turning it off is one of the recommended options to make the game "playable". Fortunately, Rare's developers seemed to realize this and so it is already off by default. Further, technically the game is "playable" without the expansion pack, but most of the game modes have been disabled, including single player, and limiting multiplayer to some smaller levels in two-player only.

This brings us to what it runs like in this ideal state, expansion pak inserted and low res enabled. Frankly, it isn't good. Goldeneye was bad, Perfect Dark is worse. Is it that far from Goldeneye? No, I'd say it's only a few frames difference. However, when the two games are running in the teens to begin with, a few frames can feel a lot more significant. At it's worst, the game dips below 10 FPS, and if you do something as foolish as to set up chain reaction remote mines and gaze into the explosive chain reaction, the game will crawl at handful of frames a second. Fortunately, that latter example is something someone would have to intentionally set up and it's the sort of thing that could be done in Goldeneye as well. (In fact, in the XBox 360 remaster, chain reaction explosions even cause that game to slow down. I suspect that explosions weren't coded particularly well in these games.) Here's the good news. Much like Goldeneye, the programmers were especially careful about how the game handled slowdown, so key frames are prioritized making sure that what does get animated are either the results of player action or the result of enemy action if at all possible. This makes the game feel far more responsive than it otherwise would without that optimization, even at the low frame rate, and thus brings it back into being playable and allowing for accurate movement, aim, and actions taking place without delay.

The art design leans further towards sci-fi and a slightly more stylized look than Goldeneye did. While faces still use photos skinned onto the models, they now use more bright and almost comic-book colors, and the characters are equally bright and bold with clear silhouettes. While the art still veers towards the realistic side thus preventing the visuals from aging very well even one generation on, they fair better than Goldeneye's strictly "movie realistic" aesthetic does. It was a needed change to allow the humans of this world to fit in better with the aliens and alien environments in the latter half of the game though. Otherwise, Elvis or Mr. Blonde would have stood out horribly. Along with that art are two very distinct visual styles for the two alien races in the game. Elvis comes from standard Grey aliens from American folklore, called the Maians in this setting. Their bodies are sleek smooth silver without visible mouths and their weapons are equally inscrutable, literally melting their ammunition into themselves to reload. The Skedar by contrast are tall imposing dinosaur-like monsters full of jagged angles and hard edges in green, only to ultimately be revealed to be pretending to that kind of strength and actually being tiny little snakelike entities that use bio-armor to wage war. Their weapons feel like a mix of high tech and barbarism, reloading in a more traditional way yet using everything from destructive energy to literal screaming explosives. Humans have the most recognizable weapons, but being set in a cyberpunk future and working for a secret organization, they have a distinct flavor. One is a laptop that transforms into a gun, another is a rather rectangular pistol that still manages to look sleep. The mines even have an odd glow to them. You know... future glow. Oh yes, and the shields. They resemble the blocky shields from David Lynch's Dune movie, only colorized to indicate how much charge remains.

Environments stay interesting enough to look distinct throughout. Every building seems to have it's own aesthetic. Area 51 has stretched out hexagonal tunnels that are medical-bay-white (and with pointless caution stripes all over the place instead of just at the point of danger, but that's a typical cliché that can be forgiven). The G5 building has numerous very tight corridors built into stone. Carrington's villa is an island paradise resort of sorts. The Cetan superweapon is a bioship that's alive with green living walls and biological turrets in the ceiling. The Skedar homeworld is a holy place yet the very capital already looks run down with broken pillars and malfunctioning doors, as though the Skedar themselves did far more damage to their world before you even discovered it. The downtown area is every cyberpunk dystopia, eternally raining and full of flying cars, dangerous security robots, and agents trying to keep everything in order. There's also a frozen expanse in Alaska, the inside of the plane Air Force One, the luxury office of dataDyne, and the clean professional Carrington Institute, to name a few more. This keeps the game feeling fresh and prevents the areas from getting too stale, save for when a level is reused, which happens more often here than in Goldeneye, but I'll get into that later.

--- Sound ---
The game's sound design is excellent, as it was with Goldeneye but enhanced even further. Unique sounds for running on various surfaces, panting, random bits of often hilarious commentary from enemies, solid punchy weapon sound effects, reload sounds ranging from simply satisfying to outright surreal, and all the numerous ambiance layered throughout each level. It all comes through as rich as the visuals do, and unlike said visuals, the sounds still hold up. When the music is "calm", take a listen. City streets are bustling with the sounds of distant events going on in roads just out of sight. Buildings have running ventilation and computers beeping in the background. Alien ships and worlds have strange unrecognizable yet consistent sounds throughout. Even Carrington's Villa has a sea breeze and the occasional sound of waves when outside. The music is a microcosm of the game's own development. Grant Kirkhope returned to take over composing duties after Graeme Norgate left for Free Radical, yet both had worked together on Goldeneye's soundtrack. Other artists also contributed, but these two, while not exactly working as collaboratively as they had on Goldeneye, still managed an absolutely stunning and addictive soundtrack. Aside from some obvious inspiration from Bond that had to stay a lot further away from that franchise this time around, they implemented numerous more "surreal" instrumentation inspired by the theme of the X-Files, and also implemented heavy "synth" inspired by movies like Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. The mixture of all these flavors came together to make a soundtrack that's a joy to listen to even without playing the game, like many Rare soundtracks. Much like Goldeneye, the game used queues to switch up songs midlevel to emphasize the situation. Sneaking uses much more subdued calmer music with that nervous edge. Combat switched to much more action packed music. Full alert emergencies ramp it up to a panic. Multiplayer also makes use of a lot of this music, and further allows players to select which music they want to play and even create a playlist. If you don't like a song, it can be stricken off entirely, though generally I simply stick with "random" myself.

I suppose it would be enough to summarize this as "Rare did Rare quality work" here. The sounds pop, the music's catchy and sets the right mood.

--- Controls ---

The game's controls are taken straight from Goldeneye, and like Goldeneye the ideal control setup is 1.2, which is more or less a "southpaw" version of the standard modern twin stick controls, replacing the right stick with the four C buttons. The game now has a number of interesting tweaks on top of this. Firstly, "head wobble" can now be disabled. This makes aiming far easier especially when running or sniping. My first time through the game I insisted on playing with this turned "on", but frankly I was making things harder on myself for no good reason. All it does is implement a random wobble players must contend with, so disabling it leaves it purely up to player skill. Plus, for those who really want to go for speed running, they'll want this off to better their chances. The game now has a cursor outside of "precise aiming" mode, so even while moving one can see exactly where they're going to shoot without resorting to putting sticky tack on the screen. The cursor itself is also much more subtle. It's smaller, semitransparent, and has a bit of a "range finding" aspect along the sides to really give a good impression of where the shot's coming from and where it's going, in case the player has a bad case of cotton eye. Corner leaning works just as it did before, and now ducking has a bit more nuance. In Goldeneye, being able to run while crouching was more of an accidental blessing that required very particular timing to pull off. In Perfect Dark, they took that and made it intentional design. Not only can players now move while crouched, there are now two levels of crouching, allowing a range of movement/profile tradeoffs. Using that particularly well timed button combination from Goldeneye now quick-ducks from fully standing to fully crouched, to save time.

Then there's the "quick menu". This feature is becoming standard in games these days, but Perfect Dark was the pioneer. By holding down the weapon switch button, a circular "quick menu" comes up. Point the analog stick in the direction of the item one wants to use and the game will switch right to it. This is much faster than manually switching most of the time, and also keeps players "in the action" better than pausing and manually selecting equipment (though the latter is still possible and very important for speed runs). If player inventory passes a certain point, pressing the trigger while in this menu switches to a second, and a third. Commands to A.I. allies take up the last "page" of this quick menu.

Once again, the fastest way to move involves diagonal running at JUST the right angle, which is easily done using the c-buttons in the 1.2 control scheme. I've noticed that the most popular shooters to speed run are the ones that involve skillful running tricks. There's something satisfying about utilizing some hidden method to get the best speed. Doom has wall-running. Quake has bunny hopping. GE/PD has diagonal running. All of them require a certain level of skill to utilize properly and mitigate movement commitments. In Goldeneye, the diagonal run was an unintended glitch, but in Perfect Dark they've specially calibrated the par times around the expectation of it's use. They didn't bother to fix the glitch and instead seem to fully endorse it now. It's such a wonderful thing when developers embrace techniques that add to the replayability of a game rather than clamp down on them.

All in all, the controls have been tightened and expanded but the general physics still feel very much like Goldeneye. For those who played the former, they'll feel right at home and then some here.

--- Game Design ---

Here's the crux of it! First, let me recap what I said in my Goldeneye review. That game created a new subgenre of FPS that emphasized exploration through numerous paths to discover solutions to unique objectives for each mission, very often allowing unique solutions so long as the core objective flag was triggered. It also heavily emphasized sneaking, though not to the extent of true "tactical espionage action" games like Metal Gear or Thief, which had already come out by this point. Further, with games like System Shock 2 out, there were now games that competed and even surpassed in terms of world interactivity while still providing solid shooting mechanics. However, Perfect Dark wasn't ready to just rest on what made Goldeneye's level design work so well. It expanded. Now the game wouldn't just add new objectives on higher difficulties. It would alter them entirely or shift locations of key items or enemies around based on the difficulty. Where Goldeneye made things more interesting and deeper with each new playthrough on a higher difficulty, Perfect Dark made each difficulty feel like a different path through the game. It wasn't incredibly rich or deep. Only some levels even did that, but the ones that did really stuck out. Further, numerous choices made in previous levels would affect later levels down the line. It becomes a good strategy at times to replay a level and pick a different option to make a later level's status shift a little. This sort of thing truly made player agency matter in a way Goldeneye didn't quite have. As examples, in Carrington's Villa, on lower difficulty, you are tasked with saving a negotiator as a sniper secretly inserted on a nearby hill. On the highest difficulty, you ARE the "negotiator", and you have to fight your way out of the situation yourself. In Area 51, during the escape, depending on the difficulty you may find Jo's brother Jonathan early on, or have to search deeper into the base to locate him. In that same level, near the end, Jonathan says he'll open the gates to allow you and Elvis to escape while he escapes on a jetbike. If you intercept him instead and stand in front of him, Jo will say she'll do that and Jonathan will escape instead. If you do this, later on Jonathan will still be alive to aid you when the institute gets invaded. The most significant change based purely on difficulty is the Cetan ship itself. The level consists of reaching numerous sections via teleporters, and depending on difficulty, the "middle" section is a completely different layout in each difficulty. Numerous little changes, and consequences to choices, are littered here and there throughout the game and it all adds up to make the game a richer experience that's a lot more interesting to play multiple times.

The levels themselves are still filled with numerous interactable objects, only this time with a wider range of effects which does make sense considering the sci-fi setting. There's computers that can be found that open hidden compartments or paths through levels (revealing secret weapons or just a shortcut to take certain enemies by surprise), windows that can be opened, and oh so very many pretty shiny buttons. The spy tools are the same kind of eclectic bunch to be found in Goldeneye, with the added bonus that more of them are optional this time around. For example, there is a level where you need to hack a taxi to create a distraction by remotely crashing it into a security bot. Except.. you don't need to do that. There's a remote drone hidden somewhere in the level and it can be fit with a bomb and asploded to create a distraction another way. In this same level, guards can be lured out to open certain locked shutters to give you more hiding places, including an entrance to a um... gentleman's club underground. As for the level's layouts, just like Goldeneye they're often filled with numerous paths and often useless side areas simply to give the area a more "lived in" feel, as though it's a real place. This also adds to routing options or simply hiding places over time. Certain level "equivalents" may be noted by Goldeneye players. The Alaskan wilderness "crash site" is much like the "Surface" levels, save that there's a whole underground section and mountains cut the aboveground region into sections. However, one thing can't be compared. Goldeneye had lots of "remnants" of it's early design as an on-rails shooter, where Perfect Dark was never intended for that. So, there are far fewer sections that look like they came out of Time Crisis here, and nothing like the "Train" level. One other thing worth noting is the player can "fall off" far more places than in Goldeneye. While some invisible fences still exist, for the most part the player is free to jump from higher levels to lower if there's no visible obstruction.

