Oh, Fates, why do you hurt your greatest son like this? Sorry to start a new year of 64 in 64 on such a melodramatic note, but if you scroll down a little I'm sure you'll understand. I almost considered adding a content warning for any second-hand empathetic suffering that might ensue. That's right, we're continuing to talent scout old Nintendo 64 tapes ostensibly for the sake of the figurative Noah's Ark that is the Nintendo Switch and its online subscriber library of retro highlights. Are this month's new duo worthy of historical preservation? I feel like I may have already provided a hint.

Anyway, and I swear this is (mostly) unrelated to the random pick this month, but I'm planning for this year's season of 64 in 64 to also be the last. Reason being in part because we're hitting the dregs after covering most of the system's highlights—though I hope to cajole a few more bangers out of the modest N64 library before we're fully through—but also because, for as much as I'll always champion this unfairly-maligned console, I do want to cover other games on other systems in other contexts. Ruts are comfortable, sure, but there's a wide world of gaming both retro and current out there to get all indignant about on the internet. The plan is to continue until November of this year: at this rate of two additions to the ranking table per episode November should see us hit our 100th inclusion and that's as good a milestone on which to wrap things up as any. It'll also be the 48th episode: a lore-important number for 64 in 64 that always heralds the pivotal third acts of these little one-hour dramas. Still, never say never for a comeback, especially if I'm ever reaching for a one-off blog on some quiet month in the future...

Speaking of quiet, nothing kills a party vibe as quickly as recounting the rules:

• Two games. 64 minutes each. A good one picked by me and a bad one picked by the randomizer tool. It's not actually a rule that it has to pick bad ones for me to play, and yet. And yet.
• I've broken up the playthrough report into four manageable 16 minute chunks, each with live commentary. This is bookended by a pre-amble and a post-amble about how much the game may or may not suck. I've also determined its odds of appearing on Nintendo Switch Online through a scholastic process I call "making shit up", as well as mentioned any RetroAchievements support it may enjoy.
• Our ironclad rule is to not touch a game that is presently available on Switch Online already or fated to be added in the near future. Presently, everything previously announced is now on the service. We might hear about more newcomers at the next Direct, but part of me thinks Nintendo's going to focus on GBA or maybe even move onto GameCube. I better start sketching an outline for the GC version of this feature before Minotti beats me to it.

Be sure to consult the table below for prior episodes in case this one didn't produce enough schadenfreude to sustain you:

Doom 64 (Pre-Select)

• Midway / Midway (NA/EU) & GameBank (JP)
• 1997-03-31 (NA), 1997-08-01 (JP), 1997-12-02 (EU)
• 24th N64 Game Released

History: Doom 64 is a console spin-off of id Software's genre-codifying demonic FPS franchise that was created exclusively for the Nintendo 64 as its own bespoke thing somewhat early in the system's lifespan (pre-GoldenEye, even). In addition to whole new levels and a story that takes place after Final Doom, the game's undergone a visual makeover with all the enemies and weapons given new pre-rendered CG sprite appearances. It also includes a few (then-)modern luxuries, like the dynamic lighting the franchise would polish further with its next big entry Doom 3. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only significant negative review this game received at the time of its release was from one Mr. Jeff Gerstmann; the man has some very specific preferences, that's for sure.

This would be our tenth featured Midway published game on here, though only the third of those they developed themselves (after Mace: The Dark Age and San Francisco Rush 2049). It's also the first Midway game that was a pre-select rather than a random pick and there may even be more to come soon (what can I say? This is the third season of 64 in 64 and desperation has oh so assuredly set in). We're specifically talking Midway Studios San Diego here: the erstwhile Leland Corporation, a subsidiary of Battletoads-publishers Tradewest (who were also purchased by Midway's owners Williams along with Leland in 1994). They had been previously responsible for Doom and Final Doom for PlayStation and would later develop the N64 Quake port on the strength of their efforts here, which might be worth remembering if I ever find myself in the mood for another blurry boomer shooter that was far from being at its best.

I'll admit to feeling a little weird about featuring this game on here. Of the many id Software/Build engine style FPSes to find their way to the Nintendo's beautiful becurvéd boy Doom 64 was the best of the bunch because it bothered to create an original experience that even established Doom veterans could enjoy as a fresh new foray into the heavy metal world of huge demons and their huge guts, as opposed to the watered-down ports you saw with the others. However, the issue with Doom 64 specifically is that the matter of its potential presence on NSO has already been rendered completely moot: it was recently revamped by Nightdive Studios and that version eventually found its way onto Switch, making the game one of the few N64 ports you can purchase directly for the system instead of just "rent" from Nintendo for a while. Even so, I felt like playing some Doom 64 and, given what the randomizer disgorged onto my shoes this week, I'm grateful to have something not-terrible to cover this month.

16 Minutes In

Owing to its status as the fourth iterative Doom game rather than one created to be an onboarding point for console newcomers, even the first level—Staging Area—of Doom 64 is on the rough side. For instance, it traps you in a room with multiple demons (the big pink ones) at least twice, the second occasion right after you get the chainsaw so you can understand its utility against melee types like that one. I'm playing on the second-highest difficulty (standard practice for any Doom playthrough) so I wasn't expecting a cakewalk but at the same time I sort of assumed it would be a bit softer on a market as yet untested with the FPS genre. (I say that, but there was a SNES Doom and that wasn't easy either, more so because you couldn't tell what anything was with that resolution.) As a Doom veteran, though, I'm all for anything and everything they want to throw at me even this early on.

Graphically, the game leans closer to the Doom successor Quake with its amount of browns and darker browns replacing the eye-catching RGB of the originals, as well as an overall murkier level of luminosity. I'm not sure I'm wholly sold on the new pre-rendered looks for the enemies, especially up close, but I'm already into the double-pronged chainsaw glow-up. Hopefully I find some of the more welcome additions from Doom II show up soon, in particular the super-shotty. Even with the higher number of foes on the penultimate difficulty, I've not run into any ammo shortages yet: I'm sure that'll change once I start having to rely on rockets and energy weapons more often. One last note: the game throws lots of pink demons at you from the outset, but the imp is treated like a next level opponent as there's only one in the first stage and it shows up to jumpscare you in the final room with the level exit. Did imps always supersede demons in the pecking order? At least these ones look suitably scary: they're still as pointy as ever but also take on a taller, darker, and more alien-like (in the greys sense, rather than the xenomorph sense) appearance. They kinda remind me of Blackheart from the MvC games.

32 Minutes In

I'm coming around on the game's controls, as odd as they are (on their default setting anyway). As you might expect, the Z-trigger shoots while holding the bumpers lets you strafe; however, the A and B buttons—usually pretty central to any N64 game's controls—are only used to alternate weapons. Instead, the next-most pressed button in any Doom game, which is the one that opens doors and activates switches, is relegated to C-Right. C-Up switches to map mode, which is convenient for finding secrets and buttons/doors you may have overlooked, but I've yet to find a use for the other two C-buttons. If I can strafe and shoot I'm pretty much set; Doom's the type of FPS where aiming isn't really a factor beyond having to center enemies horizontally, making it better suited to this controller layout than most of its ilk.

I'm making... decent enough progress, some ways into the third level now (it's slower-going, but I tend to sweep areas for secrets just in case). It's introduced those tougher transparent blue imps (phantoms?) and plenty of cacodemons but also the super shotgun and rocket launcher, so it's about a wash. I also found an item that retroactively explained the darker environments: light-amplification goggles, which really help the levels become a lot more visible. That it's only a temporary buff is just painful; can't the game look like this all the time? Maybe they weren't as confident in the enemy's new appearances as I thought, so they—like so many nightclubs—chose to make ample use of the obfuscating power of low-light conditions. I'll admit to dying once so far; it does the usual thing of resetting your inventory, which sucks since I managed to find a whole cache of rockets in the second level, but if you enter a stage with barely any health left it's probably not going to go well. Fortunately, every Doom level is built in such a way that you can conquer it with a clean slate—it'll provide everything you'll need, one way or another—so I can roll with the setbacks for now. Maybe I'll be more careful with the boss encounters though; it's a bad time going up against a Baron with just a peashooter.

