Category: Nintendo 64

Space Station Silicon Valley

Space Station Silicon Valley is a sea of possibilities that is unmatched as far as the Nintendo 64 goes. With forty-two animals to be controlled, each with its own set of skills, it gives players great freedom when it comes to figuring out what needs to be done; better yet, in some instances, it offers multiple paths to get to the same goal. It effectively feels like a cartoonish sandbox experience, and it is – in many senses – ahead of its time. Sadly, in numerous areas, it also pales in comparison to its contemporaries, showcasing misguided design decisions and problematic camera angles that significantly detract from its conceptual excellence. Expecting Space Station Silicon Valley to match the classics of the console is, therefore, a mistake; and the best way to see it is as a product of great ambition that stumbles on frustrating technical details that although impossible to overlook, do not completely destroy the enjoyment that can be gotten out of it.

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by Matt

Mischief Makers

There is charm in the hyperactive weirdness of Mischief Makers, a title that is in genre alone already quite odd due to how it is a sidescroller released for the Nintendo 64. Sadly, the game seems overpowered by the joy it finds in its freedom. Although undeniably original, it is completely unable to stop and plan how to introduce its ideas to players appropriately, leading to a good deal of confusion. Worse yet, even if it contains great variety, it fails in developing nearly all of its mechanics to a remarkable degree, leaving its stages as sketches of what could have been. Mischief Makers is a testament to how creativity on its own simply does not cut it. The grabbing movement it is centered around is a brilliant tool that opens many doors, but with such undercooked levels, the value of that ability is mostly lost. In the end, this is clearly a product put together by folks who had long been looking for the freedom to try concepts that were purely fun, and they sure got it; however, its inability to focus on one mechanic for more than a few of minutes makes it feel like a little restraint would have done Mischief Makers a lot of good.

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by Matt

Star Wars Episode I: Racer

Published in a system with plenty of solid racing games, Star Wars Episode I: Racer employs clever gameplay mechanics, a unique approach to course design, and the power of a universally beloved franchise to rank as a worthy experience, pleasantly giving players the chance of stepping into one of the only memorable moments of The Phantom Menace. As a result of the need to release it alongside the movie which inspired it, the title comes with a few glaring holes and possible improvements that would perhaps have been taken care of if the schedule of its development had been more flexible. Still, these issues do not send it to the trash can reserved for movie-related games that are nothing but quick cash-ins; Star Wars Episode I: Racer actually stands pretty far from it, and what it offers is quality futuristic high-speed racing.

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by Matt

Super Mario 64

The transplant of an established and highly popular gameplay format from the world of two dimensions in which it had so greatly thrived to the then mostly unexplored universe of three dimensions had no blueprint, no instruction booklet, and no materialized result of considerable value. The company headed into uncharted territory and rather than coming out of it with an experience that was enjoyable yet immature, as it would have been expected, they emerged out of the fog of the unknown with a gem so polished and fully developed that its controls, structure, and content would, more than serve as the base to everything that was to come, be copied and pasted multiple times across more than a decade. It is one of those grand feats that at the time when it was performed already seemed to be a pretty big deal, but that in hindsight looks a whole lot like the material of some sort of legend that is too absurd to be true. Yet, Super Mario 64 exists as proof that it happened, and, to top it all off, it remains as purely fun as it was upon release.

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by Matt

The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

With darkness in its soul, wider environments at its disposal, ability-granting masks in its pocket, and an engaging three-day cycle in its core, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is foreboding in how it frequently turns to the uncomfortable; thrilling in how it dares players to explore; flexible in how it gives them a great variety of tools to interact with the tense environments that surround them; and suffocating, yet fair, in how it is constantly counting down to the moment when the world will be consumed in the fire produced by the crashing of a possessed moon. The Legend of Zelda has never been stranger; gaming has rarely been better.