I should mention the cheese! During development, one of the designers commented to the map creator that something he'd made looked like a wedge of cheese. He decided to turn this into a running gag and put an intentional piece of cheese into every map in the game. Finding them all is yet another secret to explore, although there's no in-game tracking for it so it's just for your own satisfaction.

There is one downside to these levels with all their richness, and that's how many get reused. I'm not going to count cases like how the external of Area 51 and the internal are technically all one big map, because in practice you can't actually get to one section when playing the other so they effectively play out as two very distinct levels. I AM going to count that the "inside" section is done twice, once going in the other going out. The same goes for the main building section of dataDyne, and in fact the bonus levels unlocked at higher difficulties are also all reused levels. Not counting the bonus levels, the game only reuses as many as Goldeneye did, but counting those? Not a single bonus level is a unique location. There's four of them, but one's basically a mini-game that can be disregarded for this, leaving three. The game is one level shy of Goldeneye's count after that, and again, the bonus levels are reused. Don't misunderstand. They are reused in clever ways that make for unique strategy, but it's still lacking in comparison. All in all though, having replayed the Goldeneye and Perfect Dark levels so many times these past few months, I love them all, but Perfect Dark's level design (mostly) edges out what came before.

One last point to mention. Unlike Goldeneye, this game has a hub level called the Carrington Institute. This is a place to "relax" and calm down between tense missions. All the NPCs have some cute things to say. There's computers that add in details on current progress in the story, character bios, equipment information, and a few training facilities on top of that. The um.... "simulation room" (that looks like a holodeck straight from The Next Generation) creates holograms simulating things like navigating security lasers or locating switches. The gadget room has a hidden training hall teaching you how to use the gadgets. The massive storage rooms have hovering crates and a hoverbike you can play around with. (Here's a hint. Yes you can actually ride the hover bike. You have to press the interact button twice to get on or off. I didn't know this for an embarrassingly long time because it isn't actually documented anywhere in or out of the game in the manual.) Oh and yes, here's one you'll spend the most time with. The armory has a shooting range and you unlock more challenges in it by unlocking more weapons throughout the game (by finding and picking it up at least once in a level then finishing it, both in the campaign or in combat challenges). They range from bronze to gold and are all tailor made specifically for each weapon. Some can be very challenging, especially the ones that involve tossing explosives, but they can be rewarding when you find the unique tricks for tackling each of them. For the most part, these help you learn the full ins and outs of each weapon, but some of the training levels are a little "weak" in this regard. All in all, the institute is a wonderful addition, and if you think it's vast design is a bit overkill for what's actually there... well you're not wrong. Wait for it. No level design goes wasted in Perfect Dark.

Unfortunately, unlike the later Time Splitters series, there is no map editor. While Time Splitters would eventually have map editors so powerful they allowed for fully functional campaign levels with objectives to be set up, Perfect Dark is limited to the levels included. Recently, modders have set about fixing this with new map editing available to the retro game, but this was not available at the time of the game's release. This sets it, and Goldeneye, behind the likes of Quake and Doom which had custom level design built in right from the start.

Now we come to the enemy design. Let's get this out of the way. You can't shoot hats off guards any more. Apparently this was a result of changes that allowed different head sizes among guards, including alien heads of course, which made the hats no longer sit "right" on different heads, so they just baked the hats right into different head models. Maybe an extra week of development could have resolved that, but they decided to focus on other things. What did they focus on? Everything else. Now you can shoot guns out of a guard's hands, or even just walk up and disarm them. They may surrender if they are alone or hurt or otherwise weighted towards their "fear" factor, or they may decide to run away, or fight back. If they fight back, being close to them is a bad idea. They can melee you too, including knocking your weapons out of your hand, or they could reach down and pick a gun up off the ground, or they may have a gun or two or twenty stashed away in their clothes. All around, AI has been improved dramatically since the last game. In fact, while pathfinding has never been their strong suit, their general behaviors for handling what you may throw at them are beyond what's put in a lot of today's tube-quest cinematic shooters. Trying to lure an enemy chasing you around a corner so you can blow them away the moment they pass through the door? They may just hold back and try to lure you out instead. They may know you're a floor above and chuck an n-bomb at you to hit with the AOE. They may run and group up with more to rush back to you. They may... be able to see you over railings and fire back over them! You can no longer rely on rushing at a guard and ducking to karate chop their knees to death. Their new melee options allow them to handle that. Other than this, familiar weaknesses remain. Enemies pulling out their weapon have little room to adjust their aim if you decide to dash behind them before firing, leaving them wide open. Their animations usually need to fully complete as well. Of course, the "slowly walking forward while holding down the trigger on an automatic" animation remains, and it's as deadly as ever if you can't get behind them before it starts, so find cover instead. Of course, it's worth mentioning the aliens and their AI. The maians are basically a race of oddjobs with big heads, so their AI has all the same strengths and weaknesses. By comparison, we have the Skedar. Their AI is... much more simplistic, and since the last few levels feature them almost exclusively, it leads to them being a bit of a disappointment. They either rush straight at you or plant their feet and just fire away. No clever flanking or strategies of any kind, because they're built to be brutal almost like wild animals. They're still dangerous though at least, just not as well... interesting as the earlier human enemies.

Perfect Dark's legacy certainly can't ignore it's unique weaponry. In keeping with Perfect Dark's "throw everything at the wall" development hurricane, the weapons are a huge collection of very unique concepts with no regard paid towards balance, and I like it that way. This game uses a "secondary fire" concept that many games use today, but in this case the secondary fire modes are usually very different from primary modes. They range from incredible to practically useless to ways to make up for controller limitations. Punching has a secondary disarm mode, which is one of the most useful capabilities in the game. Pistols have a secondary smack mode, which is probably the least useful save for being able to quickly knock out someone you're holding up with a gun. I'll go ahead and mention all the faves everyone does as well. The laptop gun converts into a throwable automated turret. The Cyclone allows firing an entire clip in the space of two seconds. The CMP-150 has a "Fifth Element" secondary where you can pass the cursor over up to five enemies, and the weapon auto-aims towards them each in turn until they are dead. The Callisto NTG switches to a slower firing high impact mode that goes through doors, thin walls, and rows of enemies. The Slayer fires a screaming explosion that can be remote controlled. The wrist mounted laser switches between Moonraker and "cutting beam", combining the two items from Goldeneye. The Dragon allows you to throw the weapon down as a proximity mine, which is especially cruel a trick in multiplayer. The sniper rifle's secondary is... crouching. Yes, you can crouch in the game anyway, but the way the controls are set up, the zoom function of the sniper rifle is mapped to the same buttons as crouching, so they had to just use the secondary for that. It's a shame.

All in all though, these secondary features result in many new approaches to levels and their challenges. Many can be treated as additional gadgets allowing playthroughs to become far more varied. The laptop gun can be tossed in a heavily guarded room to clear it out, or simply to defend you while you hack a console. The Remote control rocket can be used to take out a distant important target from safety, or simply to speed up progress through the level. It's these that truly make playing with all these unique levels fun. While the weapons are NOT balanced taken as a whole, their deployment in each level is. Like Goldeneye, you can't carry weaponry from one level to the next and start with fixed loadouts, dependent on POS (Procure on Site) to better equip yourself in each stage. This can feel a little silly at times when a stage literally takes place right on the other side of a door you finish the last level going through, but it means that the challenges can be tailored very specifically to the tasks at hand. Multiplayer likewise uses specially configured loadouts that are roughly balanced in power, but it does allow you to completely ignore this and make custom weapon loadouts instead. Both of these things are critical, because there exists the Farsight. This is generally considered the most overpowered weapon in gaming for a reason. It's an alien railgun with an X-Ray scope and AI target finding. You can sit in some secluded corner of a level and just snipe everything through any number of walls, and the hit is an instant kill on contact. Well, if the target has shields the first shot destroys the shields, and the second is an instant kill. It also fires very slowly, and aiming through the scope means you have no situational awareness. These are the very few advantages opponents have when facing this gun. Limiting it to a very small number of levels prevents it from utterly breaking the game, but oh how much fun it is when you finally do get it.

Classic Goldeneye weapons do exist in the game, but only as cheat codes and they can't be used in multiplayer unfortunately. Instead, they're only for later playthrough. These weapons are unlocked by completing shooting range challenges back at the Institute, as mentioned earlier.

--- Multiplayer ---

In Goldeneye, the multiplayer mode was a last minute addition by one developer that turned into the game's most popular mode. It's no wonder then that Perfect Dark would put a big focus on greatly expanding and focusing on the multiplayer right from the start. Fortunately, this didn't come at the expense of the single player campaign. Instead, it enhanced it.

Co-op mode was added, thanks to the popularity of this mode in Doom and Quake. This addition involved certain tweaks to the level design to keep the game challenging with the extra character joining. In this case, that extra character is (usually) Velvet Dark, a sort of "Luigi" style sibling to Joanna which the story fails to acknowledge. In fact, the co-op character can even be bot controlled complete with some basic player-input commands. Co-op drastically improves the appeal of the single player campaign, so long as those playing it are willing to handle the rapid "quit and restarts" that failing objectives in a game like this brings. Co-op also has it's own saved progression, so a full completion requires doing this mode as well. In a few cases, the AI will actually get in the way (such as Mr. Blonde's Revenge) so it's probably more ideal in those cases to have a human player or even just to select a human ally and then just leave player 2's controller alone. Some levels change enemy spawn locations, numbers, or health/shield levels. Others shift a few objective locations slightly, others make the two players spawn far apart, and some even alter how certain cut scene triggers work. (The escape from dataDyne has a section where you automatically walk through a gate, but in co-op this automated walk is disabled so that whatever player didn't go through isn't locked in place when it happens.) A lot of care was put into it, and it's appreciated even if they didn't bother adding par times for cheats to this mode. It should be noted that as for playing with an AI controlled companion, a few alternate companions with their own AI can be unlocked. However, they are treated as "cheats" and thus can't be used to gain progression.

Counter-op is a brand new concept involving having player 1 play through a stage solo, while player 2 hops from body to body like a Matrix Agent, using their death (including by using a suicide pill) to springboard into a random other NPC's body. The counter agent's objective is to cause a failed mission for player 1. This can include pushing things in front of doors, setting up traps if they have the right weapon for it, or simply helping to alert guards. However, the counter agent can't destroy mission critical objects. In practice, the mode is weighted very heavily in favor of the main player. Not only does the counter agent have very low health and are unable to carry inventory with them, they will often be forced to spawn in a body very far from the player. Killing themselves or other enemies in order to get ammo or spawn closer is also very counter productive as it can make even Perfect Agent difficulty a cakewalk. It's a creative mode, but unfortunately it ends up not being all that fun to be a counter agent chasing and failing to make even a dent in an experienced player's progress. This mode doesn't track progress in the N64 original and isn't counted towards completion. This makes sense, since it's pretty easy to "suicide cheat" your way through every mission at every difficulty.

Combat Simulator is the real star of the show. This is the multiplayer competitive component from Goldeneye, vastly amped up. This mode includes new scenarios, many new maps, much more customization, and the new "Challenges", inspired by Quake 3 Arena's substitute for a true single player campaign. On top of all of this, it provides a progression system for the player, keeping track of all kinds of data recording what the player's file has done. These player files (and custom game settings) can be saved independently of the main save file and stored on a N64 memory card to make it easy to take progress over to a friend's house.