48 Minutes In

Halfway through level 4 now (I'm sure not speedrunning anything on this difficulty) and even though I'm having to squint at all the enemies in the dark—including those near-invisible demons, which are always fun—it's remarkable how much better this game feels to play than any other N64 FPS I've covered on 64 in 64 so far, including Perfect Dark. I guess it's largely because Doom is both timeless and very accessible even with the limited means of the N64 controller (playing most FPSes beyond a certain vintage without two sticks or a mouse/keyboard is simply unpleasant to me now) that it's been able to endure.

Speaking of enduring, I'm now adept enough at the ol' shoulder button shuffle to not have to worry too much about imps and cacos, while making good use of the chaingun to hold melee types like demons and lost souls at bay. It's only a matter of time before the game throws harder stuff my direction but I'm confident enough in my chances. The second-highest difficulty is no slouch though; a single caco shot is enough to drop my HP 25% without armor, so taking four at once would be enough to kill me at full health. Maybe "with an abundance of caution" isn't the right way to play Doom, but I want to repeat as little as possible while I'm limited by a timer.

64 Minutes In

Man, forget what I said about them building up to a Baron boss level: the last room of level 4 had three of them clumped together. I suppose they could be the weaker variant (Hell Knights?) but they were sturdy enough for me to resort to the rocket launcher for the first time. Always a little too skittish about the splash damage to rely on rockets too often; of course, in just a few scant years after Doom you were seeing FPSes where people intentionally fired them at their own feet. It's like we all got far too inured to the dangers of wielding heavy ordnance. At any rate, I was halfway through the curiously-designed fifth level—which has eight destinations branching away from you in a star formation as you start—before the final timer sounded. Overall, just the one death so that's something to be proud about, though I didn't find too many secrets either.

Doom's always a great time regardless of the quality of that particular installment/port (it's sort of like pizza in that respect) but I will say that Doom 64 is a smartly-made thing that understands the strengths of the N64 with considerations to its controller and hardware and not one that pulls any punches, berserker-empowered or otherwise, when it comes to giving its audience a challenge. It might've felt a little old-fashioned by 1997—a year that sat equidistant from Quake and Unreal—but I think it dutifully set the stage for GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark to follow, if perhaps to a much lesser extent the other id/Build ports. It's one of those rare games I cover here where I wanted to keep playing after the hour was over, though if I do I might restart to make a more earnest attempt at that RA set (or just pick up that Nightdive remaster; it usually goes for peanuts).

How Well Has It Aged?: Probably Better Than Anyone Old Enough to Remember What "SPISPOPD" Means. I'd say it's held up remarkably, with perhaps the exception of the pre-rendered sprites that I still hadn't warmed up to (though I am at least thankful that someone also pre-rendered the dead imp sprite's prominent butthole, as is Doom tradition). I still wouldn't play Doom on anything but keyboard and mouse if I had my druthers but as far as older console FPSes go it certainly wasn't a sluggish struggle the same way something like Armorines was.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: IDKFA (I Don't Know; Fuck All?) Chance. So yeah, refer back to what I said at the top. Nightdive and Bethesda put out their remake on everything, including the Switch, so there'd be little point for them to negotiate with Nintendo to add it to the NSO library in its visually weaker, blurrier state. At least, I can't see it being a priority for Nintendo themselves when there's still a few first-party games out there.

Retro Achievements Earned: 5 out of 88. Pretty standard assortment here, including one achievement each for beating a stage, beating it on the hardest difficulty, and finding all its secrets (if any).

Heiwa Pachinko World 64 (Random)

• Shouei / Amtechs
• 1997-11-28 (JP)
• =53rd N64 Game Released

History: Heiwa Pachinko World 64 is a pachinko game that, like many developed in this and the previous generation, was not so much meant to be played for fun (because, hey, it's pachinko) but were accurate-ish simulations of actual pachinko machines to help train players for the real thing. Heiwa Corporation is a major presence in the world of the aforementioned ball-interfering pastime and the tables featured in this game are based on their products. If you think it's kinda sketchy that there are video games that simply exist to help you get better at real-life gambling, welcome to the C-tier Japanese game industry circa the mid-'90s: this shit was everywhere.

Developer Shouei's dubious claim to fame is being the team responsible for a great many terrible Fist of the North Star brawler/fighter adaptations for Famicom/Super Famicom, only the second of which ever saw a localization. They'd already been working with Heiwa on the Heiwa Pachinko franchise since the SFC era—this is technically the fourth one, but I guess they skipped ahead a bit with the numeral. Amtechs (or Amtex, as it says in-game) is a bit more of a mystery, since Heiwa Pachinko World is their only credit. From what little I've been able to gather, they're a subsidiary of Heiwa that usually focuses on products of a more serious industrial hardware nature. No clue why they were dragooned into publishing this game on behalf of their owners, but those are the breaks. At any rate, this was the only N64 game either the developer or the publisher were ever attached to.

Sigh. I have a "please, no, god, no" folder of N64 games I strongly don't want to see show up on here, to the extent that I sacrifice a goat to Ba'al every other month to ward them away like they were evil spirits, but I neglected the vast number of Japanese N64 exclusives that would fall under the same category had I done my due diligence in including them. That naturally extends to pachinko in all its fell forms, along with inscrutable shogi and hanafuda sims (I at least know how to play mahjong, so that's off the hook). For the record, the N64 only has two pachinko games—such is my luck that one showed up anyway—with the other being Seta Corp's Pachinko 365 Nichi ("365 Days of Pachinko", so it's cool that someone out there found the nightmare journal I misplaced).

16 Minutes In

I'm not sure I adequately conveyed how little I want to play a pachinko game for an hour, but I've made my bed and now I have to piss all over it apparently. If you don't know the particulars of playing pachinko or what winning at pachinko entails then... great, we have things in common. Absolutely no clue what I'm doing. The Japanese in the menus is at least surface-level enough that I can navigate them just fine but beyond that all I've been able to do so far is put money into a machine for 125 pachinko balls a pop and then watch helplessly as they all tumble past the pegs and into the abyss below. You can rotate a dial that increases or decreases the strength of the launch—otherwise known as the only control you have over pachinko and even then it's mostly an illusion—but despite aiming for the various little "pockets" on the table there's not been much in the way of big jackpots or really a significant payout of any kind.

What's remarkable is that this game bothered to create an "external" aspect outside the tables, where you're able to walk around a facsimile of a dingy pachinko parlor (absent the overwhelming noise, graciously; instead you just get some jaunty marching music) with four-directional movement like I'm playing some g-d Wizardry. Unfortunately, there's very little you can do in this mode: you can't talk to anyone and you certainly can't, say, turn a corner to find a goblin guarding a chest that has a 5,000 yen bill inside and enough energy drinks to keep you awake as you spend another long day frittering away what little funds your family has while your children go hungry and neglected. That I've been playing this game 16 minutes and am already inventing vivid bleak domestic drama scenarios in my head probably tells you plenty. About this game and me both.

32 Minutes In

I've found three different machine models so far, despite the fact that in the dungeon-crawler mode every machine looks identical. I'd go into what separates them all but really the only thing that's not identical is the little slot machine in the middle. That's right, this isn't actually a pachinko game: it's pachi-slots, a subtle but significant difference as it involves even more random chance. By dropping balls in the right aperture, you can get one free spin on the pachi-slot in the center, which could win you anywhere between 0 and 0 pachinko balls (from what I've been observing, anyway). Other areas of the table might grant up to five or six new balls, but since the balls drop at around the pace of three per second that's not whole lot of extra pachinko. Evidently there's a way to build up to payouts in the thousands—otherwise, what's the point?—but such a path presently eludes me.

I can actually feel my soul dying as I play this. It's quite the sensation; one almost impossible to describe except I could sense my eyes glazing over and my consciousness enter a disassociated state of being. It might also be because I'm not drinking enough water or I'm squinting too hard at these pins though. Either way, I'm not exactly warming to Heiwa Pachinko World 64 over here. Maybe I'll jog a few more laps around the pachinko parlor again, annoying all the literally faceless people concentrating on their bouncing balls.

48 Minutes In

Checking on some mental gauges real quick and it appears I'm running out of steam, patience, fucks to give, and material to talk about, so to address the last of those let's discuss the aesthetics of these three machines. Since I can't read their titles (if they're even displayed anywhere) and we're all about the balls here I've tentatively dubbed them Ligma, Sawcon, and Goblin: Ligma is a pretty straightforward pachi-slots machine with an enlarged central display, so it's clearly not messing around with too many peripheral bells and whistles like its more flippant contemporaries—it knows you're here to gamble, and all that ball and peg jazz only serves to distract from what's truly important in life; the Sawcon machine has a pachi-slot display where ladies cycle between multiple costume changes, up to at least a dozen variants, giving it a coquettish and playful air as it continues to rip you off; finally, the Goblin machine has this cute Pac-Land/Dizzy aesthetic where there's a bunch of anthro pachinko balls in the background going about their lives and the pachi-slots display has LEDs that more closely resemble the old-school pixel art of classic Pac-Man.

