Welcome to a spooooky episode of 64 in 64, and what's scarier than racing and fishing games? Yeah, I flaked out on doing a horror-themed episode of one of these. Ideal time for Resident Evil 2 to make one of the slots, but I decided I didn't want to play that game. The random choice algorithm wasn't really in a seasonal mood either, it turns out. Still, you can get some cask-strength Halloween energy most places today so why not treat this as an oasis of relative serenity? I mean, there's still pain and suffering and insanity but I'm the one taking all that on so don't you worry none.

Right, an introduction that isn't just me taking a glance at the PC clock and realizing what day it is. Hello! This is 64 in 64, a (currently) monthly retrospective on N64 games with an eye on judging how well they've held up and how they might be received by a modern audience browsing their premium tier Nintendo Switch Online retro game libraries for something to fill the time. Perhaps that time is sixty-four minutes exactly? Well, that sounds like an unusually specific length for a lunch break and/or commute journey but who am I to call you a liar, you filthy liar? If any of the above applies to you and your suspiciously particular needs I hope this series helps you out. If a guy from Nintendo happens to read this: A) I bought all these games legally as far as you or anyone else knows; B) Say hi to my middle school friend's uncle for me; and C) I hope you feel sufficiently inspired by all the research on display to do some overdue moving and shaking over there.

However, whether we happen to be a Nintendo guy or not, we all have to follow the rules (well, technically, only I have to):

1. Each episode of 64 in 64 covers two N64 games, though once upon a time I used to have enough energy to do three. Each is played for sixty-four minutes exactly. I've split each playthrough into four quarterly chunks for the sake of better journalizing my efforts. I'm like the Sammy Pepys of the N64 (no, he was not the inventor of Pepsi).
2. The pile of N64 games I want to try out is ever dwindling to nothing like a bonfire on its final cinders, but fortunately I only get to pick one game to cover. The second is picked for me by a malevolent AI super-entity posing as a browser random chooser app to torment any humans foolish enough to incur its attention. It says hi.
3. As well as the quarterly check-ins I've also written some insightful drivel about the game's legacy, its longevity, and its eligibility for the Switch Online N64 library. I've kept the sarcasm to a moderate level. Moderate for me, anyway.
4. There is one special rule, one so iron-clad that I've only ever broken it twice and probably will again who am I kidding, and that's never to touch a game slated to be added to the Switch Online library or one that already resides in its vaunted halls. Any opinion proffered as to its suitability for inclusion is kinda moot if that decision has already been made. As of this month that also includes Mario Party 3, and I'd celebrate being free from the capricious whims of another devious CPU except I think the random chooser is looking this way. Psst, act inconspicuous.

It was only after inadvertently putting "Episode 35" in the title of this brand new series that I realized my error and had to quickly write and publish all thirty-four previous episodes overnight before anyone caught on to the gaffe. (That's also my excuse for their quality.)

Iggy's Reckin' Balls / Iggy-kun no Bura Bura Poyon (Pre-Select)

• Iguana Entertainment / Acclaim
• 1998-07-31 (NA), 1998-08-01 (EU), 1998-08-28 (JP)
• =119th N64 Game Released

History: Iggy's Reckin' Balls sees Californian studio Iguana Entertainment take a break from their usual annual sports games and dinosaur hunts to try their hand at a mascot platformer with a (not chameleon) twist: rather than jump around an open world collecting gewgaws the player is instead competing with other spherical cartoon characters in a series of races up towers that vaguely resemble those crazy marble courses you could buy with all the tubes and such. It also frequently uses a grappling hook: a mechanic the video game industry, outside of the occasional Bionic Commando, wouldn't really exploit in full until around 2015/2016, known as the Year of Grappling Hooks to gaming historians.

This is our second Iguana game, and a large part of why I chose it is due to giving them the benefit of the doubt after the first of theirs we played: Forsaken 64 (Episode 31). Of their other games, well, I'm almost certainly going to get around to a Turok one of these days but I'll probably avoid the South Park FPS for as long as possible. The rest are sports games I could do without, but I'm sure the random picker will select a few for me in due time. (It's also our fourth Acclaim game, for those counting. The others include South Park Rally, Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M., and Forsaken.)