The scenarios available include standard combat, where players compete for the highest kill count. This, and all other modes, can be configured either as a free for all or team based modes (with up to eight teams). There's also Capture the Case, a capture the flag stand-in that's straightforward enough just spy themed. The case is a little harder to spot though. The player holding the case can't be spotted with it and thus has to be picked out on the mini-map indicator, if it's enabled. Hold the Briefcase is a variation of this. Whoever is holding the briefcase gains points the longer they hold it. Unlike similar modes in other games, you are free to fire back at enemies while holding the case. Pop-A-Cap, aside from having a very cringeworthy 90's "white guys trying to sound street tough" name, is essentially a twist on the previous mode. Instead of holding a case, the game randomly selects someone to be "it", and all other players have to kill whoever's "it". Whoever is "it" simply has to stay alive to gain points, and whoever kills them becomes the new target. Hacker Central is... well it depends on how many players are on each team. When played with teams of 1, the game is a slog. One player has to first collect a hacking tool, then stand in front of a hacking terminal, unable to defend themselves, until the hacking tool completes. With just one player per team, this is dull and only ends when everyone gives up on just being killed and no one getting any points. However, the game becomes a lot more interesting with team sizes of two or more, where players can actually form some sort of strategy to defend the hacker. Lastly, there's King of the Hill. Unlike many implementations, instead of putting a circle down of a fixed size marking the hill location, Perfect Dark instead alters the wall texture color to indicate a whole sector or room as "the hill". This means it can be an incredibly large area such as the bottom floor of an open arena, or as small as a tiny square a team has to pack into that's at the corner of two hallways and visible through windows in another. A rule can be set on whether the hill moves after every point, or stays at a fixed location.

Most weapons, save for gadgets, the Goldeneye weapons, and the psychosis gun in particular, are available in multiplayer. These include more balanced preset lists, or a full level of customization so the player can make their own stage loadouts. There are a whole selection of brand new arenas, and three fan favorite levels from Goldeneye, with some tweaks and enhancements. There has been much speculation as to just why Facility was renamed Felicity, but as it turns out it was simply an in-joke with the level designer, much like the cheese (the nature of this in-joke has yet to be publicly revealed). It had nothing to do with copyright issues. One thing worth noting is the shift in focus when it comes to the new level designs. While the previous levels had as much of a focus on espionage and sneaking around as the game levels they're based on, this time around most of the levels are designed as direct combat arenas first and foremost. For those who liked the sneaking, traps, and subtlety Goldeneye combat focused on, this made the newer levels feel like a step down. I think in some ways I agree, but there are a couple levels I love in the new set. First is Grid, based roughly on the "ground floor" scene in The Matrix and with enough twists and turns and unique locations to keep people guessing. The second is Fortress, which is perfectly arranged for 4 team capture the case or king of the hill. Beyond that, the Skedar level has too much unreliability with the doors to be all that fun (an issue that also plagues speedrunning the single player version), and the car park is simply far too vast, with every floor being utterly cut off from every other. So, some new levels do have some issues outside of the shift in focus, but all in all since the most popular Goldeneye levels have been brought in, it still feels like overall the mutliplayer selections have all improved.

Simulants (bots) are another new addition, based on similar popular AI controlled entities in other shooters like Quake 3 Arena at the time. These however had a lot more player accessible customization than average, and they're surprisingly capable. They can be assigned to teams the same way any player can. In total, the N64 game allows for four human players and eight simulants at once. However, playing with these numbers in large levels combined with explosive weapon loadouts can cause the game to slow to an unplayable crawl. It's better to manage the numbers a little better to maintain playability. Simulants have a number of "personalities" that can be assigned, such as "cowardsims" who only attack when their algorithm detects an advantage, or "vengesims", who seek out whoever last killed them to the exclusion of all else. The difficulty of their AI can be set from "meat", which are more or less walking targets, to "Perfect". At that level, they can turn and aim as fast as if they were using mouse controls, always run as fast as a diagonal run, and switch their objectives instantly the moment players change the situation on the map. "Dark" is a level further beyond that. At that level, if Perfect felt like the enemy was cheating, Dark removes all doubt. Dark sims can pull off perfect aim with wildly inaccurate "crowd clearing" weapons like the reaper, instantly whip around for those headshots while running perfectly fast in reverse, and often simply manifest objects into their hands when you aren't looking. So long as the mini-map is enabled, their wave function stays collapsed but if you disable it, these quantum monsters now will teleport to whatever location their AI deems appropriate so long as a player doesn't see them do it. In the setting, the combat simulator is a holographic training facility and "Dark Sims" are modelled off of advanced robots that are faster and stronger than humans, explaining some of this cheating. All in all, it's very fun to play on a team with three friends and form a defensive base against an army of perfect or dark sims just to see how long you can hold out. This has shades of modern "horde" modes when done this way.

The AI really has it's chance to shine, and frustrate, in the combat challenges. Thirty in all, completion is kept independently for 1-4 players, so full completion means going through this four times, with differing numbers of players each. Frankly, that's a bit much to ask someone to put together with their friends, so fortunately there's a glitch that can be abused to just "complete" the challenges on the higher player count without actually playing them all. Of course, I'd recommend at least playing the one player versions the intended way. These all consist of specially baked scenarios with preset enemies, allies, weapons, and objectives with occasional interesting little twists too. The difficulty is fairly low key early on, and only really starts to become challenging in the 20's upward. The last few challenges, involving numerous perfect and dark sims, border on outright unfair. A lot of luck and exploitation of AI weaknesses will be required to handle these challenges. I think at that point the challenge goes a bit too far in the unfair direction. When that much luck is required, it's not really fun. However, one key note. These challenges unlock multiplayer features from maps to weapons to scenarios to customized options. Fortunately, the very hardest ones are past that point of unlocking things, which is a small mercy. All in all, it adds yet more replay value to the game for subsequent playthroughs without stretching the game out too long.

For customization, aside from the nuanced control of rules and weapon loadouts, players can also fully adjust which music they want to play and create a custom playlist on top of that. They can also select not just a character but an outfit from any available in the game, plus a few additional bodies that didn't quite make it into the campaign. This includes mixing and matching human and alien heads and bodies. While Oddjob was notoriously short and hard to hit in Goldeneye, Maians made up for this with massive heads that made headshots far easier. However, by combining a human head with a maian body, something even harder to hit than Oddjob is born. Sadly, Skedar are not a playable option. Their animations and behavior are just too different from the stock human bodies to have worked well without a lot of custom work. The closest option to that is playing as Mr. Blonde. Incidentally, this is also what happens in Counter-op when respawning puts the counter agent into a skedar body. They simply becomes another Mr. Blonde. Oh yes, it should be noted any custom game scenarios players cook up can be saved to the memory card and brought with them as well.

With all of these features, multiplayer has been enhanced to such a degree it's hard to go back to Goldeneye. About the only thing missing would be the rest of Goldeneye's levels brought over, or a map editor, but short of that this is one of the most complete multiplayer experiences available.

--- Cheats and other bonuses ---

It's a Rare tradition! Provide plenty of cheats and make players earn them! There's a massive number available this time around, one for almost every stage! Well, that's the thing. Unlike Goldeneye, there are no par times for the bonus levels. It's a shame since there's a few cheats missing that were in Goldeneye as well. There's no fast and slow animations (but there's a universal "slo mo" cheat now), and no "enemy rockets". There's also no "turbo speed" cheat, but there is a "fast motion" option for multiplayer that no longer counts as a cheat. A few other former cheats were graduated to full options though. Paintball mode is now simply an option that can be enabled without being considered cheating, and turning off the radar is simply a multiplayer option. The Goldeneye style aiming reticle however IS considered a cheat. There's also a number of additional cheats like "Hurricane punches", for when you want to just destroy an enemy, and infinite laptop gun ammo, or even infinite ammo without reloads. What's a shame is there's room for more cheats if only so many weren't just subsets of other better cheats. There's a "perfect darkness" cheat that casts the whole world in a black filter, but doesn't actually blind the enemy. Also, the "cloaking device" cheat is essentially a weaker version of the invisibility cheat from Goldeneye.

All in all, while some of the new cheats are unique and fun additions, like the psychosis gun for turning enemies to allies, others are downgrades, and the missing par times for bonus levels means less challenges to overcome in those cases as well. The cheats are of course welcome, but it all comes down as a bit of a wash between the two. No clear winner here.

The statistics gained in multiplayer however lead to something interesting. Each statistic has hidden "milestones", and reaching a certain preset number of these milestones across all statistics causes a rank up. After a long period of grinding, the coveted rank of "Perfect: 1" is attained, along with a revealed username and password. Originally, these were meant to be used with Perfect Dark's "augmented reality" ad campaign web sites, but those sites went down earlier than expected and the codes never did get properly used. Still, it was a unique idea, even if getting to that rank involved far more grinding than it should have. (Literal days of leaving a controller with buttons or a stick taped down to run in long circles.)

-- And in the end ---

What we finally received from Rare was their last great hit. Conker's Bad Fur Day would be another great game released a year later to end out their run of N64 games (a game Nintendo refused to publish forcing Rare to do so themselves), but this was the last million seller they'd produce that made such a name for itself. It was a game that truly improved on just about everything Goldeneye offered, and while it falls short of being "perfect", it's certainly one of the greatest games of it's generation, PC or console. If only it had a good framerate and perhaps a higher resolution....

Enter the XBox 360 version. This version was commissioned and done by 4J studios using the original code provided by Rare as the base, where the unreleased Goldeneye remaster was done directly by Rare themselves. I'll get into the numerous changes made to this edition. Note that this is for a fully patched version of the game. The patch fixed issues involving the timing of explosions and the laptop gun as well as adding extra control options. Of course, the game now mostly runs at a smooth 60FPS. Oddly, explosions still cause the game to stutter a bit, and massive chains of them can still make the frame rate crawl, but not nearly to the extent of the original. Beyond that, the gameplay is identical to the N64 original. Even most of the glitches and exploits for speedrunning are still intact. The only one of note that I honestly think shouldn't have been "fixed" is that now the devastator can no longer be used to blow up Carrington's files "before" Carrington orders you to do so, making that particular time trial much less flexible than before. Controls, with a little prodding, are also mostly improved and now work just like most modern duel stick FPS controls. Sadly this makes diagonal running MUCH trickier. I wish they'd allowed the d-pad (bad as the 360 dpad is) to be used for movement, but alas that's not the case. Instead, you must find JUST the right angle to get that diagonal run boost, and it's not even doable on every 360 pad. Of all the pads I own myself, only one actually is calibrated JUST right to allow for it, and unfortunately 360 gamepads can't be manually calibrated in any way. The game does allow for some minor buttons reassignment, to make buttons for reloading and the like match one of three popular franchises. I picked the "Duty Calls" one myself. Crouching is now assigned to it's own independent button! This is great in many ways, but there's no longer any "quick" way to go from fully standing to fully crouched. This also means the "secondary" mode for the sniper rifle was simply removed. There was simply no point in it even being there when zooming and crouching no longer overlap.

Textures and models have been updated across the board. They don't make the game look like Halo Reach or anything, but they make the game look sharper, like what it MIGHT have looked like as an early Gamecube title. Whether this is an improvement is a matter of opinion. Maians now look like wrinkly old naked people instead of silvery smooth cute buddies, and so I'd say that was a notable downgrade. Other changes are also hit or miss. Sometimes the "interpretations" change enough details that an object will look entirely different, and other times it'll look simply like an enhanced version as intended. Their interpretation of Maian tech shifts from "liquid metal" to "aquatic lifeform" for example. Of note is that many of the heads based on old employees from both Rare and Nintendo have been replaced with the then current staff of Rare, 4J, and Microsoft. While it's a shame that Miyamoto is no longer guarding the Pelagic II in a Fire Mario suit (because he's got real firepower, see), at the very least now we have Peter Molyneux as the new elevator guard at dataDyne. Yes that's right. MS's most fabled liar can now be punched and kicked repeatedly in the opening and closing cinematics between levels! They've also added an additional character for multiplayer, the "Agent" from Crackdown 2. That's... well it's whatever but at least they made the model intentionally undetailed to more closely resemble the N64ish look of the rest of the game. The four cheats that previously had an alternative unlock if you plugged in the Gameboy Color Perfect Dark with a transfer pack now unlock if the game detects a save from Perfect Dark Zero on your console.

Audio has also been enhanced in many ways, and this one is a more objective enhancement. Voice and sound effects generally play at a higher bitrate based on the original samples, and music was remastered using the original instrument samples as well. Some of the songs, however, sound rather different in their recomposition, and thus are open to interpretation.