The third's my favorite—I was batting around the idea of calling it Pac-Chinko for a while, until I realized that literally translates to "Pac-Man's dick"—though I've been experimenting around to see if there's a machine that's maybe a little worse for wear that I could feasibly cheat at. Not that I'm in any hurry to earn extra pachinko balls but perhaps something, anything, will happen if I collect enough. That could just be my N64 3D platformer mindset inventing things out of whole cloth as it feverishly tries to find some purpose in the 48 minutes we've spent here so far; I'm nigh certain this game has no point to it whatsoever, though.

My mission for the final segment is to see if I can earn enough balls to cash them in for a prize at the counter like they were skeeball tickets. I just hope one of these Japanese detergents they're selling is Mr. Sparkle, though on the whole I'd prefer something a little more exciting like a box of mochi or a fidget spinner or even a BB gun. Or better yet a real gun with a single bullet.

64 Minutes In

I found a fourth machine! This is the most thrilling thing that's ever happened to me. This one, which I guess I'll call Bophides, has a mahjong theme as if to taunt me about the marginally-less annoying experience I could be having elsewhere in the wider world of Japanese-exclusive N64 games. The tiles show up and if three match, then... well, that's kind of minor as far as mahjong goes but here it might mean grabbing more balls than I know what to do with.

While continuing to stare joylessly at all the flashing lights and spinning dials I was able to mentally escape, the ending of Brazil-style, with a thought exercise where I'd imagine all the better uses for the many pachinko balls I was throwing away. Here's a short list:

• Sticking them up my nose one after the other until it got to the point where it would sound like maracas every time I nodded my head.
• Place them on every centimeter of floor in my house so I could simply roll to my desired destination (though I would need to workshop the stairs).
• Use them to trip up the Wet/Sticky Bandits, should I ever fall afoul of the pair.
• As Fairy Slingshot ammunition to make progress easier in my other headache-inducing N64 playthrough this month.
• World's Tiniest Ball Pit™.
• Pretend I was a giant who found some Fushigi balls in the bag of the human I just ate.
• Make a miniature Newton's cradle for busy office cats on the go.
• Throw them at cars from the overpass.
• Throw them at trains from the overpass.
• Just throw them at people passing by my window; it's too cold out to be walking to overpasses.

And that kept on going for a while until something completely unexpected happened: I actually won a jackpot. At that point, the display changed to a game of strip mahjong with three anime ladies and I managed to keep my streak (so to speak) going until all three were topless. The wildest shit I've ever seen in an officially licensed Nintendo game. I actually thought I might've imagined it while in some sort of horny fugue state until I noticed that my pachinko ball counter had gone up by 2,000: it's truly incredible what the mystical power of anime nudity can accomplish. (I should point out here that they were all covering The Goods with their hands but it's still nutty Shouei managed to get that much past Nintendo's draconian censorship. I guess the odds of winning on that table really were that low if Nintendo's QA department missed it. In fact, going by the rest of the playthrough, they seem to have missed a lot.)

Only question is, will tiny pixel hentai be enough to save this game from the absolute nadir of the ranking table? Ooh, ooh, let's find out, shall we?

How Well Has It Aged?: About As Well As That Sony Discman D-145 in the Pachinko Prize Store. If the randomizer bot ever tries to make me play the other N64 pachinko game I fully intend to quit this feature then and there, several months earlier than the planned end date. This was not a good game and this was not a fun time. Maybe it offers some practical use for degenerate pachinko addicts but I'm not sure that's a strong enough reason for a thing to exist. This is why, even though the parlors are everywhere in Japan, that they've only ever put pachinko in a Yakuza game once: they're just that monotonous and arbitrary. Also it looked like hot trash.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: A Snowball's Chance in Hell (Not a Pachinko Ball's Chance in Hell Though, Since They All Go There). To be clear, Nintendo would have to give money to an avaricious, unscrupulous, gambling-enabling pachinko manufacturer to make this game's inclusion on NSO happen. If they were ever prepared to sink that low, they might as well pay Konami instead for all that good, good Ganbare Goemon.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. Weird that it's not supported.

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. Doom 64 (Ep. 38)
7. Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)
8. Goemon's Great Adventure (Ep. 9)
9. Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)
10. Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
11. Tetrisphere (Ep. 34)
12. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)
13. Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
14. Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Ep. 27)
15. Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
16. Super Smash Bros. (Ep. 25)
17. Mega Man 64 (Ep. 18)
18. Forsaken 64 (Ep. 31)
19. Wetrix (Ep. 21)
20. Harvest Moon 64 (Ep. 15)
21. Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
22. Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
23. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
24. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
25. Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)
26. Densha de Go! 64 (Ep. 29)
27. Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 2 (Ep. 32)
28. Snowboard Kids (Ep. 16)
29. Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
30. Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
31. Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)
32. Mickey's Speedway USA (Ep. 37)
33. Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
34. Body Harvest (Ep. 28)
35. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Ep. 33)
36. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)
37. 40 Winks (Ep. 31)
38. Buck Bumble (Ep. 30)
39. Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Ep. 20)
40. Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)
41. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)
42. BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
43. Last Legion UX (Ep. 36)
44. Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
45. Cruis'n Exotica (Ep. 37)
46. San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
47. Iggy's Reckin' Balls (Ep. 35)
48. Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
49. Charlie Blast's Territory (Ep. 36)
50. Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
51. Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Ep. 35)
52. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
53. Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
54. Mahjong Hourouki Classic (Ep. 34)
55. Milo's Astro Lanes (Ep. 23)
56. International Track & Field 2000 (Ep. 28)
57. NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
58. Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
59. Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
60. International Superstar Soccer '98 (Ep. 23)
61. South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
62. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
63. Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
64. Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
65. Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
66. F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
67. F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
68. Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
69. Wheel of Fortune (Ep. 24)
70. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
71. Mario no Photopi (Ep. 20)
72. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
73. Dark Rift (Ep. 25)
74. Mace: The Dark Age (Ep. 27)
75. Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. (Ep. 21)
76. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Ep. 32)
77. 64 Oozumou 2 (Ep. 30)
78. Madden Football 64 (Ep. 26)
79. Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Ep. 22)
80. Heiwa Pachinko World 64 (Ep. 38)

Bless the baby angel that is in charge of producing 3D platformers. Well, it's more the work of small teams of passionate developers around the world, but regardless of the providence that has allowed it I've had another opportunity to partake in running around 3D environments picking up random junk for hours and boy is that just peachy. This particular opportunity was The Spirit and the Mouse by Canadian team Alblune; befitting that country's European roots, the game feels beholden to both the UK and France in its aesthetic choices. (Well, maybe more so France, but the language was in English at least so we limeys will take partial credit.)

In the Spirit and the Mouse you play as an electric mouse whose task it is to help humans become the very best, like no-one ever was happier by listening to their troubles and resolving them, provided it's a request that a mouse carrying some serious voltage is capable of fulfilling. A guy who is missing his favorite TV show after the signal goes down, for example, just needs for you to shock the antenna above the building to bring it back online. Added to this is an extra layer of complication where the electricity spirits that power these generators also need your assistance, and these tasks tend to be little mini-games and fetch quests that might involve gathering information from around the level to answer trivia questions or playing hide and seek. The "small guys in a big world" aspect combined with the emphasis on these little spirits and their unseen lives reminded me quite a bit of the Wii game Elebits, which works for me as it was one of my favorite obscurities for that system. Exploring the everyday from a different perspective, especially when that perspective is very low to the ground, definitely has an appealing quality.