This is a total curiosity pick. I've known about Iggy's Reckin' Balls since forever ago because how could you not with that name but I've never taken the opportunity to play it before. It never struck me as a particularly well-acclaimed (so to speak) or even well-liked game but certainly one that stood out in the N64's ocean of third-party mediocrity, and often that's what gets you immortalized more than uninspired competency. Some might question why I'm covering two games about balls in as many episodes (we covered Tetrisphere last time) and what that might say about any repressed psychosexual yearnings, and to that I say "ball jokes are funny, and I need every crutch I can get".

16 Minutes In

Well, here goes reckin'. Went with the first grand prix of the standard race mode to see what's what. Hopefully this game has an onboarding ramp because I've seen this in action and still didn't quite get it. So the idea is that you're rolling or hopping along a fixed-track 3D (think Klonoa) obstacle course and jumping across gaps and up platforms when needed, using the grappling hook to either latch on to the terrain above or to attack your competitors. Each course has its own rules, hazards, and number of laps: the general goal is to head ever upwards towards the checkered platform, but even if you can't see the full course there's always arrows telling you where to head next. (By the way, I opted for the Jack O'Lantern looking guy, Narlie, since I'm getting in the seasonal mood and all.)

So, two observations from this inaugural segment: The first is that the game is really tough. Like, the courses are straightforward enough once you get acclimated to using the hookshot and its length (apparently both its reach and the top speed are different for each character? Narlie's somewhere in the middle for both, I think, but the game doesn't give you hard stats like it would in Mario Kart 64 or Diddy Kong Racing) to reach higher platforms, but actually beating your opponents to the end requires a level of precision play I didn't expect from this colorful party game of a racer. Every CPU knows exactly what they're doing and where they're going and they're pretty aggressive to boot, so you really need to take a few attempts before you're in a position to beat them and even then there's still a luck/RNG factor regarding moving platform cycles and other timers. However, for certain courses the CPU might be dumb as hell; I've yet to figure out if there's any consistency, but they'll whiz right to the end taking the absolute most efficient path for one course and then in others they'll get lost for a whole minute. The second observation is that there doesn't seem to be a limit on retries, so you can just start over if it's looking like last place. If this is just an exclusive courtesy for the tutorial-tier grand prix or a game-wide thing is yet to be determined. (I say tutorial, but the game has none. Just throws you in with the proverbial lions from the get-go.)

32 Minutes In

Dear God, this game does not pull its punches. I completed the Easy Street GP in pole position, albeit with a lot of resets, but three races into the first "proper" GP, Downtown, I'm getting my ass handed to me. I've started utilizing the power-ups they give you a bit more, but certain ones like missiles seem useless given how chaotic the game is and how you have little idea where anyone else is besides a progress tracker on the left side that tells you how far in front (or behind, frequently in my case) from the rest you are. Even the speed boosts, which are normally so reliable in games like this, can be a crapshoot if (for example) you weren't aware that the next part of the course is mostly vertical where any increased horizontal movement is redundant. Hammering the grapple is often necessary for areas where the layers of platforms are close together, though if there's some distance you might need to jump and grapple instead. As always, opponents seem to know exactly where to go, so if all else fails I can try to follow them and remember the route for the next attempt.

Seconds before this block was about to end, as I was retrying the third race after almost getting lapped by the clown ball yet again, the game crashed. Can't say if it was the game itself punishing me for too many restarts or just an emulator snafu, but either way I'm half-tempted to skip ahead to avoid repeats and half-tempted to not do that because the game's only going to get tougher. There's ten of these GPs, incidentally, so I've no idea what the difficulty curve is going to look like around the eighth or ninth one. Maybe a spectral hand comes out of the screen to punch me in the face repeatedly. Again, it would at least be thematically apropos to the season.

48 Minutes In

Switching to Charlie, the aforementioned clown ball (and, according to internet research, the fastest racer; so I wasn't just imagining it) and I managed to reach the third course of Downtown and it crashed again. Happens when restarting the race as well as after successfully completing it in first place. I'll chalk it up to some odd emulation issue and move onto the other main game mode for our final block coming up.

Apparently I'm blind as there is in fact a pretty detailed "trainin'" tutorial available on the main start menu, rather than the game mode menu that immediately follows which is where you'd expect it to be. The tutorial covers the basics I'd already figured out—A to jump, B to grapple, Z to use your current power-up—but in addition there's techniques like hanging underneath a platform and using your wrecking (sorry, reckin') ball momentum to swing yourself up to new heights. There's also several ways you can grapple and throw your fellow racers, the more elaborate they are the longer they stay stunned afterwards; though it should be noted that stopping to attack is still going to delay you as well, so any other opponents might take the opportunity to get ahead. I couldn't even imagine the level of mastery you'd need to pull off these tricks without losing too much time, unless they adjust for player error by making the CPU bad at the more advanced tech too.