There's been a few tweaks as well. Times now display to greater precision showing the milliseconds as well, but the Perfect Dark speed running community never really "took" to this version. Still, it's an appreciated detail. Further, the Goldeneye weapons are now fully selectable in multiplayer, and in fact all multiplayer options are selectable right from the start instead of requiring unlocking through challenges. Difference species heads can no longer be mixed together in this version without a special cheat. Hold down "RB" while switching from head to body and now they can be mixed, but the reason this was normally prevented reveals itself. The new models don't "mesh" right and now gaps show between head and body when the species don't match.

The two big gameplay changes this time around are in online modes and the new "Awards" system. Mutliplayer is as fully featured as 360 games were expected to be at the time. Full support for "parties", leaderboards, matchmaking, access to your friend's list, and so on. That's where "Awards" come in. These are similar to the game's achievements, but they go a step beyond. The list of achievements is mostly just an incomplete list of things you do to get 100% completion in the game anyway, plus minor stuff like killing an enemy with each weapon and just destroying Carrington's entire wine collection. However, one is locked behind getting all the awards, and that's only doable so long as 360 online support remains operational.

While achievements are progress stored both locally and online, "Awards" are stored solely online and saved to an ongoing profile for player's Perfect Dark progress. It's an extension of the game's leaderboard system, in fact, though it was almost never used after MS introduced it. In one way, this is frustrating. Once MS's 360 services go dark, there will be no way to attain progress in these rewards. I'd rather they have been part of the typical achievement system. Secondly, there is no clear indication of what the award even wants you to do. You're given an icon and a silly little quip and the rest is up to you to just guess at. The community has come through here, breaking the code and figuring out the objectives (with a little uncertainty on some specifics here and there) for each of these rewards. Their implementation may have been left wanting, but what they add is a whole new collection of unique challenges throughout the game. There's some multiplayer focused ones, the hardest of which is gaining every "medal" possible. Like Goldeneye, Perfect Dark awards silly little medals based on playstyle after a game. Things like "most shielded" or "most cowardly". Getting all of them nets you this reward. The majority of awards are additional challenges for the game proper. Each one must be done on a particular difficulty level for a particular level. One involves completing Carringon's Villa while getting scopeless headshots on 8 enemies, for example. Of these awards, three were particularly challenging, and not just to do but to figure out. Three must be done in co-op. That's not to say all three actually require a friend's help to accomplish, but that all three must literally be done while in the co-op mode or even if you do meet the objective, it won't count. No, not even with an AI buddy. It must be done with a second player, full stop. Of these three, technically two don't actually need someone to help you. One can be done completely solo (beating the G5 Streets level in under 35 seconds), and the other can be done with you switching back and forth between two controllers (on Air Force One, accomplish objective 2 BEFORE objective 1 and then finish the level all within a certain time, which can be done by having player 2 just stand in the right spot until a cutscene starts, immediately tossing a timed mine, then switching back to player one and skedaddling right the heck outta there. The last of these is the only one that truly can't be done without another person at the controls, and that's completing the first and second objectives in under a minute at the Carrington Institute, then finishing the rest of the level in whatever time but without using the RCP-120's cloaking feature once. If you want to know why this review took so much longer after my Goldeneye one, THIS is the reason. I had to convince a friend to take the time to grind out this particular accomplishment. In all fairness, once I did, it was actually pretty enjoyable. Neither of us got frustrated because we went in knowing it would involve many restarts, and unlike me this friend hadn't played Perfect Dark in a good long while so at first there was a lot of relearning involved, but eventually we got it done. It's just that the stars had to align to make this something this friend actually wanted to do. That, and the game takes longer to 100% than Goldeneye does, since there's so much more to do. Once this and all the other awards were finally attained, I sat on top of a 201% completion rating according to the leaderboard and could finally weigh in on all this. Let me just get this out of the way. I don't think there should be multiplayer dependent awards, in the same way I don't think co-op should have par times for cheats exclusive to it. It makes it all the harder for anyone to ever actually complete the game, and not in a fun way, save having someone else who actually cares about a 23 year old game enough to play a 13 year old remaster of it with you. All in all though, it did add a lot of new experiences and challenges to the old game, and that much I do appreciate. The awards? No new cheats I'm afraid, just a few "gamer icons", some avatar accessories, and a new theme.

All in all, the 360 release comes out as the ideal way to experience the game, for now. It's just a shame there's no "quick button" to revert back to the visuals and sound of the N64 release like Halo or Monkey Island's remakes did, and again the diagonal running aspect is far too tricky to pull off. Just a few changes, which at this point are unlikely to ever happen, would make this one truly perfect. Also, still no map editor outside of the modding community. But, it's easy enough to get this version on even the newest XBox consoles and for cheap.

Goldeneye

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 20:40:21 +0000

Duh duh duh duuuuh nenene- or whatever. Sadly there's not an easy way to post musical notation in text.

Goldeneye is a game adaptation of more legendary status than the movie it's based on. It was one of the first truly successful FPS games on consoles, helped really motivate controller sales thanks to the N64's adoption of four ports as standard, and really showed what the N64 could do that the Playstation struggled with.

But, above any of those things, it created a shooter subgenre. Many imitated, but only Perfect Dark and Time Splitters 2 (both games made by the same team) managed to capture the design well. This was a game that combined fun gunplay and stealth mechanics, wide explorable level design, and multiple unique level objectives as well as a variety of means to accomplish many of those objectives. While some games had much more developed RPG design (such as System Shock), none combined those mechanics with solid arcadey shooter design almost as well put together as Quake.

However, we should start graphically. Goldeneye wasn't even the best looking shooter of it's day. Quake came out the year before and Quake II was a few months away. (Likewise, Half-Life and Unreal would come out the next year, redefining what could be done graphically in shooters once again.) Compared to those games, Goldeneye was an undetailed blurry mess with tiny levels. Indeed, it hasn't aged well either. Pretty much any game designed to look "photorealistic" hasn't aged well compared to things meant to take on an unrealistic art style. But, what it lacked in graphical fidelity it made up for with it's amazing motion captured animations. While Quake's animations lacked even basic interpolation and were clearly done "by hand" in a way that resembled claymation, Goldeneye was setting a modern standard. But, the hardware could hardly keep up. Maybe the game could have been better optimized. Certainly the explosions could have. Those bring even the 360 version to a crawl. In any event, they did do ONE thing to make the game playable even at it's abysmal frame rate. They specifically coded the game to pick which frames to "skip" so that it preferentially used "important" frames. That is, changes of direction, your actions, enemy's actions. Whenever something was changing from before, that frame got rendered and frames "around" those key changes got skipped. This technique made sure that even though the game was running pretty badly, even by the standards of games like F-Zero, it still had a very "playable" feel to it.

Then there's the enemy design. Enemies react to your presence in interesting ways, can surrender if you sneak up behind, get startled, run for help or to set alarms, duck behind boxes, and react in unique ways when you shoot them. They even set a modern standard with the first body-dependent shot recognition system. Well, one of the first. It seems the original "beta" releases of Team Fortress 1 managed to JUST beat Goldeneye by a few months, but it certainly was the one most players found out about it from, including Romero himself, the Doomsman of Id. Yes, you can thank Goldeneye for the "headshot", and for a very funny way of negating them. If you hit someone in their precious hat, the hat comes off and they remain unharmed, if confused. Frankly, the list of things Goldeneye innovated from that to giving enemies "pathing personalities" and so many other things wrapped in a game that was actually fun to shoot in is staggering in retrospect. For someone who didn't truly "get" games like Doom and Quake until years later, THIS was my entry point into truly falling in love with these games in the way they were meant to be played (without cheating), as well as my entry point into this very forum. Now, the enemies have all kinds of fun behavior you can exploit. Many of them take time to really line up their shot, and this can be exploited to rush in up close, duck, and just karate chop their knees into crushed bone jelly. The most dangerous attack animation an enemy can take is the "marching slowly forward while holding down the trigger" one. If they do that, hide. You're not going to get away with only a little damage. Also, enemies have a lot of trouble seeing past anything even remotely an obstacle to their movement. You can use this to line up free headshots across railings or large gaps, or to lure enemies around long paths while you just fire away.

Map design is what sets this subgenre apart however in ways that are almost never imitated. Doom and Quake set a standard for levels that encourage a lot of free exploration and some puzzle solving. Half-Life, later on, redefined the shooter as a largely cinematic endeavor. That is, Half-Life popularized shooters as a means of telling stories full of cut scenes and voice acting that very rarely encouraged much exploration and felt more "on rails". While Half-Life is good in it's own right and deserved the praise it got, the industry as a whole was itself guided "on rails" into making Half-Life again and again from that point forward, and only thanks to the more modern Doom games have we seen any hope of breaking out of that rut. But, Goldeneye stands apart. Predating Half-Life, this game skews towards encouraging exploration. It didn't start out that way. Goldeneye was originally envisioned as something more like Virtua Cop, a TRULY on-rails shooter involving a lot of ducking behind crates and firing at enemies in a more automated fashion. In fact, a few levels still have vestiges of that older design, namely the train. Elements like the body zone based damage and detailed animations are hangovers from that which made it into the final version. One thing that stayed throughout the design was a developer insistence that every map "feel like" a real location. Doom and Quake unapologetically don't care how "realistic" their locations feel. They are very much built to be video game levels first and foremost. Goldeneye instead first designed a location that was layed out semi-realistically, THEN went back and added in obstacles, enemies, NPCs and objectives to flesh it out into a fully realized map. This turned out to be the right move for a game designed around playing as a spy instead of a one-man army. Now you're watching patrol paths in some sections to sneak by, or in others finding the best way to take out enemies without worrying about taking too much damage, or avoid damaging mission-critical components. It's to this game's credit they still kept it's "level based" design. Failing a mission by accidentally destroying or killing something important isn't so devastating when you've only lost a few minutes.

Mission difficulty is also interesting. Higher difficulty adds additional mission objectives that make certain rather "empty" feeling levels now brim with greater purpose. The added challenge of far more accurate enemies and less ammo/armor combine with these to make it really worthwhile to play through the game at least three times. Consider it "training", and fun as the game is it really is worthwhile to see a lot of these levels multiple times. There's also very fun rewards. There's two bonus levels, and the first is simply the most challenging in the game. Aztec is absolutely punishing. The second is more of a walk in the park, a "victory lap" you can take. While the puzzle of how to actually unlock the golden gun is just trial and error (sadly there is no way to find out without just experimenting over and over again, or looking up the solution online), once you have it down, it's easy to remember for life. One thing this game does better than Perfect dark is these bonus levels. There's only two, but each gets a dedicated level, enemies, and even guns.

About that variation. Objectives are directly tied, mostly, to specific item statuses. That means that while the game is designed for you to accomplish the objectives a certain way, so long as you manage to get the object in it's desired state, that's all the objective tracker actually cares about. You can thus create unique solutions to problems. So, in the Facility for example, the level is designed for you to hit certain buttons on consoles to open doors ahead, but you can instead skip some of those buttons altogether by alerting guards to your presence with gunfire and making them open the door for you giving you an alternate path in. About the most egregious exception I can think of is a case where a remote mine "modified" into a timed mine (why not just use a timed mine?) is the only method you can use to destroy a certain helicopter. Had they allowed it to be destroyed via other tools, it would have opened up that level a bit more, since grenades can also be found in that level. It's also possible in a few levels to "sneak" through without ever alerting guards to your presence and thus avoiding an endless swarm of them spawning into the level. In fact, level "interaction" in this game is a step above what typical shooters had. Duke Nuke Them 3D started the trend towards greater interactivity, and this game ran with that and expanded it thanks to unique "spy gadgets" that enabled new means of interacting with things.

Combining the free exploration, the feeling that each area of the level has a purpose, the high degree of interactivity with objects throughout, and impressive (for the time) AI that included passive behaviors as well as how they handled player actions, and you get the complete package that truly created a sense of sneaking through, gunning down opposition, and accomplishing espionage tasks in a way no game really had before. Again, System Shock and games like it must take credit for innovating a lot of the 3D interaction and RPG elements beyond just shooting, but those games didn't have solid shooting mechanics and a good physics system combined with that. Other games that did have solid physical mechanics like Metal Gear Solid and Thief wouldn't come out for another year with their take on sneaking missions. (Metal Gear 1 and 2 do deserve some credit as well, but they predated the 3D revolution.)