As the Spirit and the Mouse is one of those rare platformers with no jumping, similar to Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker, much of the time you're having to fall from higher up to reach other areas. While it's a known scientific fact that rats can't jump or leave the ground unassisted in any way, it's equally known that they're excellent climbers. As well, given the titular Mouse of this game was filled with the awesome power of raw lightning during the prologue, she can also ride through power cables like the electricity gremlin from Gremlins 2: The New Batch, which is something of a nexus of mine when it comes to apposite pop culture-based analogies. Through these two traversal skills the game makes ample use of verticality in its level design, having you explore the sleepy Parisian-esque town of Sainte-et-Claire on both street level and rooftop level. The rooftops are often where the power boxes that house the aforementioned electricity spirits (called Kibblins) are found, so the first task after listening to a human's problems—or overhearing them, I should say—is usually to make your way up to the nearby Kibblin-Box. It's also a case of the game's relatively small size working for it: the levels, compromising four areas of the town corresponding to the cardinal directions, are never so large that you're likely to get lost while exploring or spend too long sweeping up collectibles while still substantial enough for some clever circuitous design.

The game has three main sets of collectibles, usually seen at the top left of the screen: the happiness of the humans, which is the main story-critical type; energy, which can be gained by shocking metallic objects and earned in bunches after assisting the Kibblins; and lightbulbs, which are spread across town and can be exchanged for maps and a few power-ups from an NPC back in the starting area. The last of these lightbulb power-ups is actually a radar that pings whenever a lightbulb is close by for the sake of those hunting for the full set, which is the type of convenient QoL feature that I always appreciate in collectathons like this—that you still have to find more than half of these collectibles on your own before you can unlock it for purchase is a fine compromise. They don't really serve any further purpose beyond being something there to chase after, but it does have that beneficial side-effect of letting you appreciate the intricacy of the level design when poking around every nook and cranny. Most of the gameplay loop is contained within those Kibblin missions which, while simple enough, are at least varied in their approach: many are puzzle-based, while others might involve a traversal challenge or exercising the player's reflexes. (Thankfully, the game has its own journal tool to track any passwords or information you might glean, but that's really closer to something that should come as standard.)

As with most Indie 3D platformers there's not a whole lot of content to the game (it's about six hours long) but what's there is charming, stress-minimal, and eclectic (and electric) enough in its objectives to leave a positive impression. Visually and audio-wise it's pretty solid too, with some amusing characterization for the mischievous and work-shy Kibblins and a jaunty French accordion jazz number playing in the background that—along with its rodent hero—makes the game feel very Ratatouille in stretches (or, closer to my own interests, like the BGM of Dark Cloud 2's main hub city). Just a cute game about doing regular mouse stuff like turning into electricity and conversing with ghosts, all the while taking in the attractive view from your high-up perch on the rooftops—in fact, it's sort of like that part with the bat gremlin from Gremlins 2: The New Batch after it got covered in cement and froze in place on an eave like a gargoyle.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I'll admit to being all poised to put the Mega Archive on hiatus again—these updates take a lot out of me, especially when it's almost wall-to-wall trash like this episode—but I can't just abandon it in the fourth quarter of 1993 so close to the finish line like this. It will take most of this year to ensure the Mega Archive has covered everything 1993-related but I'm determined to do so regardless. After that, it'll either be another long vacation before covering the system's busiest year of 1994 or a much more truncated format (though I keep threatening the latter and never going through with it). Even so, this is one of the most personally-rewarding features I do (besides, well, covering modern games I actually want to play) so I doubt I'll be able to stay away from futzing around on our increasingly-imperilled wiki for too long.

With that, let's move on to what the Sega CD's new library looked like in September '93. I'll level with you: with the exception of one of the most beloved Sega CD games of all time showing up in this entry, this particular batch might be one of the weakest I've ever seen. Great way to ease us into a new year of MD/SCD recaps, I suppose. Hell, that Part VIII both starts and ends with a barely-interactive FMV disaster is a real ominous portent of the darker times to come. After this, we'll have two regular Mega Archive updates that'll cover October and a bit of November before we return to CD land for a whole bunch of juicy movie tie-in games. Mmm-mmm, can't wait.

For all the Mega Archive recaps and links, be sure to check out The Official Mega Archive Mega Spreadsheet.

Part VIII: CD68-CD76 (September '93 - October '93)

CD68: Power Factory Featuring C+C Music Factory

• Developer: Digital Pictures
• Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1993
• EU Release: September 1993
• Franchise: Make My Video
• Genre: FMV Nonsense
• Theme: The CD-ROM Format Has Been Around for Five Years and We Still Don't Know What We're Doing
• Premise: C+C Music Factory already knows that their music videos need to replace any zaftig female vocalists with svelte lip-syncing models, but beyond that they're utterly lost. Make their video, won't you?
• Availability: Not with all the licenses involved. The Power Factory was decommissioned long ago.
• Preservation: We thought the Make My Video series was done and dusted, but we have one more—that, tellingly, dropped the "Make My Video" brand—for C+C Music Factory, the early house music act. As in, the "everybody dance now" guys. That song, which is actually called I'm Gonna Make You Sweat (too late; I've already seen what I'm covering this month), is featured in this game along with two others: Things That Make You Go Hmmm... and Here We Go Let's Rock & Roll. As before, you just mess around with a bunch of B-roll and ancient public domain footage to string together a passable MV, which is then reviewed through some arcane manner of arbitration. Is it even a game? Sega and Sony would like you to think so.
• Wiki Notes: Some extra text and corrections as well as screenshots and a header image. For the header, I went with the evocative shot of a hammer coming down on a CD: very much the kind of energy I'm looking to bring to this episode.

CD69: The Amazing Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin

• Developer: Sega of America
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: September 1993
• EU Release: November 1993
• Franchise: Spider-Man
• Genre: Platbrawler
• Theme: "My Kusoge Sense is Tingling"
• Premise: Kingpin, who made his fortune through an empire of various business enterprises (legal and otherwise) across New York City, now plans to blow it all up with a nuke and blame Spider-Man for it. It's the evil magnate's best get-rich-quick scheme yet.
• Availability: It's also on the Mega Drive. We covered it in Part XI.
• Preservation: I'm still not 100% sure whether or not I ought to be re-litigating every Mega Drive game that shows up on Sega CD with a fancy new makeover and soundtrack, but it's not a process that was exceptionally common: often, these ports were considered not so much for the sake of "let's put this on everything to make more money" but "how do we make a meaningful change to this game to justify selling it on both this platform and its peripheral?". Mostly those meaningful changes are limited to adding CD audio and possibly some animated clips (this port has both), but it also reworked the levels and added several new ones for a more "Definitive Edition" feel. A snippet from an interview with Dave Foley (presumably not that Dave Foley) featured on SegaRetro suggested that the development team took the opportunity to re-add a bunch of content they left out of the original MD version due to space issues; a limitation that no longer applied to the CD format. It corroborates a metaphor I often return to which posits that game development jumping from cart to CD is like moving to a much bigger place but still having the same amount of furniture and decor: you end up filling that space with all kinds of pointless junk just so it doesn't look quite so cavernous and empty.
• Wiki Notes: Double-dip. All the page needed was the EU MCD release and its box art. However, I just had to put in more screenshots from the opening animation. That beautiful Parker mullet.

CD70: AH-3 Thunderstrike / Thunderhawk

• Developer: Core Design
• Publisher: Victor Entertainment (JP) / JVC Musical Industries (NA) / Core Design (EU)
• JP Release: 1993-09-17 (as Thunderhawk)
• NA Release: November 1993 (as AH-3 Thunderstrike)
• EU Release: October 1993 (as Thunderhawk)
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Flight Sim
• Theme: Does Thunder Strike? I Thought That Was Lightning. Did AC/DC Lie to Me?
• Premise: Fly an attack chopper through multiple missions as you squint to see where all the tiny bad guy sprites are hiding before they fire their surface-to-air missiles. Like Where's Waldo? only with war crimes. (Well, more war crimes depending on the Where's Waldo? book in question.)
• Availability: There's a '96 PC port but I don't think any of the big digital stores preserved it.
• Preservation: Thunderhawk sits in this nice pleasant valley between flight sims that go overboard with the fancy polygonal graphics that slows everything down to a crawl and something like an After Burner where's a purely adrenaline-pumping action game. You still have mission targets to pursue and gauges to side-eye and some tactical awareness to call upon, but it's mostly just blowing shit up really fast before it can blow you up. Maybe like a first-person Desert Strike would be the best way to put it. The game's based on an older Amiga/ST game (the developers Core Design are British, so that tracks) but I wasn't entirely sure if it's a full sequel or a glorified remake. It also got a new title for North America, which suggests there was already a Thunderhawk out there sitting on the name. Roosting, maybe is the more accurate term.
• Wiki Notes: It already had a page separate from its Amiga/ST antecedent so I just shrugged and left it like that. The jump to CD-ROM definitely gave the developers more to work with and it looks completely different, so I doubt I'll get the equivalent of a wiki editor court martial over it. The page needed pretty much everything besides screenshots.