64 Minutes In

The other two modes include a time trial, which I'll leave well enough alone, and the Battle Mode which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Three balloons trail behind you to represent your lives, and upon dying you get to turn into a bomb and chase after the still-living like a revenant out for vengeance. Yes, it's exactly the same as Mario Kart 64, but try not to call too much attention to it for the devs' sake. Anyway, the battles are just as chaotic as the races but at least the balloons are easier to see at a distance if an enemy is closing in. There's some heat-seeking lasers that seem tough to avoid—like if you had a Mario Kart battle mode with the blue shells included—and there's one power-up that shrinks everyone else that I swear I never picked up once.

After sixty four minutes I can attest that my balls are thoroughly recked. At least I have a clearer idea of what this game is now and, honestly, it feels like the type of game that would be due for a comeback. The party game aspect combined with the tough grapple-based platforming all seem a little ahead of their time and better suited for today's Indie crowd, ideally with a lower price tag and a much higher level of quality. Actually playing it is rough in multiple respects: the sense of speed combined with the N64's draw distance does not make for a great experience if you happen to be a fan of being able to react to things ahead of you in time, and the opponent difficulty is absurdly strong for no particular reason I can see besides making the game's "time to beat" accelerate towards infinity. Though, if that is the case, it's an odd decision to let players restart races endlessly for a better result. It's a game where I'm not sure who it's for, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that it found an audience that adored its challenging and unusual take on a multiplayer competitive racer.

How Well Has It Aged?: A Light Reck-ommend. I don't think I need to play it again and the N64 wasn't hurting for novelty racers, though few were as strange as this one. Props to Iguana for taking such a big swing, so to speak, on a racing/platformer game featuring spherical wrecking ball characters that look like they rolled right off the Madballs assembly line. Plus, I steeled all the resolve I had and didn't make a single joke about deez nuts throughout this whole review. It was tough but I managed to pass my own test...icles. Aw, shit.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: I Reckin' Not. Iggy's Reckin' Balls, like many of Acclaim's properties, were bought by Canadian nostalgia-grocers Throwback Entertainment whom have been slowly rereleasing those games on Steam. They recently signed off on letting Nightdive handle that excellent PowerSlave remaster and they've put out N64 games like Extreme-G 2 in the past (though in that game's case there was a contemporary Windows version to make it easier for them). No clue if this so-so game featuring a mascot for a defunct company is going to be something they're interested in reviving.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. (I'm surprised it has no support; I figured this would be a cult favorite among achievement fanatics and fans of challenging games in general.)

Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Random)

• Victor Interactive / Victor Interactive
• 2000-05-26 (JP)
• 326th N64 Game Released

History: The Nushi Tsuri series, known in the west as Legend of the River King (or sometimes Harvest Fishing, to tie it into Natsume's thematically and visually similar Harvest Moon games), is a fishing-RPG hybrid that prioritizes upgrading the tools of the angling trade and procuring the right bait to hook the biggest and rarest fish in any given region, earning XP and/or money and thus improving your odds of eventually reeling in the titular sovereign of the watery deep. As might be expected from this subtitle, which means "Riding on the Sea Salt Breeze", this N64-exclusive sequel includes ocean fishing as well, raising the stakes by having you reel up enormous groupers, swordfish, and sharks.

Victor Interactive was a briefly-lived merger of Victor Entertainment, a Japanese multimedia publisher that often worked with EA to publish its games in Japan, and Pack-In-Video, another publisher that occasionally developed licensed games: they were behind Rambo, Predator, and Knight Rider for NES, for example. Victor Interactive would soon after be bought and folded into Marvelous Entertainment, the current owners of the Story of Seasons property. We've met Victor once before on this feature with Harvest Moon 64 (Episode 15), so the relationship between the two properties is certainly more than just skin-deep, but this is going to be it for them unless we ever get around to the first Nushi Tsuri 64.

A little apprehensive about this one. There are no fan translations for Shiokaze ni Notte that I could find and we're talking an RPG about fishing here; there's going to be many terms I probably wouldn't recognize even if they were in English, so I expect to get very lost over the next hour. I did play a little of Harvest Fishing back in the day and bounced off it due to how boring it was, so that bodes well. Turns out fishing works better as a mini-game in RPGs rather than the whole game.