But that's not all this game had to offer. Speedrunner bait was programmed into this game. Rare may not have even realized the full extent of what they'd done, but this game passes into legend as one of the oldest of the really popular old guard of speedrunning classics. That short list includes Super Mario Bros, Super Metroid, Doom, Quake, Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, and the one that eclipsed them all in popularity, Super Mario 64. Goldeneye may not be THE most popular speedrunning game of all time, but it's still on the list and for good reason. They programmed in a lot of cheats behind accomplishing certain goals, ranging from beating a level on a certain difficulty for the first time to beating a level within a certain amount of time. The latter is what really took the challenge up for those that had beaten the game on 00 Agent and wanted more. Every level has one difficult that has a time challenge. These range from easy to "Caverns and Facility". Sometimes it's just a matter of finding the quickest path and discovering what counts as accomplishing an objective (like, rescuing Natalia on one of the many... MANY times you need to rescue her only involves letting her see you through a door and then she just runs from the guards meant to... guard her). What isn't so fun is finding out just how many aspects require random luck, like where certain NPCs spawn, or where in a guarding path an enemy is when the level opens up. All in all though, some require such perfect execution. Caverns in particular gave me such trouble because that level is difficult to even survive in in the first place, and now you have to do it within a certain amount of time. QUICKLY taking out guards that are right next to sensitive exploding tanks that themselves are next to a mission critical radio you need to use is... frustrating. Still, the elation of finally achieving these goals is wonderful. The diagonal run is key to this, as well as using a far superior control scheme. 1.2 is similar to Turok's control scheme, and turned out to be the ideal way to control a shooter on the N64. It was more or less this style that got adopted in two stick control schemes later on and that's what we have to this day. With all this in mind, and with a LOT of room for improvement thanks to all those unique quirks and the flexibility the game's engine allows in resolving objectives, it was no wonder the challenge switched to beating other's times online, and the rest is history. Oh yes, and one additional detail regarding it. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are two games that rely on the in-game timer and not an external timer to determine records. While an outside game timer would allow finer determination on times, the in-game one "accounts" for oddities in Bond's movement speed that an outside timer does not, allowing for times that better reflect player skill and not random luck.

Multiplayer is another story. Someone went and snuck that mode in working on it on their off-time as a side project and it almost didn't make it into the game. For something of such a sketchy quickly hashed out nature to turn out to be the part that defined it's play for so many people is nothing short of a gaming miracle. Numerous modes of play were introduced, but the basic deathmatch proved to be the most popular, followed by flag tag. Multiple preset loadouts were done, you hold whatever you find until you die, then scramble around hiding from all those who outgun you until you manage to get it all together again. What really impressed where the number of well thought out stages that really emphasized the stealthier side of Bond's shooty play, and those wonderful proximity mines! Even with everyone able to see the screen, you can take advantage of moments of high action elsewhere to covertly plant a bomb right under where an ammo crate or armor spawns, or next to a door, or most evilly a player spawn point. It may not really hold up today in this regard, as multiplayer shooter map design has really become a well developed science at this point, but it was amazing for it's time.

Sound deserves a mention. From the sound of each gun, to enemy banter, to even Bond's footsteps on different surfaces the sound design really is top notch. Music is absolutely amazing and stands up to even Doom and Quake's legendary scores. The Jungle deserves a mention here, as it mostly lacks a soundtrack altogether in favor of ambiance. This is apparently a glitch as there is a song specifically for it, but it goes unused. I think it's for the better. The ambient sounds of the jungle really make it stand out.

All in all, this game deserves it's reputation, but I think it deserves more. So very many articles that bring it up these days only vaguely allude to it being "important for console games" as a sort of backhanded compliment, without realizing that Goldeneye wasn't just "good for a console game", it was truly innovative in ways that survive to this day, and in other ways that very few games ever imitated. Even The World is Not Enough for N64 didn't capture that level design nearly so well.

I'd review the 360 enhanced port of Goldeneye, but that was never officially released. Instead, we have an emulated ROM. So, the only thing I can say about it is it allows fully customized duel stick controls based on the 1.2 control scheme, inverted, and even allows mapping movement to the wonderful XBox One d-pad. Do this to get full speed strafe-running back. It runs at a smooth 30 FPS, at higher resolution, but no improved draw distances and the textures all look "wrong". It's also got achievements for doing all the stuff you'd normally do to 100% the game. The only thing of note is this time through, it's the version I played. All in all, if you want to play the game emulated, there are better options. One of them is the 1964 emulator with a special profile mapping mouse and keyboard support into the game. If you're going to play emulated, that's the best way to do it.

But Perfect Dark did, no, it surpassed and that's what I'll review next time.

Donkey Kong 64

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 02:13:18 +0000

Donkey Kong 64 is somewhat notorious these days, and heck it was considered a bit much even when it first came out. However, I still remember when we all first started playing it, before the tedium kicked in, when we all were really enjoying ourselves. However, over time opinions on it soured. There's legitimate criticism to be had, but being one of the few that played this one before Banjo Kazooie, allow me to offer my opinions on this massive game that gave us 4MB of RAM to plug into our systems.

Graphics: Here's a little story you may have heard. "Donkey Kong 64 only used the expansion pak to get around a memory leak glitch and didn't actually need it otherwise." That's one that's popped in the past few years according to a Rare staffer. However, another Rare employee has recently come out in defense of the game. The story is a little more complicated it seems.

https://tcrf.net/Prerelease:Donkey_Kong_...ion_Issues
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/1...the_dk_rap

According to this interview, DK64 DID in fact have a memory leak issue, but that leak was apparently resolved before launch, and the decision to use the expansion pak was made long before that glitch turned up in any case. The game really does make use of the added RAM and couldn't be easily patched to rid itself of the requirement. Now, this doesn't stop other Rare employees from mocking them, as some of the developers behind Conker have been recorded stating their team was "just better" at optimizing their game than the DK64 team was. That may well be true, but at the very least, no, it doesn't seem like they spent money packing in a free accessory just to get around a game critical glitch.

The game's framerate averages around 30FPS, which is pretty good for this particular generation and very playable. Too many games on this system tried to push it a bit too far visually and framerate often suffered, especially coming off the SNES and NES generations which generally had 60FPS games (albeit with some slowdown issues at times). This one manages better frame rates than many, but it isn't a fully steady 30FPS, and there are a few busier areas where the frame rate dips. All in all though, unlike later Rareware games like Perfect Dark and Conker's Bad Fur Day, the frame rate doesn't get in the way of enjoying the game.

Now where was I? Visually, DK64 still looks good, at least artistically. The "smoothness" of it's art design also manages to make it stand out from Rare's other platformers. It's a unique visual design to be sure, and it does stand out as one of the better looking N64 games. Bright colors, engaging animations, it has all it needs to make it easy to identify what you're looking at and what's important. There is one major tradeoff. The fade-in is strong. While the game doesn't have fog as bad as other games, it exchanges it for a trick where things like enemies items and special buildings and barrels don't actually appear until you get closer. They "grow" into place once you're close enough. On the plus side, you can still see the overall map design of a level from far away, but you'll be practically right on top of items of note before they actually appear. Compare this to Rare's other games and it's pretty noticeable. It's a better solution than level fog at least, and it won't hurt the game's playability too much.

Here's a little anecdote. The original design for the Kong's weapons were realisitic gun designs made of metal and everything. Miyamoto took one look at that, then drew a wooden gun complete with twigs and leaves growing out of it, the "coconut gun" was born. Thank goodness for that. Realistic guns have no place in a game with anthropomorphic cartoon animals. At least, not until Shadow the Hedgehog. It had to wait a few years!

Sound: Theeeey're finally here, performing for YOU! Grant Kirkhope once again wrote the soundtrack after his amazing success with Banjo Kazooie, and it shows. The music in this game still stands as some of the best on the system. It's hard to match the likes of Click Clock Wood, admittedly. That may well have been Grant's opus, but there's still a number of memorable tunes. They all however are overshadowed by the rather unexpected choice of an opening song, the DK Rap. Banjo opened with a musical hoe down, and so they originally intended to do something similar with the Kongs. That's the original source of their varied musical instruments. However, numerous people on the team started liking the thought of a silly rap song parodying this popular British single:

The result has gone done in infamy, with far too many people not really "getting" that it was always intended to be tongue in cheek. Nowadays it has a lot more fans of it as a "so bad it's good" tune that's far too catchy for it's own good, finally being appreciated in the manner it was originally intended.
My favorite tune has to be Fungi Forest- both day and night versions. It gets close to that Click Clock Wood vibe. Second to that would be crystal caverns. Sound design is also pretty well done, with the exception of "Sssssplat!" which seems to randomly trigger any time you get a little too close to a high ledge.

Controls: They packed in a LOT of abilities this time around. For the most part, the controls are pretty solid, but admittedly a lot of Kong actions feel a little... shallow. The instruments in particular are basically just a fancy way to press a button, and taking pictures of banana fairies is a rather limited function of a C button command. However, each Kong does have enough unique abilities to make them all fun to play as. Lanky may be my personal favorite thanks to how fun the handstand is. Chunky is... clunky.

Game design: Here's where it gets complicated. On the good side, this really is a vast and expansive game. Taking a page from previous collectathons on the system like Mario 64 and Rare's own Banjo Kazooie, this team also decided to use a large hub world. The combination of DK Island and K. Rool's floating fortress make for enough range to be a decently sized and varied hub world, but there's something a bit... lacking. The issue comes down to how DK Island itself most of your exploration to the thin strip of beach circling the island. Everything's so spread out beyond that that it doesn't feel like "much" even once every opening has been unlocked. The hub world doesn't feel as developed as it could be as a result. The locations each part of the hub world leads to also seem almost entirely unattached from where they are. It's just unpolished compared to Grunty's Lair or Peach's Castle, but there's still some memorable moments. Freeing K.Lumsy resulting to a rather drastic change to the hub, the way climbing up K.Rool's ship makes things feel suddenly dark and oppressive, things like that still stand out. There's a framework of something truly legendary here but not enough time was spent bringing it to that polish needed to really make it pop.

Bosses are numerous and unique full featured experiences expanding on what we got in Banjo Kazooie. I enjoy each of them, and I certainly appreciate that while some bosses are repeats later on, they change up the mechanics enough to keep each encounter interesting. The fake paper K.Rool is a standout in sheer ridiculousness. I also adore how well the final boss and that out of nowhere boxing match came together. Yes, I would have liked a little build up to that encounter to explain it just a tad better, but it was still great fun and each phase really comes together well.

The levels are expansive with numerous hidden items and challenges. Most of them are pretty varied, but a certain set of mini-games get recycled a bit too often over the length of the game. I don't mind harder versions of a mini-game but I prefer to get the harder versions completed in one go than to keep going back to the same pot again and again. However, there's still enough unique challenges to keep that particular complaint from standing out too much. Each one is is laid out sensibly with a warping system to speed up travel around it and numerous fun challenges throughout, and most have numerous notable landmarks to make navigation both easy and memorable. It hews a little closer to the huge layouts of Banjo Tooie than the more compact and "efficient" design of Kazooie. I think I prefer that compact design more, since it leads to every last inch being filled with wonderful things and almost no wasted space between challenges or collectibles, but if you prefer the Tooie design, this game does amazingly well... EXCEPT...

-The problems: We can't discuss the gameplay without talking about the game's biggest issue. First the complaint- "There's way too much to collect! It burned me out on collectathons!" Well, today we have Super Mario Odyssey and A Hat in Time, two collectathon games that managed to rekindle that obsession without burning players out (well mostly). Super Mario Odyssey has a simply ridiculous number of power moons to find. Now, what makes those two succeed where DK64 failed? I think that comes down to the real problem that made those collectibles stand out. Character switching...