CD71: Warau Salesman

• Developer: Compile
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-09-17
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Warau Salesman
• Genre: Adventure
• Theme: Ironic Comeuppances
• Premise: The Laughing Salesman can grant your heart's desire, but only if you don't mess up and break his rules. Yet everybody does. How vexing. For them.
• Availability: Licensed game. Though apparently the show did come back recently as a Netflix thing.
• Preservation: Here we have another impenetrable adventure game based on an anime license. The license this time is the darkly comic adventures of the titular salesman and his Wishmaster-esque approach to devastating the well-beings of those who become raging assholes once they get a taste of the good life. First created in the '60s by Motoo Abiko, the character saw a rise in popularity in the late '80s and early '90s due to an anime adaptation from which this game's animation and voice clips are sourced. While most Japanese adventure games tend to be dense, text-heavy menu-based affairs, this game uses a simplified UI that was becoming popular in the west around this time too: the cursor changes shape to represent any possible actions that can be performed, like eyes for examining something or a mouth for talking to an NPC. I'm sure you could brute force the game easily enough even if you couldn't understand the language, but that feels like missing the point. Either way, it's another example of the MCD becoming a home for anime licenses due to the increased multimedia potential of the CD-ROM format. I was a little surprised Compile was behind the game; they probably found a quiet moment between Puyos to take advantage of a license they'd been sitting on.
• Wiki Notes: A skeleton, so it needed everything. My thanks to wiki user Aruru-san for getting the ball rolling though.

CD72: Winning Post

• Developer: Koei
• Publisher: Koei
• JP Release: 1993-09-17
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Winning Post
• Genre: Simulation
• Theme: Horsies
• Premise: RAISE some thoroughbred horses to peak fitness. RACE those horses to win big payouts in the G1 circuit. RAZE the horses that disappoint you. (RAY'S the guy you want to talk to about horse murder.)
• Availability: As well as a bunch of contemporary ports, you could also just buy the newest one—Winning Post 10 released last year on nearly everything. You will need to know Japanese though.
• Preservation: Not content with just Cao Caos, Koei looked across the barnyard and centered their gaze on the noble, hard-working steed. Winning Post is a very long-running (because horses; see, they tend to run long distan-) franchise that involves selectively breeding and racing horses to make a small fortune, which then goes back into building a bigger stable with better horses. Drawing on my traumatic memories working on SuFami pages, horseracing games were (are?) shockingly popular in Japan, possibly in part because of their strictly-controlled gambling laws, and there's an even split between those where you're raising the horses and those where just inputting their performance data into an algorithm for betting "advice" (meanwhile, there's barely any where you're actively involved in the racing yourself). This game, which is the first Winning Post as opposed to the one released on Saturn in North America (actually the second, or maybe the 1.5th), debuted on Japanese home computers the PC-98 and the Sharp X68k—the usual domain of Koei—before hitting Super Famicom and Mega-CD within one week of each other. It also appeared on the 3DO, if I ever feel like taking on that mostly-cursed wiki project. The next three Winning Post games all hit Sega platforms, but not the Sega CD or Mega Drive; we're one and done here.
• Wiki Notes: SFC double-dip so just some screenshots.

CD73: Sonic CD / Sonic the Hedgehog CD

• Developer: Sonic Team
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-09-23 (as Sonic the Hedgehog CD)
• NA Release: 1993-11-23 (as Sonic CD)
• EU Release: October 1993 (as Sonic CD)
• Franchise: Sonic the Hedgehog
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Sonic Booom, Sonic Booom, Sonic Booooom
• Premise: Tired of getting chumped as the pushover penultimate boss of Sonic 2, Sonic's metallic doppelganger (doppelclanger?) decides to get serious for this CD-ROM debut for the franchise. (Yes, yes, I know that was Mecha Sonic in Sonic 2 not Metal Sonic. Dang Sonic pedants.)
• Availability: You can't get it separately on Steam like most of the early Sonics, but it is available in compilations like Sonic Origins. It's also on the Sega Genesis Mini 2.
• Preservation: The inevitable Sega CD Sonic game might well be the peripheral's most beloved overall, especially given a lack of stiff competition outside of niche RPGs like Lunar and the even more niche preferences of ironic FMV appreciators, but fans of the Sonic franchise do seem attached to the narrative innovations presented by its time-travel story, a cooler new antagonist in Metal Sonic, and the divisive debut of gaming's most persistent stan Amy Rose. There's a whole bunch of names attached to the development of Sonic CD: in addition to Sonic Team, there's several other Sega internal divisions as well as third-party programming assistance from H.I.C. (that's Human Interface Communications, because I guess calling a company just "Talking" was insufficient) and a credit to Toei Animation for the game's pretty decent animated cutscenes. I guess because Tails isn't in it (outside of cameos), the creators decided this was set between Sonic 1 and 2 thereby giving the franchise its first prequel. Did we need to further complicate the already richly dense chronology of Sonic the Hedgehog? Apparently.
• Wiki Notes: You kidding? This page has had more work done than Mickey Rourke. I've been on the internet long enough to know never to underestimate the dedication of Sonic fans.

CD74: Aoki Ookami to Shiroki Meshika: Genchou Hishi

• Developer: Koei
• Publisher: Koei
• JP Release: 1993-09-24
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Genghis Khan
• Genre: Strategy Sim
• Theme: Genghis Demonstrating His Khan-Do Attitude
• Premise: The Khan still fully intends to conquer the known world no matter which system he gets shunted off to next.
• Availability: It's on Steam, albeit in Japanese only. For anglophones, you'd be best off buying either of the localized Genesis or SNES versions.
• Preservation: The Winning Post MCD port I could understand since it hadn't debuted on Mega Drive yet, but there wasn't much reason to bring Genghis Khan II over as well seeing as it had already appeared on MD just a few months prior. Koei strategy fans don't really come to these games for the type of flashy presentations a CD port can offer, after all; it only serves to distract from all those delicious numbers and menus. Anyway, I think Koei themselves were conscious of this pointless doubling up because they didn't even bother to localize this even though they'd gone through the trouble to do so before with the aforementioned Mega Drive port. Any further details about the game itself can be gleaned from when I last covered it back in MA Part XXXI.
• Wiki Notes: Screenshots. The JP MCD release erroneously used the English title, which is a mistake I make too often myself.

CD75: Joe Montana's NFL Football

• Developer: Malibu Interactive
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: October 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Joe Montana Football
• Genre: Football
• Theme: Football
• Premise: Football
• Availability: Licenses and endorsements might make a modern rerelease difficult, on top of pointless. I think Sega's done faking any interest in football.
• Preservation: Less an iterative sequel in Sega's homegrown Joe Montana Football series, more a spin-off that could ably utilize the CD-ROM format for some FMV shenanigans. The prior 49ers QB shows up in scratchy video form to dispense advice much like the various licensed game sportspeoples before him, and the game uses the CD capacity to its fullest with a 38 team roster (including ten historical teams) and some sprite-scaling visual trickery. Park Place Productions and BlueSky Software were Sega's usual go-tos for their Joe Montana games—both companies were frequently employed by EA Sports also—but the former were developing a different NFL Sega CD game (see below) while the latter were already hard at work on the next MD game, NFL Football '94 Starring Joe Montana, which released the following month. Instead, we have the return of Malibu Interactive whom we last saw with the enhanced Sega CD port of Batman Returns [MACD Part VI]. Given the positive reception, Sega probably figured Malibu could be trusted with throwing FMV pigskins around. After all, seeing how it was vitally important for Sega to put out three friggin' NFL games in one friggin' season, it must have been a case of any port-developer in a storm.
• Wiki Notes: Screenshots and text. At least someone was kind enough to list all the featured historical teams. Great example of having some obscure bit of trivia burning a hole in your pocket that you need to put on the wiki somewhere.