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by Matt

The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time

It is utterly natural, given Nintendo’s stunning competence, that all 3-D The Legend of Zelda installments that followed it are superior in at least one major area. Majora’s Mask has a more distinctive vibe and stronger gameplay outside dungeons; The Wind Waker does a better job at implementing exploration and creating full-fledged sidequests; Twilight Princess feels like a grander and more thoroughly realized perspective on the Ocarina of Time structure; Skyward Sword tops it in inventiveness; Breath of the Wild operates in a level that is so different that comparisons become too one-sided; and the trend will continue as the saga advances. Yet, the steps those entries took were all solidly built over what Ocarina of Time laid down; they were only possible because the leap into 3-D was made so successfully and established so many vital mechanics.

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by Matt

Rayman 2: The Great Escape

As such, Rayman 2: The Great Escape is a flooring oddity of the Nintendo 64 days. During a time when most platformers and adventure games had their sights so deeply set on taking advantage of the grand environments supported by cutting-edge hardware that they ended up, positively, straying away from the genres’ origins, Ubisoft went the other way. With The Great Escape, the company opted to build, in the recently discovered 3-D realm, a quest that was open to the new opportunities unearthed by the latest technological developments, but whose main concern lay in being simple and old-school. In that regard, Rayman’s second adventure was certainly not alone, for many were the games and studios that tried to explore that interesting middle ground; however, arguably, none of them did so as well as the limbless hero, because the variety, quality, level of polish, and production values contained here are nothing but extremely rare. And propelled by those attributes, The Great Escape feels gigantic, blasting into the pantheon of the best games of its era and standing out among them for using the full extent of its energy towards being straightforward and fun rather than employing its ambitions in matters of size and scope.

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by Matt

South Park Rally

South Park Rally, differently from most games that jump into the kart racing genre with the goal of dressing it up with a famous franchise and quickly extracting a good deal of money out of it, does try to tackle the gameplay style with a unique approach. Sadly, all the efforts that it makes in that regard end up being not only disastrous but also incredibly frustrating. Perhaps, if handled by a company that wanted something other than to get it out into the market as fast as possible in order to cash in, those ideas could have flourished into a likable experience. As it stands, though, playing South Park Rally is a miserable journey through thematic races that seem to have been designed to generate anger rather than joy. At least, however, its presence in the Nintendo 64 library serves the useful purpose of proving that good intentions can be smothered quite brutally by sheer greed; so much, in fact, that one has to look really hard to find traces of their existence amidst the mess.

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by Matt

Star Fox 64

Overall, Star Fox 64 is nothing short of spectacular. It is the full realization of the concept of bringing arcade space shooters to a home console, and it reaches that status not just by perfectly translating the genre’s excitement and high-scoring thrill to television screens, but by finding ways to naturally expand the otherwise brief experience into a meaningful length. Be it by flying an Arwing, piloting a Landmaster, or diving in the Blue-Marine, players are bound to have an excellent time when blasting through Andross’ large army, and they will do so accompanied by likable characters, plenty of voice-acted dialogues, and stages that always succeed in surprising, testing gamers’ capacity to react quickly and shoot fast, and inviting them back for one more try. It is a source of joy that keeps on delivering for quite some time, and it is no wonder the absurd quality of the action it presents has been so hard to replicate.

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by Matt

Mario Party 3

Although it takes a fair shot at fixing the series’ lack of an engaging single-player experience, Mario Party 3 does not succeed in that regard, just like all of its sequels eventually would. However, even if it does not do as much as Mario Party 2 did for the formula, it is able to – through the punctual polishing it gives to the visuals, boards, and mini-games – take the franchise to its Nintendo 64 apex. Some of the Mario Party games may have done one or two things a little bit better – such as the orb system introduced on Mario Party 5 or the boards governed by different rules of Mario Party 6 – but Mario Party 3 was the very last time (to those who have been following the series since its inception) in which it felt like the franchise took a good step forward, consolidating what had been done before it and propelling the package to a new level of quality.

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by Matt