Every level requires you to switch characters. It's not so bad in the first level, or the second, at least at first until you have to revisit them later on. But, soon you start to realize things. In order to switch characters, you need to find a barrel. In Banjo Kazooie, you can switch with a few button commands (or to be more accurate, Banjo and Kazooie are simply alternate moves on the same single "character".) In the DKC games, your other character is following you around at all times, and you just switch with the press of a button. This game? The moment you notice a change in banana color, back you go. You swap, you follow the trail, open a gate, and then there's a button. Time to head back! The constant switching wears on one's patience over time. I believe the game's massive list of collectibles would be far more tolerable if all that character swapping was streamlined or eliminated in some cases.

Here's two big fixes I'd suggest for any remake. One, all the bananas and coins should be collectible by every character. Leave them colored as they function as breadcrumb indicators of what sort of character challenge lies ahead, but let everyone pick them up. This alone will go a long way towards fixing the issue since so much of the character switching is just because a new trail in a different color showed up along the map path. Secondly, allow instant character switching just like the DKC series. Thirdly, lower the requirements to access the final boss and beat the game. Now, this will necessitate removing all the DK barrels from the game since they're all basically useless with this change, but have no fear. I submit that any time you continue your save file, you go "into the barrel" to pick the character you'll start your session with. That way, we keep the charming and funny interactions between the kongs on that character select screen.

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4961/

Above I've linked a rom hack which accomplishes that. It does a few other things I disagree with (I don't mind needing to unlock each kong before I'm allowed to switch to them, for example), but the primary change of letting you switch kongs instantly is the major one. A little further work to add a cloud of smoke animation when switching and it would be perfect. This would massively streamline level progress. This is a rather popular mod right now and with good cause. It essentially "fixes" the game according to numerous reviews and highlights what DK64's real problem was all along. If you have an Everdrive 64, stick a modded ROM of DK64 and enjoy. It is, right now, the definitive way to enjoy the game.

Completion: Alright here it is. This is either going to make or break it for a lot of people even with the hack. The game has a pretty high completion ceiling before you're able to actually beat it and see the credits. Much like Jet Force Gemini, this frustrated a lot of people (such as reviewers) who may prefer to just enjoy the ride rather than feel compelled to find absolutely everything. It's that final door that ends up requiring a bit too much. I think if they dialed down the final gate requirements a lot more people wouldn't have complained at that juncture. From my perspective, I wouldn't have minded if most of the special items were optional to beat K.Rool "the first time". What I mean by that is I'd grown used to how DKC2 and DKC3 handled all their collectibles. Collecting all of them wasn't needed to "beat" the game, and get a decent ending. They were needed however to find out that there was a whole hidden section of levels and a hidden boss to defeat. DKC2 handled it best, and if they had some more time, I'd have loved to wonder what the point of getting those keys and coins and so on were only to find out that after defeating K.Rool in his boxing match, there was a hidden super secret level right at the back of the arena. That level would be especially challenging and dedicated to finding the very last few golden bananas combined with all the keys and special coins and blue prints from earlier in order to unlock the true ultimate final boss fight against... I dunno K.Rool piloting his own giant fortress that turns out to actually be a giant robot, while Kong and the gang "pilot" K.Lumsy.

Stop & Swop: Alright, it has to be said. There is very VERY tenuous evidence that they may have intended DK64 to be a "stopover" game in between BK and BT for unlocking stuff like the ice key. The only evidence is the name "ice key" still in the game's code, but that could very well be a leftover from BK still in the game. That said, it still could have been amazing if the three games had in fact linked up with each other. Nintendo of course put a stop to this rather famously. It wasn't so much that Nintendo DID change the hardware in a way that prevented the hardware trick from working, more that it was a distinct possibility, and the hack they were trying was such a rough and bodged thing in the first place that it wasn't exactly safe in the first place. Thing is, as much as we may wish that such a feature made it into the game, the sad truth is we only have Rare themselves to blame, specifically BK's development team. If they truly wanted to use old save game data in future games, they should have coded in N64 memory card support. That's all there is to it. Yes, some would be left out in the cold having to buy an additional memory card to do that save data transfer, but as it stands NO ONE gets to do that (outside the Xbox 360 versions), so it's clear in hindsight what would have been the better option. If you DO want to take advantage of Stoppy Swoppy, the XBox 360 versions of BK and BT make use of it, using Nuts & Bolts instead of DK64 as that interrim game.

Conclusion: Honestly I still love this game, but that backtracking had kept me from playing through it again until that new mod came along. That mod makes this game easily compete with Banjo Tooie, even if Banjo Kazooie over the years has slipped into a well deserved top of my N64 collectathon list. If you haven't played this game before because of the bad rep it's collecting gets, or even if you have but got burnt out because of it, I implore you to try it with that mod. You may find your opinion of it go up dramatically. For those who already loved the game, your opinion of it, like my own, will only go up further. There are still imperfections in this game of course, such as the rather lackluster hub world or the levels being perhaps a bit too expansive in the sense of not utilizing that vast space effectively, but Banjo Tooie is guilty of those issues as well and neither flaw holds it back from being one of the best games on the system. So pull this game out again and TAKE IT TO THE FRIDGE!

Mickey's Speedway USA

Sat, 09 Oct 2021 00:01:52 +0000

After two decades, I finally got the last of the big three cart racers on the N64 and the last Rareware N64 game I didn't own. Long ago, I recall a lively discussion on this game and questions on it's quality especially compared to the likes of Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing.

Graphics: Visually, this game looks great, for an N64 game I mean. In fact, I'd say as far as graphical prowess, on a technical level it looks better than Diddy Kong Racing. This is to be expected, since it was such a late release. Rare knew how to really push the N64 by this point, and it shows. Mickey and the gang are nice and big and detailed and the animations are well done. The carts themselves show a lot of that "billboarding" technique that other cart racers on the system used, but that's no mark against it since the visual trick is done well. Beyond that, the house of Mouse are all lively, animated well and reacting to things happening around them. The animations of impact and item use are well done, and the details of the levels are nicely done too. The big criticism here is on an artistic level. I'll return to this later, but the decision to set this game in various US locations hurts the level of creativity they could have shown. The levels are just kind of dull and a bit too realistic. I'll give props to a few choices like turning the statue of Liberty into a mouse but otherwise they certainly could have done better. Mickey's Speedway Disneyland would have been far more interesting.

The game keeps a very solid 30FPS which keeps the racing smooth and responsive. F-Zero X managed 60FPS famously, and in that regard this one falls short but what it does manage it does well and the tradeoff in graphical fidelity may well have been worth it.

Sound: The music is fine- but hardly exceptional. Nothing is all that grating, but most of the tunes feel like they'd fit a platformer better than a racing game. There's just a lot of energy missing from a number of the tracks. A few of the tunes are memorable, and they're all competently done, but I can't even credit the composer because the game's very short list of credits omits the composer or simply doesn't put them in their own category. The sound effects are well done and have a good sense of impact or speed when needed, but then there's the voices. Let me be clear here. They used Disney's own voice talent, so every one of the characters are extremely well acted and the banter between them comes off entertaining. That's what I would say, except as we all know by now this was the start of a long era where constant "banter" was becoming an expectation in games. Mickey's Speedway is no exception. The banter is CONSTANT to such a degree that for the first cup, I could barely even hear the music. It's so bad I have a compliment to the game's option menu. You can turn off the character chatter without shutting off other sound effects. Do this. The game and the music become a lot more enjoyable without the voice samples. It's a shame. Had they just scaled things back a heck of a lot, we could have enjoyed the samples a lot more in the rare moments they did appear.

Controls: This is a Rare game, a Rare racing game, coming at the tail end of a pedigree that started with R.C. Pro Am on the NES. The controls are absolutely amazing and smooth like butter. Every single input you put in is reflected as you intend on screen. I'd even say the controls manage to beat out Mario Kart 64, but for one thing. There's no turbo boosts. Now, this doesn't kill the game at all, but sliding turbos as innovated by Mario Kart 64 added so much to the sub-genre that this is the only one since then I can think of that forgoes the convention. As a result, the skill cap is lower than it could be (nearer to Super Mario Kart than Diddy Kong Racing). You'll master this game quick, but then there's very little room to grow. To break it down, there's acceleration, braking, using an item, and the "power slide" button (no hop).

Gameplay: Everything you need is here, but nothing more. There's multiple cups adding up to a standard number of tracks. There's a time trial mode complete with developer ghosts and racing your own ghosts. There's a battle mode complete with CPU opponents (something I don't think I've ever even seen outside Mickey's Speedway), and there's solid 4 player multiplayer besides.

Much like Diddy Kong Racing, the items are the standard set lifted straight from R.C. Pro Am. You've got oil slicks, missiles, nitro boosts, and a shield to temporarily protect yourself. Beyond that, there's additional items inspired by the things Mario Kart brought to the table, like a homing missile (remote control car) and an invincibility powerup that also makes you more responsive and powerful for a limited time. Like Super Mario Kart and Diddy Kong Racing (but unlike Mario Kart 64) the track is littered with a golden collectible (in this case medals instead of coins or bananas) that boosts your max speed by a small amount for the duration of the race for each one you snag (maximum of 20).

Tracks are relatively straightforward, but again come off as a little dull visually with very few gimics. There's a few shortcuts, and enough twists turns and obstacles to allow you to plan an ideal route that shaves the most time off. Beyond that, nothing that stands out. None of them are designed for different vehicles, because there are only carts in this one. They didn't provide the variety of Diddy Kong Racing.

The game is incredibly easy at low difficulty, but quickly scales up becoming that special breed of "Rare Hard" at the highest level. Without drift boosts, you'll really need to learn every last aspect of each track to win by that point. It's challenge is "mostly fair", but it does use AI rubberbanding like many racing games do. An understandable necessity, or the game wouldn't be challenging at all.

Completion: This game is a lot closer to Mario Kart 64 in terms of completion and unlockables than to Diddy Kong Racing. That said, there's a few things of note. Firstly, while the game doesn't track your "end score", completing every track in first place on a cup grants you a rainbow trophy over and above the standard gold. Full completion means getting first in every race in every cup. This becomes especially challenging at higher difficulties. There are also a few simple unlockables. They're all done by completing cups, and include a few unlocked characters and cheats (the cheat codes are standard Rareware classics like "Rainbow goo"). One character in particular is locked behind the transfer pak. This is that "DLC unlock" stuff that frustrated back then. While Perfect Dark gave you in-game ways to unlock everything, there is no way to unlock one of the three duck nephews without linking up the GBC version of the game. To date, the only game that used the transfer pak as more than a way to "gate" content behind an additional purchase were the Pokemon Stadium games. That still remains the sole good use of the accessory.

Story: The Weasels dognapped Pluto for his diamond collar and e-mailed Mickey and the gang bragging about it. Mickey gets his scientist goose friend to lend him and his friends carts so they can follow the clues and rescue Pluto. So... the plot makes no sense. Not since Mr. Burns kidnapped maggie just to get the diamond she was sucking on (in the Simpsons Arcade Game) has a villain been so pointlessly evil. Just take the collar/pacifier and go! Why add the extra headache of dealing with a dog/baby on top of it? What's worse is this plot does a terrible job of setting up a reason of any sort to actually race. Just- get where you're going then hop out and grab those weasels. Why are you racing each other? On tracks that just go in a circle? There are so many well established tropes to get this thing underway. Aliens invade and threaten the earth into a racing competition because they're THAT obsessed with sport. Races are magically tied to ancient powers in whatever strange location you're in and that's how you defeat some evil wizard. Everyone just felt like racing and even the bad guys want to win out of pride. Literally any of those do the job just fine, because racing games don't need a plot! In short, there's really no point at all because this game doesn't have a full on single player campaign like Diddy Kong Racing or Crash Team Racing. It's just a set of cups with no connective hub world, so why even bother with a story? You don't even get to race the Weasels.