CD76: NFL's Greatest: San Francisco vs. Dallas 1978-1993

• Developer: Park Place Productions
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: October 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Football
• Theme: Football
• Premise: Football
• Availability: Maybe a little too outdated now. Besides, 2008 would've been the ideal time for a reboot.
• Preservation: If Joe Montana's NFL Football was an earnest effort at making a CD-enhanced football game, NFL's Greatest is definitely a "let's fuck around and find out" experiment that's more in line with how we perceive the Sega CD today. It's all grody FMV clips bolted together by a mostly hands-off management gameplay loop where the player can call plays, substitutions, and the coin toss and that's about it. After making a decision, another FMV clip shows up to tell you how well your decision has fared. There's only two teams in the game—the eponymous ones, if that wasn't clear—but the clips come from 15 years of televized bouts between the two in order to cover a wide variety of possible plays. The amount of bouncing back and forth through time kind of makes NFL's Greatest like the world's first fourth-dimensional football game; very innovative stuff. Maybe it was pretty smart in retrospect that Sega had a real SCD football game release the same month just in case this dumb idea blew up in their faces (which, from what I can tell from scathing contemporary reviews, it sort of did).
• Wiki Notes: Skeleton, so it needed everything except release info. The original deck message was so enthusiastic (in a passive-aggressive way) I was loath to remove it, so I've kept it as is. What is this hidden video of which it speaks? Is it like a THPS "secret tape" bloopers reel of players getting debilitating concussions?

Now that I've made good on a longstanding obligation to a fellow GB blogger with last week's Tower of Time, it's business as usual for the Indie Game of the Week. That is, I'm reviewing another explormer. Quelle surprise. Well, I say "explormer": it has maps and traversal abilities, but it's light on collectibles and very linear so I'm not sure it necessarily counts. Either way, I just picked up a double-jump so I figure it's close enough to pass the smell test. Itorah is the explormer in question, the debut game from German studio Grimbart Tales, and has a sort of Mesoamerican theme (making that two Latin American explormer playthroughs in close proximity, after Guacamelee! 2 back in November) as the world's remaining human being finds a magical talking axe and joins up with a scientifically-curious furry (in the sense that she's driven by scientific curiosity, not that furries themselves are a scientific curiosity, though they kinda are) to explore ruins and learn more about the "plague" that exterminated the rest of our bush league species.

First impressions of Itorah are positive largely due to its gorgeous art and animation work. In that respect it's similar to Lab Zero's Indivisible, with its central character sporting an impressive number of animations for running, jumping, using healing magic, idling, and reacting to things during cutscenes. She doesn't talk, letting her sapient axe Koda do most of the communicating (in more ways than one), but the expressive character animations do a fine task of substituting for any verbal indication of her current temperament or status. Most of the exposition is delivered by your new fuzzy friend Ahui and her brother, who leads her village, as they discuss the next destination for the heroes as they stay one step ahead of the creepy plague monsters. This naturally has you returning to said village frequently, pretty much the only recurring destination given the lack of backtracking, which is where you can also spend some finite resources to either upgrade your healing (which, like Souls, is limited but replenished for free after stopping at a checkpoint campfire; something that's becoming the norm in explormers rather than the exception) or increase your health and stamina gauges, the latter used up whenever you hold down the run button and quickly regenerates once the button is released.

The issues arrive when you're left to your own devices to make your way to the next destination flag. The first is that the game is hopelessly linear: there's very few alternative paths and little to earn for finding them besides cash and items for upgrades, and most of the time you're just following the icon on the map rather than exploring off in random directions and procrastinating. That's often the case for other explormers too, but this game seems far less interested in an open world and more towards a railroaded experience. Not a bad thing at all, as most regular platformers are certainly of that mindset, but a little deceptive given all the other explormer accoutrements that the game presents like the map and traversal upgrades. The second issue is the jumping controls; there's a certain level of commitment to jumps that makes it hard to adjust with air control. It's not quite as bad as, say, Ghouls N' Ghosts where you're pretty much consigned to whatever horrible death lies in the direction you just unwisely double-hopped towards but it can feel oddly restrictive at times, especially if you do a smaller hop and barely cover any distance.

The third issue is the combat, which... well, when the platforming and the combat both feel a bit off, it's not generally a good sign given how little else tends to make up the DNA of an explormer. In this case, the combat has animations as flashy as anything else but includes some odd hitbox collision. It's also kinda dull, as you fight the same enemies over and over (I'm particularly tired of swatting little flying bug guys everywhere I go) with the same three-hit combo and an upwards stab to the point where I now mostly avoid fighting enemies if I can help it. They provide so little currency compared to the chests that they're scarcely worth the trouble. Add to that a very generous amount of health that, with the healing opportunities added on top, makes the platforming something you can sleepwalk. The moderately tough boss fights still require a bit more cautious attention, and there's been at least a couple of challenging "chases" where I've had to quickly platform my way through a gauntlet while something big and nasty is close on my tail, but other than that it's been kind of a breeze.

I don't dislike Itorah. It's very attractive and the stretches of low-effort gameplay can be mildly relaxing, which I guess is a nice way to critique that. I don't get the usual thrill from traversal upgrades I usually do from this genre: they only appear the moment they're needed, and any prior cases where you walked past a barred passage that could've used a specific upgrade are invariably routes to future destinations rather than prizes to backtrack for. Still, though, it's nice to have upgrades like a double-jump and a wall jump just for the promise of more elaborate platforming sequences in the future. Even if the combat's dull I can just skip past it if I like, saving my energy for the boss encounters, and the jumping around is adequate enough despite my poor attempts to describe why "the feel" is just a tad amiss (something that's as hard to expatiate as it is to program in the first place, I know from experience). I've mentally catalogued the game in the same filing cabinet drawer as Owlboy: another game with impressive graphical chops and some mildly intriguing worldbuilding, but let down by its only so-so gameplay loop. I'll come back with some post-game analysis later if anything changes.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: Nothing much changed. It did get a little more challenging though. I even died once, against the final boss.

Welcome to OoT OoT—which is to say, Over the Top Ocarina of Time, in case you thought I suddenly turned into Pingu—which involves another look at the severely cursed randomizer tools for that one N64 Zelda game lots of people like, rather than the one lots of people are weirded out by. I actually took on a rather tough configuration a few years back in this LP blog, where I opted for both Keysanity (randomizes all keys for all dungeons) and Tokensanity (adds the gold skulltula tokens to the item pool and makes it so skulltulas can drop vital items), and afterwards swore I'd never make one of my all-timers this painful to play ever again.

Well. Ocarina of Time makes fools of us all, as the saying goes.

Pottering around the OoTRandomizer website for all the new options that have been added since I last checked it out in 2020, I was surprised by just how much more malevolent the developers have become; presumably, the streamer/speedrunner types who can play through these randomized Zeldas in their sleep were asking for ever more devious variables with which to challenge themselves. I thought I'd give it another shot and highlight some more of the things you can randomize—the seed I've since generated is truly one of the most dire imaginable. There won't be a whole lot of new ground to cover since the last time I LPed one of these, and people are (or should be) familiar enough with the vanilla experience already, so I'm just going to cover the new toggles and do a play-by-play of maybe the first few hours or so. (I very much doubt I'll have the cajones to actually complete this run. Well, unless someone offers me money. Or double dog dares me, such is the fragility of my masculinity.)

Prepare to be amazed and/or horrified at how much more ridiculously punitive a randomized OoT can be.

(N.B.: I'll be breaking up the usual wall of screenshots with a "what have you transformed here observation" side-bar, or "WHY THO" for short. In these, I'll be explaining in detail some ominous new change I've made via the randomizer, rather than delineate them all beforehand. It'll be more fun this way? Question mark?)

Give a Hoot, Read This OoT OoT

WHY THO #1: Starting location. This is some dude's house, but it's where I'll always start as young Link if I ever reset the game. Naturally, this can mess with the pathing something fierce; it also means that, even if I begin the game with a certain other vanilla setting still enabled—that is, the one where Mido refuses to let you see the Great Deku Tree and continue the game without the starting sword and shield—those items could still be anywhere because I'm no longer confined to Kokiri Forest.

WHY THO #2: I also fucked with the color palettes, but only sparingly. I'm not wearing a Zora tunic; that navy blue is what the game registers as green now, at least as far as my sartorial choices are concerned. That also goes for the hearts, which have taken on an incidentally cool metallic sheen.

WHY THO #3: Yep, in addition to the starting location being randomized, so has every internal and external exit in the game. And I do mean all of them. However, there are certain limitations in play here: dungeon entrances can only ever go to other dungeons, for example, and likewise doors to houses and holes in the ground will always go to other internal locations. Not only can this get hideously confusing for your sense of direction after a while, but there are many places where you'll be stuck because the exit you just appeared at is one way (like, say, the gate leading to Death Mountain if you haven't given the guard Zelda's invitation). If that happens, you gotta reset with the save warp. This is a pretty well known randomizer function, but one I was reluctant to use before: fortunately, the internet has some decent OoT Entrance Trackers.