16 Minutes In

Much like a vase on a thin stand in a cartoon or Crime Boss: Rockay City, this playthrough was a disaster anyone could've predicted. I cannot read a damn thing. There were multiple eras of how much Japanese text a game can feasibly display with the resolution of the console and we're in that least accommodating era where displaying kanji is fine but furigana not so much, and I can only read hiragana and katakana (and even then only on a good day). From what I've been able to pick up, you play as any one of four members of a family of avid nature lovers (a blue older son, a red androgynous sibling, a purple dad, and an orange mom) and set out to fish and collect bugs and flowers from your home village at first, with perhaps an eye towards conquering the whole region. Conquering in the sense of cataloguing all its flora and fauna, anyway. All I've been doing since I left the homestead as the orange character (which turned out to be the mom; she wears her hair under a bandana so it's hard to tell) is finding bugs and picking flowers. Any attempts to actually fish have been met with failure: the fish move insanely quickly, to the extent that I'm fairly sure an emulator issue is responsible (nice, two for two this month).

Drama struck when I ran out of room to collect new bugs, either that or I'd already found all the unique species here and am unable to interact with any dupes. The town, which looks to be partially submerged, is full of random people enjoying their time and all manner of wild and domesticated beasts—I can't catalogue those, probably because they're too big to fit in any of my terrariums—as well as what look to be primo fishing spots, were fishing something I was capable of doing. Last, I should probably note this art style before moving on: they look like Playmobil figures and I'm not sure why the visual style is this drastically cartoonish given how natural-looking the plants and wildlife are (they're super detailed too; the game must know its fanbase of hobby-grade biologists). Time to poke away at this indecipherable game for another sixteen minutes, I guess.

32 Minutes In

This is kinda like the video game equivalent of being in the waiting room at a doctor's office. I can't do the thing I'm here to do, but maybe I can read a magazine or look at my phone or something. Which is to say, even in a fishing RPG where you can't fish there are ways to waste time that isn't usual amount of time wasted on fishing. I've placed my bugs in a terrarium so now I can pick up more, if I wanted to or could even figure out why I would want to, and I've stopped by all the local stores (I can't afford anything besides two vegetables) and play an Othello knock-off board game that someone shoehorned math into, just in case anyone wondered how you could possibly improve on Othello.

I'll be real with you folks, this one's looking like a wash. What's troubling is that I can see a fail state on the horizon: you have a limited amount of stamina that's constantly ticking down and an equally limited means of replenishing it with no money. I found the fish shop but, well, the only thing they want to buy is fish and I don't have any of those. If I could sell these bugs or flowers at the fish shop or the greengrocers I might be able to hang on for the full hour, but then I remembered how the concept of commerce works and I don't think those are going to be viable options. I suppose I could try eating the bugs instead? When did this suddenly turn into a grim poverty simulator like Papers, Please?

48 Minutes In

Determined to actually do some damn fishing in this damn fishing game, I underwent some trial and error to figure out how Nushi Tsuri's angling system worked rather than bailing on it with loser talk like "the emulator's at fault" or "I need to visit my parents in the hospital while I still can rather than spend a whole hour bashing my ahead against an ancient fishing game I can't even read", so while I sit here ignoring what sound like very urgent phone calls I've just been practicing on some small fry. Turns out years of finely-honed fishing mini-game instincts were all wrong: you don't fight the fish when they're trying to pull away on your bait, but rather just sit there passively while they tire themselves out and only reel once they stop resisting. It's a surprisingly hands-off method: only needing to reel whenever the fish takes a break makes the whole thing feel like a very rudimentary "red light, green light" mini-game. I guess I can chalk that up to the game's age to some extent, but I want to say even while I was toiling away in the figurative landfills that were the JP-exclusive SFC and PCE back-catalogs for the sake of wiki research I encountered far more sophisticated angling sims than this. Maybe I'm still pissy that I threw in the towel so quickly when it proved to be so simple, perhaps deceptively so given how deep in the reeds Nushi Tsuri is about having the right fishing accoutrements (there's so many types of rod, hook, bait, and lure on sale at the local fishing store; unless you know what fish you're specifically aiming for and what it needs, so much of it seems like blind luck).