So that leads to the final verdict on this one. Mario Kart 64 was and still is an amazing kart racer, and as far as multiplayer is concerned it still is the best on the N64. However, for single player Diddy Kong Racing set an entirely new bar that Nintendo STILL hasn't matched with their own series since then. Diddy Kong Racing had three completely different vehicle types and tracks that were specialized for all three, but usable with all three types anyway! It had bosses, unique creative challenges like coin hunts, all kinds of unlockable cheat codes, and a truly incredible and addictive sound track to match all of that. Both it and Mickey's Speedway are impossibly adorable and- (to use a term I haven't heard since the late 90's/early 2000's) "kiddy", and they make that work for them well, but Mickey had the misfortune of coming years after Diddy Kong Racing, and thus it sadly lives in it's shadow, and heck back on Playstation we had Crash Team Racing which took everything Diddy Kong Racing added to the genre and expanded on it even more, with a unique boost mechanic that still feels amazing to this day with it's recent remaster (available on Switch if you please).

Here's the thing, it's entirely understandable. Diddy Kong Racing and Crash Team Racing were both made by much larger teams than Mickey's Speedway USA. It's a common phrase these days (especially talking about Dark Souls development), but this is a distinctly "B Team" endeavor. I hate that term (and in Rare's case it's not even fully accurate, since they actually had more than two projects going at any one time), but what else do you call a team that's intentionally limited in scope and spending making use of talent that weren't exactly Rare's "rockstars" (another term I hate). Fact is, this was the team normally relegated to Rare's Gameboy offerings at the time, and this was their fist shot at an N64 title. Considering how much more work goes into developing a 3D game than a 2D one- especially in the art department- that they managed to churn out such a beautiful looking game that also played so well is a testament to their skills. Maybe if they'd been given a bigger team and a bigger budget (and more time), we really could have seen what they could do. As it stands, I can say this. If Diddy Kong Racing didn't exist, or if this game had come out first, it would have been much better received than it was. It isn't a bad game. It's a good one that deserves to be counted, but it forever lives in the shadow of Rare's earlier masterpiece and the likes of Crash Team Racing. It just can't stand up to it when compared. It was also marred by a few bad decisions, like not including power slide boosts and the odd decision to make the tracks a tour of America rather than of the Disney-verse (if I want to race across America on my N64, I have Cruis'n USA).

Do I recommend it? I do with that caveat. If you really want to see all that Rare had to offer, it's still a very well done game. Approach it the same way you would any of Rare's portable renditions of their properties from the time and I think you'll enjoy it. Just don't expect it to outshine Rare's eternally wonderful Diddy Kong Racing.

Body Harvest

Wed, 25 May 2005 00:51:40 +0000

Here's an old post of mine that I made in Tendo City before this forum existed. I thought I'd re-post it, and make little edits here and there (such as adding a score out of 10, as requested my Barbara EdenMaster & Rtan (I'm too lazy to come up with a silly name for him)). So here it is:

----

God damn it, people, you just love to keep things from old beanjo, don't you? Once again, you've failed to let me in on an underrated yet awesome N64 title. CHOKE ON AIR, YOU BUNCH OF NEGLIGENT SONS (and daughters) OF SEA COWS!!!

So I bought this game recently, for a measly 4 bucks (maybe 5, I don't remember - I buy old N64 games all the time). I heard that it was a sleeper hit, and remembered that those who played it and talked about it on message boards had loved it. So I bought it in hopes that it would be another Rocket: Robot on Wheels, a simple yet addictive title hidden among piles of gaming excrimient.

So anyways, who else was left back at the station when the Body Harvest hype train departed? Well, you sure wouldn't have to walk far to get back on it, 'cos it broke down about a mile down the tracks. Because people are dumb.

The graphics of Body Harvest are simple, but they get the job done. Given that the player gets to run around in enormous fields and cities, the simplicity of the graphics can be excused. The game plays a little like GTA, actually (its maker is DMA). You have to jump in and drive random cars travel the map more quickly, which so far (I'm only in the 1946 Greece stage right now, but there are different stages which I assume have different cars) range from tanks to motorcycles. However, the gameplay differs between the two games in that Body Harvest is more oriented towards puzzle solving and bug shooting. The shooting parts have been ridiculously easy so far, but I finally got stuck at one point at the end of the stage where I have to fight this huge, hard boss. Oh, and there ARE civilians running around that you can run over or use as target practice, although if you kill enough, you lose the game. :( There are a few parts where you even have to save civilians in cities from invading alien insects.

The atmosphere of this game is the best part! The very first feeling I got when playing was that it felt like Starship Troopers in video game form. I'm a sucker for sci-fi, so this enhances the experence all the more for me. The background music is very creepy, and it gave me an uneasy feeling after listening to it nonstop for a span of a couple hours. A game hasn't had that ability to genuinely creep me out since Silent Hill (for PSX). I doubt it'd creep many other people out, though... it's just one of those strange situations where something very simple can make you and you alone feel anxious and panicky.

I have only a few qualms with this game. For one: the save points are spread far apart! This actually only bothered me when I got stuck at one point in the game (this was before I found the first save point) and ended up running around in circles for a good hour and making no progress whatsoever. I didn't want to play the game, but I wanted to first find a save point before quitting. I actually wouldn't have been stuck, had I known that I was actively being given clues via informations transmissions. When an information transmission arrives, an "E" icon appears next to the energy bar, and I could never figure out what that damned E meant until recently, so I just ignored it. Anyways, the player doesn't reach the first save point until 1/4th the way through the first stage. Then, generally, when another 25% of progress through the stage is made, the player is given another save point.

Secondly, if the player dies just once, it's GAME OVER. I've died a few times, mosty by either drowning or a large bug landing on my head (they're beamed down from the sky when you fight them). The player is advised to retrace his steps back to save points often, just in case the shit hits the fan in the middle of a mission.

The puzzles in this game are pretty easy, especially with the information transmissions as an aid. For example, at one point, you need to find a way to break down a blockage in the road, to get a cog from a miller to give to a different character, who in turn opens a water gate for you.

The weapons, so far, are nothing short of awesome. At the start, you're given a standard pistol that can't run out of ammo. Later on, you find a machine gun, dynomite (although I've never used that in battle), and my personal favorite so far, the sun shield. :D This baby is used to reflect a powerful beam of sunlight and fry insects, I suppose to allude to the archetypal mischievous kid who uses a magnifying glass to burn ants.

The bottom line: Body Harvest is awesome, so if any of you see it in the store for just a few bucks, do yourself a favor and pick it up. I don't know what games (other than GTA) I can use as a point of reference, since this one is quite unique. It isn't all that much like Jet Force Gemini... it's less concentrated on shooting and more concentrated on puzzles. Plus, it's stages are much longer, although I believe there are only four of them in total. I suppose I'd describe it best as a cross between GTA and Jet Force Gemini (although I'm sure there are better games to compare it to).

Overall, I give this a 9.3 out of 10.0.

Super Smash Bros.

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 04:11:14 +0000

In this game, you can pit one on one battles with your favorite Nintendo stars, such as Mario, Link, Kirby, Pikachu, Starfox, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, and Samus Aran. The game starts with all fighters entering the battlefield with 0% damage done to them. As they attack each other with a barrage of vicious attacks, their percentage moves up, and the higher the percentage, the farther the opponent flies after a hit. However, this percentage does not guarantee a winner, your goal is to knock your opponent off of the screen, and that could happen to the one with the lower percentage just as much as it could the character with the higher percentage. Graphics are okay, the backgrounds and characters are well made, but the arenas are a little bit blocky and flat.

Super Smash Bros. is a game that may keep you occupied for a few days, maybe weeks, until you’ve fought everyone against everyone else, found the secret characters, and unearthed all the other goodies. Then you leave it to sit and probably won't play it again for a while. Even still, I give Super Smash Bros. a 6 out of 10.

Paper Mario

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 19:04:36 +0000

Paper Mario Review

By Derek Miller

We all know that the Nintendo 64 doesn't really have many RPGs. Heck, I can count them on one hand. Let's see: Ogre Battle 64, Quest 64, Aidyn Chronicles, and Paper Mario. That is not a lot of RPGs. Luckily Ogre Battle 64 and Paper Mario are both excellent games and it is a tough task to choose which game is better. This review, however, is focusing on the sequel to Mario RPG for Super Nintendo. Mario RPG was a joint venture between Nintendo and Square. Obviously, Square had nothing to do with Paper Mario. Rather, Intelligent Systems did much of the work on the game, with Shigeru Miyamoto checking in from time-to-time. Paper Mario was labeled as a kiddie game from the start, mostly because of its strange graphics. Using 2D characters in a 3D world may look strange upon first glance but it was pulled off flawlessly to provide a unique gaming experience.

Graphics

The graphics, as stated above, are different. Mario and all of the other characters are flat, and simply rotate around their 3D world. This makes for some interesting effects, such as Mario floating down like a sheet of paper or spinning around a pipe. All of the graphics are crisp and there is little blurriness. There are the typical locations such as a desert, haunted forest, and snowy mountain and they all fit perfectly into the world of the Mushroom Kingdom. There is no slowdown whatsoever which is always a plus in today's bloated games. All-in-all, a game that looks like it could be a SNES game, but on closer inspection, its obvious that a lot of work was put in to make this game look great.

8.5

Sound

Typical Mario fare here. You'll notice a lot of rerecorded classic Mario tunes in the game as well as some interesting new tracks. The sound effects are nothing special, but fit into the role of a Mario game. Nothing much more to say about the sound department.

7.5

Gameplay

If you've played Mario RPG then you'll be pretty familiar with Paper Mario's gameplay. It differs from many RPGs in that you have more of an active role in battles. You have to press certain button combinations or do various other things to block attacks or make your attacks stronger. What differs from Mario RPG is the fact that Mario is the only character who takes damage. You can only have one ally in battle with you at a time and, while they can still attack, they do not take any damage and cannot be killed. While there is the rare time when your ally gets hit, he or she won't die, rather, they will be immobilized for a number of turns equal to the amount of damage they took. It's quite a refreshing take on the RPG battle system. Much of the rest of the gameplay is standard RPG gameplay with a little Mario thrown in. You walk around talking to people and performing different tasks, but you can also jump and perform Mario's various moves, some of which you will learn along the way. It's a fun game and, although it is a little short, it will keep you hooked for a while.

9.0

Replayability

There are tons of extras to be found in Paper Mario. You can try to discover the different recipes of Tas-tee, or try to find all the different badges, which are like relics from Final Fantasy III. The only problem is when you get to the end you save deep in Bowser's castle so it might take you a while to get out. Truthfully, at the time of writing this, I haven't tried yet so there might be a shortcut but it's still a problem. The game doesn't have the most secrets to find but there is still a lot of extra stuff to do.

8.0

Buy/Rent

Unless you plan to play this game for 24-30 hours straight then this is a buy. You could rent it again but this game is definitely worth the $40-$50 it costs. You'll find yourself coming back to play Paper Mario again and again. It is extremely reminiscent of all the great Super Nintendo RPGs.

Total (not an average) : 9.0

Ogre Battle 64

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 19:03:19 +0000

Ogre Battle 64 Review

By Derek Miller

Nintendo 64 gamers have asked for more RPGs and more mature games. Ogre Battle 64 delivers on both levels. Not only is it a deep strategy-RPG, but it also features mature characters in a deep story. Ogre Battle 64 has got to be one of the best games on the Nintendo 64. Even if you don't like traditional RPGs, Ogre Battle might still peak your interest. The story alone is enough to keep you playing and there are so many different possible story lines that you might never see them all. There are also many heroes you can meet along the way, and many of them may even join your army. Ogre Battle is a very deep game and it may be difficult to get into, but once you get into it you'll never want to put the controller down.

Graphics

The graphics in Ogre Battle are decent, but not spectacular. All of the characters look pretty good and are distinguishable, but the environments seem really flat and boring. Some of the spells look just spectacular, however. If you get sick of the spell animations, though, there is an option to turn them off which is even accessible during battle. All-in-all, a decent looking game considering the amount of information that was crammed into the cartridge.