WHY THO #4: Now we start getting into truly psychotic territory. This toggle randomizes all the Silver Rupees you need to collect to finish certain puzzle rooms. You might recall one from the Shadow Temple where there's a big spinning reaper scythe in the middle of the area. All five of the Silver Rupees in each of these rooms have been replaced with other items, and said rupees are part of the universal item pool. I'll need to figure out where they all are before I can move beyond the room in question. Incidentally, there's fourteen of these rooms in the game, meaning there's 70 of these Silver Rupees out there in the item pool. I've found quite a few so far.

WHY THO #5: See those golden pots? I randomized every pot's contents too. There's an optional setting where, if you've broken one of these pots that might potentially have a vital item, it'll go back to its usual brown color the next time it spawns. Of course, you can eschew this visual QoL feature and just run wild and free like the founding fathers intended.

WHY THO #6: I randomized the crates too. Only some of them, mind: the ones that would normally drop items. They can have the same optional visual glow-up the unchecked pots do.

WHY THO #7: You better believe Keysanity is still active. No half-assing on this occasion.

WHY THO #8: The song locations are part of the universal item pool too, rather than just randomizing the locations where'd you normally get a different song (like learning Saria's Song from Impa instead). They each have these neat transparent clef items attached to them. Of course, I won't be able to play anything yet for a couple reasons I'll get into.

WHY THO #9: All shop contents are randomized, though I've set all the prices to 10 rupees. I know, I went bush league with some of these options. Still, though, what an amazing deal this is.

WHY THO #10: So, the game has these things called "freestanding items", which are usually just hearts and rupees sitting out in the open rather than being in chests or in pots or some such. I randomized all of them too. That includes freestanding items hidden in patches of tall grass, like above. How do I know if I've already checked them? That's what Google Spreadsheets are for, my friend. (Well, it's either that or for administrative office work and data management, but one's clearly more important than the others.)

WHY THO #11: I know you didn't think for a second that I turned Tokensanity off, but here we are to confirm things are still busted regardless. 100 of these little skeletal beauties gumming up the works.

WHY THO #12: Those annoying business scrubs? Better believe I randomized all their shop contents too. Best part is that they never tell you what they're selling. Caveat emptor, everyone.

WHY THO #13: You can't really see in the above screenshot, but those two beehives are wiggling slightly. That's because I randomized their contents as well, which probably means there's more than a few chests with a whole bunch of confused and angry bees inside. The hives stop wiggling if you've checked them already: another very necessary QoL toggle.

WHY THO #14: You know how many loose cows are in Hyrule? Lots. And you know what happens if you play Epona's Song around them? They get all happy and give you some free Lon Lon Milk, provided you have an empty bottle for it. Not anymore though. I randomized what they give you once they hear their favorite song. That also means I have to track where they all are for the sake of a future point in the run when I can play them the song in question, including the bovines stuck in a random hole in the ground like this one.

WHY THO #15: This is what I call the piéce-de-résistance. You can actually take the individual button presses for the ocarina songs and add them to the item pool too. This is the C-Up button, if it wasn't clear. It's all moot right now anyway, since I don't have an ocarina, but my musical options would be pretty limited without all five note buttons even if I did have one.

Anyway, that's just a taste of how badly you can screw up one of these Zelda randomizer runs. I didn't find the option for randomizing the tufts of grass you can mow down but I know that's out there too. If you really wanted to get nasty, you can randomize the notes in every song producing absolute cacophonies or randomize how much damage each enemy can do to you (and presumably you to them). You can even combine the two N64 Zeldas into one game and randomize all their items and entrances together to produce an enormous mess not even the four giants could sort out. If I remembered a damn thing about Majora's Mask I almost would've been tempted enough to try it.

Playing this nightmare was certainly fun for a few hours but I've made almost zero progress besides finding a handful of items like bombs and the hookshot. The only dungeon entrances I can access right now take me to the Water Temple and the Master Quest version of Jabu-Jabu's Belly, the latter of which needs the slingshot to get out of the first room. I haven't even found a sword yet. I'm going to leave this run abandoned like it was some 1,500 piece jigsaw puzzle strewn across a portable poker table that I vastly overestimated my patience for solving. Good thing we're still in early January, where it's entirely permissible to give up on any and all lofty goals you may have set yourself.

In conclusion: I'm sorry, Zelda. I'm sorry I messed up your game real bad. (Not that sorry though.)

...Just incidentally speaking, though, have we nailed down what @danryckert 's postponed Blight Club game punishment will be once his broken fingy is all healed? No particular reason for asking.

(P.S. I realize OtT is the abbreviation for over the top, not OoT, but I just wanted to keep saying OoT OoT. Artistic license.)

One week into January is a good time for contrition I've found, since most of us have already broken any and all New Year's Resolutions we'd optimistically set ourselves. In my case, having long since abandoned any pretensions towards self-improvement, this sheepishness is instead aimed squarely at a fellow Bomblogger: one Mr. @arbitrarywater. See, the stand-up duder in question gifted me this entry's Indie Game of the Week as a fellow CRPG nut curious to read my reactions; however, I've actually forgotten how long ago it was since this game showed up in my Steam library on that generously fateful (fatefully generous?) day. In my defense, it wasn't until I bought a stronger PC that I could finally run it without issues. That is, the PC I bought last December. Uhhhhh well, I'm playing it now, and as we say here in the titular chronological fortress "better late than never", a statement heard only slightly less frequently than "stop sitting on your ass and protect my mages already, you stupid tank".

Tower of Time is a tactical real-time RPG with... well, not so much turn-based but "slowed down enough to let you collect your thoughts"-based (though fully halting the action is available as an alternative). You control a party of four champions loyal to you, the big important unnamed protagonist who ominously introduces himself as "The Destroyer" during the in media res introduction, as you send them down through an inverted tower reaching deep into the earth to their probable grisly deaths. Due to some poorly-maintained arcane energies and a whole lot of incidental bad shit going down besides, the tower is full of monsters and traps but also purports to hold the salvation for the surface world through ancient technology and thinking lost to the current surface world, presently undergoing a very slow apocalypse for reasons lost to history. Point being, this tower seems pretty important and everyone's pushing past its many obstacles to find a path to a brighter future at its base (or its top, depending on your perspective).

Units in battle automatically attack anything in range, with an optional toggle to have them march towards the nearest enemy to fight or stand their ground (the latter preferable for squishy ranged types) but the player is in charge of everything else, including skill usage and positioning. Enemies spawn in from multiple directions, requiring your best crowd control and situational awareness as you chip away at the encroaching hordes while keeping your team alive and (ideally) buffed to the nines. Roles naturally fall under the usual archetypes—tanks at the front line to soak up damage, support for heals and buffs, DPS to take down foes tout de suite before they overwhelm you—and the game provides a set of pre-determined characters (with newcomers doled out at about a rate of one per floor) with similarly pre-determined skillsets that you have some minor customization over, in particular regards to the skills you choose to upgrade and the alternative upgrade paths you might follow. An example might be an AoE attack where you can either upgrade its splash range or its damage, your preference being contingent on how you're using it (either demolishing larger groups of weaker mobs or taking down bosses/spawners and their adds quickly, respectively).

The situational awareness factor takes a much more critical role in this game than other RPGs of its type, as you're frequently required to move units out of the way of incoming enemy AoEs or having to quickly account for a bunch of mooks that spawned in behind your archer and mage while your tanks were out in front. Hitting the space bar to slow down the action gives you time to react to these new developments, as well as toss off multiple skills on the trot. These skills are limited by both cooldowns and a finite mana gauge, though the regeneration for the latter can be improved with the right enhancements on your gear (and probably should for mages). You're also only able to equip four skills per character, out of the eight they eventually acquire through levelling up, further adding to the player-directed specialization aspect. To account for the somewhat small number of character customization options, the game has multiple battle scenario "types" that it'll throw at you including demolishing monster spawners, either destroying or avoiding enemy orb turrets, protecting your own orbs (something I already do habitually thanks to some painful lessons learned during dodgeball in gym class), or rescue a fellow comrade from a sturdy cage before the enemies arrive to ensure I have my full fighting force ready to go. Many battles will also add bonus conditions, making things easier or harder for you or the enemies by way of slowdown, lower elemental resistances, or extra health regen. Where it might falter in giving you a wide spread of tactical options (there's little reason to change things up unless you recently acquired new skills or an enemy proves highly resistant to your favorite element) it makes up for it with these varied battle scenarios.