Anyway, I did a fishing. I fushed, to use the correct past tense verb. Now to sell these healthy splashboys to the local sushi place (I can read "sushi" on signs just fine) and earn about enough money... to pay for all the bait I wasted. Truly a fishous cycle. (Oh, what, you're going to carp at me for that? Kiss my bass sole.)

64 Minutes In

Very little further progress was made but I will rescind a little bit what I said earlier about this being a rudimentary fishing game. The behavior of the fish can be very erratic, so you really have to pay attention to what it's doing and what seems like a safe time to start reeling. There's no gauges, no idea of how taut the line is or how exhausted the fish is becoming, and the only way to tell how far the fish is from where you're standing is the angle of the line (the steeper the closer, naturally). I haven't decided yet if that's because the game is going for a very natural feel in tandem with its environmentalist themes or if all the fancy gauges are upgrades you can buy with enough cash and progress made. I can't imagine the whole game is just this; a fishing game has to have hooks, after all.

So that's the end of my sorry attempts to make sense of this game. It's a prolific series in Japan, one that appeals to both fisherpeople and those with an affinity for games that let you gain experience and grow stronger at any given pursuit until you've become a master at it and can reap the rewards for your diligence. I appreciate that Animal Crossing bugs/fish collectathon aspect to it too, and I'm sure with a little digging (and a lot more Japanese fluency) I could glean many interesting facts about the natural ecosystem in Japan. Or wherever in the South Pacific this game is actually set; I heard you go to Hawaii at some point. Probably need to catch a lot more fish to pay for that plane ticket.

How Well Has It Aged?: Cod Only Knows. I would need to have a stronger sense of how to properly play the game and the kind of progression arc it has before I can speak with any authority about how well it's held up as an example of its genre. Saying that, I'd probably also need to play a bunch of modern fishing games for something to compare it to. Is it fair to say I liked Final Fantasy XV and Tales of Arise as fishing games more than this? I mean, I did more than just fishing in those games, but the fishing was excellent. At any rate, I don't think I'd want to continue with this game even if it was available in English, but I'll admit some broken part of me does want to fill out those fish and bug bestiaries...

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Troubtful. Marvelous is working with Nintendo to put Harvest Moon 64 on the Japanese Switch Online service at least (though someone somewhere is certainly dragging their heels about it) so there's a moderate chance they might follow that with the lesser regarded Nushi Tsuri games if this partnership turns out to be fruitful for them.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. (Really, what is Retro Achievements coming to when it doesn't even have a set of achievements for a Japan-only N64 fishing RPG sequel?)

Current Ranking

1. Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)
2. Diddy Kong Racing (Ep. 6)
3. Perfect Dark (Ep. 19)
4. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)
5. Donkey Kong 64 (Ep. 13)
6. Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)
7. Goemon's Great Adventure (Ep. 9)
8. Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)
9. Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
10. Tetrisphere (Ep. 34)
11. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)
12. Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
13. Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Ep. 27)
14. Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
15. Super Smash Bros. (Ep. 25)
16. Mega Man 64 (Ep. 18)
17. Forsaken 64 (Ep. 31)
18. Wetrix (Ep. 21)
19. Harvest Moon 64 (Ep. 15)
20. Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
21. Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
22. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
23. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
24. Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)
25. Densha de Go! 64 (Ep. 29)
26. Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 2 (Ep. 32)
27. Snowboard Kids (Ep. 16)
28. Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
29. Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
30. Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)
31. Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
32. Body Harvest (Ep. 28)
33. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Ep. 33)
34. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)
35. 40 Winks (Ep. 31)
36. Buck Bumble (Ep. 30)
37. Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Ep. 20)
38. Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)
39. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)
40. BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
41. Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
42. San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
43. Iggy's Reckin' Balls (Ep. 35)
44. Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
45. Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
46. Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Ep. 35)
47. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
48. Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
49. Mahjong Hourouki Classic (Ep. 34)
50. Milo's Astro Lanes (Ep. 23)
51. International Track & Field 2000 (Ep. 28)
52. NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
53. Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
54. Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
55. International Superstar Soccer '98 (Ep. 23)
56. South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
57. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
58. Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
59. Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
60. Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
61. F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
62. F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
63. Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
64. Wheel of Fortune (Ep. 24)
65. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
66. Mario no Photopi (Ep. 20)
67. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
68. Dark Rift (Ep. 25)
69. Mace: The Dark Age (Ep. 27)
70. Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. (Ep. 21)
71. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Ep. 32)
72. 64 Oozumou 2 (Ep. 30)
73. Madden Football 64 (Ep. 26)
74. Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Ep. 22)