7.0

Sound

The music in Ogre Battle is incredible. It's hard to believe that MIDI songs are playing. They almost sound as good as if they were being read off a CD. If you were a fan of Ogre Battle for SNES then you may recognize some familiar tracks. The sound effects are decent, but not spectacular.

8.0

Gameplay

Ogre Battle 64 is a tough game to learn, especially if you aren't familiar with the Super Nintendo version. Luckily, there is an extensive tutorial provided which lasts over half-an-hour. Much of your learning, however, will be on the battlefield. There you control your armies and try to complete a certain mission objective, usually taking over the enemy's headquarters. When you encounter an enemy unit you engage them in battle. However, these battles are not standard RPG-fare. You do not directly control the characters, rather, you give them a specific strategy such as "Attack Leader" or "Attack Weakest." As boring as that sounds it actually makes the game better than it would be if you controlled every character. It makes you feel more like you are leading the army if that makes any sense. There are also numerous characters, both good and bad, that you will meet along the way. They may or may not join you depending on your actions taken. This makes the game very interesting because it can change every time you play it. Words really do not do this game justice, so if you can find it then give it a shot.

9.5

Replayability

I have already played through this game three times since I got it and that's tough for a college student. You always want to try and see if you can learn from your mistakes and earn a better ending or try to convince characters to join your army. There are also many hidden secrets, including ultra powerful spells, in the game which you can only find by exploring the towns. This game may suck you in for a long time so be prepared.

9.5

Buy/Rent

You probably won't find Ogre Battle for rent anywhere but if you're lucky you may find it for sale at an videogame store but it will probably be $40-$50. Chances are you'll pay the same price on eBay for a used game so if you can find it at a store then try to pick it up, otherwise you can watch as the price for this rare gem continues to skyrocket on eBay.

Total (not an average) : 9.0

Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 19:02:15 +0000

Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine Review

By Derek Miller

I have got to be one of the biggest Indiana Jones fans around and when this game came out for the PC I had to have it. I was extremely disappointed. While the game was good conceptually the controls were so horribly awkward that it took away almost all of the fun. The Nintendo 64 version fixes these control problems, making the game a Tomb Raider-type game that is actually fun to play and doesn't need bouncing female body parts to sell. LucasArts and Factor 5 did a wonderful job porting this game to the Nintendo 64 and any fan of Indiana Jones will probably consider this the best Indy game made. Although that isn't saying much, Indiana Jones would make a worthy addition to your N64 library.

Graphics

The graphics for the PC version were pretty good, but, if you can believe it, the N64 version actually improves upon them. The expansion pak, although not required, is used to its full potential to create awe-inspiring landscapes and locations. There is a very long range of vision which produces little pop-up making to feel like you are actually at the archaeological sites. The lighting effects in the game are great, and don't feel like they are overused like they sometimes do in Rare games. The creatures in the game all look very realistic and there is no slowdown to speak of.

9.0

Sound

Factor 5 is known for great sound production and they don't disappoint in Indiana Jones. Ambient sounds pervade the game, making the locations feel all the more realistic, and instead of a constant sound track, ambient music is played when you enter new locations. Of course, the Indy theme is present and there are also various other tracks that get you into the mood of the game. Every character speaks and Indy even sounds like Harrison Ford, even though I know it isn't really him. Surround sound is used expertly in this game which makes it sound much better than its PC counterpart. This is easily one of the best sounding games on Nintendo 64.

9.0

Gameplay

The creators of the Tomb Raider series admitted that they were influenced by the Indiana Jones movies and the creators of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine admitted that they took the gameplay of Tomb Raider and applied it to Indiana Jones. I was a fan of the original Tomb Raider game but then the gameplay just didn't evolve at all. Putting Indiana Jones into the Tomb Raider formula just seemed to fit. The gameplay is solid. If you like the Tomb Raider games, at least in concept, then you'll love Indiana Jones. Platform jumping is done well and very rarely do you find yourself frustrated trying to accomplish make a jump or use the whip. The Legend of Zelda's Z-Targeting is implemented and changed slightly to help you aim both the whip and other weapons more accurately. The puzzles in the game will stump you a lot but you will always feel a sense of gratification when you solve them. There are treasures to be found in each level which will earn you IQ points which are needed to truly complete the game. It will take a lot of exploring to find all of them and is something I'm not even close to accomplishing yet. The game is a lot of fun and if you want Tomb Raider-type gameplay it's your only option on Nintendo 64.

8.0

Replayability

Indiana Jones takes an incredibly long time to beat, even for more experienced gamers, so you may not feel the urge to play it again right away. There are hidden treasures to find in every level, however, and this is a task that you probably won't accomplish the first time through. Most of the levels are huge, and fun to explore, making searching for the treasures seem like fun instead of a chore. And it's always fun to go back and shoot some Communist Russian soldiers.

5.5

Buy/Rent

Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine isn't sold in retail stores so don't bother looking. It is available to rent, however, but it may be difficult to finish with just one rent. You can probably find the game used but be prepared to pay $20 to $35 for it.

Total (not an average) : 8.0

Conker's Bad Fur Day

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 19:00:27 +0000

Conker's Bad Fur Day Review

By Derek Miller

*#&@ off! You don't need to read my &%*#ing review! Go buy this @!#$ing game! Okay, to start this review off let me say that Conker's Bad Fur Day is definitely not for everyone. If you are young and easily impressionable or you take offense to toilet humor and sexual innuendoes then do not buy this game. But if you are sick of the same old platformers and want a game that will make you laugh then Conker may be for you. Whether you have to feed chunks of corn to the Great Mighty Poo (who, by the way, has an excellent singing voice) or jump off the rather large, uh, melons of a talking flower, Conker will never cease making you laugh. In my opinion this is Rare's best game since Goldeneye. Get it now you %$#&head!

Graphics

Graphically Conker is beautiful. It looks as good as Banjo-Tooie, if not better. The lighting affects are not overused in this game as I thought they were in previous Rare games. There is slight pop-up but never any noticeable slowdown. Some of the images in Conker will make your jaw-drop for more than one reason. Also Conker himself has some pretty cool idle activities. While Mario would take a nap in Mario 64 if you left him alone too long, Conker does a wide variety of activities. He will play with a yo-yo, play his Gameboy Color, or flip through a porno magazine. Let me reiterate that you will not stop laughing while playing Conker.

9.0

Sound

Rare once again proves they are masters at sound. The sound effects in Conker are near perfection and the music tracks are incredible for being stuffed on a cartridge. There are only a few games I can think of with better sound and most of them are Rare games. What else needs to be said?

10.0

Gameplay

The gameplay in Conker is fairly standard platformer fare. The most fun you'll have, though, is the jokes and the tasks you have to perform for people. While Mario had to bring a lost baby penguin to it's mother, Conker had to get a cow to drink prune juice so it will go poo. While Banjo and Kazooie had to climb up an anthill, Conker had to convince some bees to tickle a busty flower so the king bee could "pollinate" her. While Donkey Kong fought a raging armadillo, Conker had to fight the Great Mighty Poo. There are also funny parodies of pretty much every popular movie under the sun including Saving Private Ryan, The Godfather, and Aliens. Conker is hilarious the whole way through and if you aren't offended by the humor then you'll love it.

8.5

Replayability

Conker has some awesome multiplayer modes. Many are similar to standard FPS games but they all have a certain twist. I'll explain the modes here:

Deathmatch : Standard deathmatch with multiple levels to choose from.

Heist : A bag of money is in the middle of the bank. You have to grab the money and take it back to your safe. You go much slower when you have the money and you can't use weapons. Speaking of weapons, you start with a baseball bat and can also use throwing knives, an uzi, and a bazooka amoung other weapons.

Beach : You can either be on the side of the Frenchies or the Tedizes. If you are with the Frenchies then your goal is to make it across the beach without getting killed. The Tedizes will fire at you with a powerful machine gun, bazooka, or a sniper rifle. You can find powerups that burst your speed which will greatly help you avoid the gunfire. There is also a dynamite plunger you can use to blow the stuffing out of the Tedizes. As a Tediz you sit atop the hill and shoot at the frantic Frenchies with your three weapons. I can't explain in words how much fun that is.

Raptor : This ones pretty tough if you are on the Ugas side. As an Uga your goal is to steal a raptor egg and bring it to the large frying pan. Problem is Mama Raptor is out to prevent that. The Uga can use many primitive weapons to attack Mama Raptor but Mama Raptor has a vicious bite which is tough to compete with. This game is more fair when multiple Ugas take on a single Mama Raptor.

War : There are two modes to this, Total War and Colors. In Total War the Squirrels and Tediz both occupy seperate sides of the same fortress. Your goal is to find the enemy's canister of lethal chemicals and put it into the opposing sides sewer system, thus killing everyone who is not in a safe zone or wearing a gas mask. In Colors you simply play capture the flag. Get your enemy's flag and take it back to your own base.

Tank : This is similar to Total War except you are in tanks. Find the chemical canister and return it to your base to destroy the other tanks if they are not in safe zones. There are many different hardware pickups you can find such as a high-velocity gun barrel, a telescopic sight, a shield, and a nitro-booster. There is an option that lets one player control the tank's movement while another controls the turret.

Race : You race the hoverboards across lava with nitro-boosters and missles scattered about. It is the same race that is in the single-player game.

8.5

Buy/Rent

Buy it now! What are you waiting for?! Best Buy lowered the price of it to $30 so you have no excuse anymore!

Total (not an average) : 9.0

The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 13:09:35 +0000

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Review

By Weltall

The Nintendo 64 sold roughly 30 million units in its lifespan. It would not be a bad guess to estimate that a good quarter of those were sold along with, or for this game. It is that damn good. This version of Zelda rode a bumpy road to its November 1998 release. Delay after delay plagued any news of it. But the ends, in this case, justified the means. Ocarina of Time, in this reviewer's opinion, is bar none the greatest title ever released for the console, and one of the best games ever. Rarely does a game present such a complete and satisfying package of gameplay, graphics, atmosphere. Even the N64's oft-maligned sound capabilites were used to the greatest extent

In this installment, chronologically the first in the series, the young Kokiri boy Link is summoned by the Great Deku Tree, via the fairy Navi, for an appointment with Princess Zelda, the evil Ganondorf, and ultimately destiny.

Graphics

Ocarina of Time showcased was is arguably the best real-time graphics of the entire hardware generation. Vast areas like Hyrule Field and Lake Hylia are rendered beautifully without the slightest hitch, and the game keeps a steady 30 FPS from start to finish. Character designs are iffy, except for the important ones. Textures can be a little blurry at times, but there isn't a hint of clipping to be seen, which is no mean feat. Artistically, the game is a wonder to behold. Town and dungeon designs alike fit the their respective themes. And there's nothing like watching your first sunset. There is little to complain about in this deparment whatsoever.

Sound and Music

Koji Kondo performed miracles with limited tools. His musical selections are superb, some of his best works. Even though the game lacks the classic Zelda theme, the new stuff is memorable, and you will be humming it, guaranteed. And though the classic theme is absent, there are certainly a few you will recognize, Kakariko for instance. Sound effects are good for the most part. I say for the most part because there is no option to rip out the vocal cords of your fairy partner Navi, who pops up CONSTANTLY with generally useless information. It's all good everywhere else.

Gameplay

Oh sweet mother, does this game have play! All your favorite classic Zelda weapons, plus a few new ones, brilliantly translated into the 3D arena. The move to 3D made some old weapons more fun to use. The Fairy Bow comes to mind. And the good old Hookshot is far more important than ever. Another wonderful, innovative addition is the Z-Targeting system. When Navi hovers over an enemy or object, pressing the Z trigger will make Link lock on to it. This is an invaluable combat tool, especially when speed is key. While locked on to an enemy you can do the dance of death like never before: sidestep, hop forward, leap backward, shield, thrust, jump-slash for double damage, and perhaps best of all, it gives projectile weapons (Bow, Slingshot, boomerang, etc) a much better chance of hitting it%27s target without fine-precision manual aiming. For a challange, try playing the game without using Z-Targeting. It's a LOT harder!

Purchase Price

Shouldn't be more than $20 by now.

Total (not an average) : 9.5