Notably, the game eschews an XP system: your characters are already as skilled as the world's strongest according to the in-game explanation, so the only way to improve is to study whatever ancient fighting techniques and magicks you can gather from this tower and pay for training. This means that both equipment and money are tantamount to succeeding in battle, at least in preparatory terms. As such, I've been exploring floors until I see a battle on the horizon—no battles are random, and enemies will simply stand in the road until you're ready to face them with the exception of a few sudden ambushes—and then walk the opposite direction for a while. After all available looting opportunities are exhausted, I can peruse my inventory to make sure I have the best gear equipped and maybe hit the trainers back in town to be fully primed for whatever the next fracas has waiting for me. Best of all, the game is very forthcoming with information about the current floor: the number of battles, treasure chests, secret areas, side-quests, and other notables are all made apparent to you as soon as you enter, ensuring that you don't miss anything before you find the exit and are prepared to move on. There's also intra-dungeon fast travel for quickly getting back to splits in the path you left behind, and moving back and forth from the hub town is mostly instantaneous: the game has been very accommodating so far, saving all its challenging moments for the battles themselves.

There's plenty I really like about this game, and only a mild layer of jank that's worthy of kvetching about. The combat recalls a little game from Cyanide I played a while back called Aarklash: Legacy (hard to miss it, since it always sits at the top of my alphabetical Steam library) that had a similar "what if Infinity Engine games did way more with the repositioning aspect of its real-time combat?" epiphany, and none of the battles so far have been either too difficult or too easy (that's on Normal difficulty, mind). The dungeon exploration half hasn't been slept on due to the combat focus either: each floor has its own distinct personality, its own role back when the tower was newly built that in some way has influenced the state it's in now (very Ultima Underworld), and its own bonus areas and unique challenges to find and overcome. There's a ton of flavor text—and some inescapable typos, given this is an ESL game—so it regularly feels like a tabletop RPG experience, even without the guy spilling soda on my character sheets ("Hey, you said you liked 'flavor text'!" Yeah, thanks Gerry). It even does the Divinity: Original Sin thing of having your teammates bicker over certain dilemmas until you step in with some problematic mind manipulation to settle their disputes (you can leave it to chance too, if tinkering with your friends' brains is somehow not to your liking). I keep entering each new floor excited to discover what's next, and how my battle strategy might change with each new level up or character introduced to the mix. If you're a fan of color-coded loot (and by golly I am) this game has a bunch of it, even if you run into the usual procgen issues of, for example, finding way too much mage equipment that boosts your melee strength—thankfully, you have the means to make your own gear if the stuff you find isn't to your liking. Not for the first time, I find myself thanking ArbitraryWater for his recommendations and contributions to a backlog that's proving to be every bit as bottomless as this tower. Still, I have a whole new year to spend delving ever deeper into it so I can't say I'm not content right now.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-playthrough update: The rest of the game was more or less the same, though it did feel like it was running out of steam towards the end (or maybe that was just me). After undead, orcs, and elemental constructs it kinda got stuck on golems for a while. There was an interesting twist (and one germane to the name) where you met the extradimensional orcs again near the end but they were way more advanced; turns out their world portal was several hundred years ahead of the previous, and they'd been chased through on this occasion by a bunch of genocidal human purists (who, charmingly, had leaders named for American colonists like Hernan Cortes). The ending was... well, it was something. What's odd is just prior they set up a sequel hook involving a minor antagonist, but I'm not sure how they're going to resolve it given everyone in your party died. Definitely a memorable game with more than a little bit of jank, but some novel ideas and an appealing enough tactical real-time combat system. (Once I discovered the auto-cast function and given everyone mana-regen-boosting gear, the battles got considerably easier.)

I sadly didn't get around to enough 2023 games for a comprehensive (and objectively 100% correct) ranking of the year's greatest so instead I've prepared a selection of miscellaneous "Best Of" categories and other rundowns for you to peruse at your leisure over the holiday break.

This certainly wasn't motivated by any sort of ugly jealousy spawned by everyone else's writing getting more attention. Wait, did I say the quiet part loud again?

Games of a Year

Welcome to Games of a Year, a list that highlights games of a year—which is to say any year, not necessarily this year—that I enjoyed the most in 2023. Pulled from my "List of Games Beaten", I've selected both a favorite and a runner-up for each month. I do plan on playing more 2023 games eventually but I'm in no rush, hi-fi or otherwise. Let them drop in price and get all their patches (looking at you, Starfield) and free DLC first; I've plenty to be getting on with in the meantime.

January: Vampire Survivors (2022)

While huddled around a fragile candlestick one dark and dreary night Dracula's minions wondered aloud why they didn't all attack the interloping Belmonts at the same time, and so Vampire Survivors was born. A twin-stick (twin-stake?) shooter that only uses the one in truth, Vampire Survivors not only created a compelling run-based gameplay loop right out of the gate but continued to embellish it with regular mostly-free content updates just in the off-chance we were about to get burned out on getting merked by chromatic psychopomps after our permitted half-hour of mass slaughter. It's a game with far more nuance and depth than it first lets on but never stops being crowd-pleasing (and crowd-avoiding) fun.

Runner-up: Psychonauts 2 (2021). Helps to be in the right headspace for a game like this.

February: Chained Echoes (2022)

Sea of Stars looks to be the big mainstream-breaching throwback RPG of 2023, but Chained Echoes helped set the stage with its equally adept balancing act of taking what we loved about those older games and marrying it to the modern conveniences and deeper waters we've come to expect from our contemporary RPGs. The worldbuilding has more than a few surprises, the cast all have their distinct personalities and combat roles alike, the mech suits let you pretend you're playing Xenosaga if you're the kind of sicko who's into that, and the Reward Board gives you plenty of extracurricular activities to tackle if you ever need a break from the main progression. Just a really solid and quite substantial game for its weight class.

Runner-up: Eastward (2021). Great work slipping an English language Mother 3 past Nintendo without them noticing.

March: F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch (2021)

There's nothing particularly inventive or revolutionary about F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch but I found myself frequently floored by the amount of earnest, gritty yarn-spinning and presentational chops that went into the game, creating a well-realized steampunk universe of talking animals with thousand-yard stares and difficult personal histories. It's also a highly competent explormer that reminded me frequently of Shadow Complex between its gun-toting foes, mature narrative, and "2.5D" format, and was one of the strongest of its genre that I played this year (and I played many, as I'm known to do). Plus, electric whips. Why can't more games let me have an electric whip? C'mon. I'm responsible enough.

Runner-up: Sunset Overdrive (2014). They really didn't need to make any more open-world city games after this.

April: Lost Judgment (2021)

My annual RGG Studio RPG playthrough saw me once again occupy Takayuki Yagami's stylish loafers as the former yakuza orphan turned public defender turned streetwise private eye took on a case that tapped into the long-term, widespread psychological harm caused by both bullying and suicide: two horrifying scenarios that are sadly all too quotidian. Mostly, though, it's an excuse to ride a skateboard, build robots, hang out at flirty dive bars, scare the crap out of people with the new Snake martial arts style, take someone else's pet dog out to hunt for treasure, and just generally go around giving highschoolers a hard time because you're an adult and they can't do shit to you. Sure, there's a main plot, but that's sort of missing the point of these games.

Runner-up: Metroid Dread (2021). As suspenseful as Breaking Bad, and has almost as many E.M.M.I.s.

May: Severed Steel (2021)

As Mirror's Edge taught us, there's no FPS that can't be improved with parkour and this game takes that axiom to its absolute zenith with its high-paced gunplay and vertiginous platforming as you shred your way through dozens of foes with the most stylish leaps, wall-runs, slides, and flips, all of which are encouraged through concrete gameplay advantages in addition to the mostly incidental "cool factor". I'm also a mark for any game that lets you defeat enemies by kicking open a door real hard. As a zealous votary at the Church of Vanquish—a Vanquishitor, if you like—Severed Steel is the sort of disciple I wish would've appeared more frequently in its wake.

Runner-up: Rising Dusk (2018). Methadone for collectathon addicts.

June: Mortal Shell (2020)

This year produced some apparently stellar Soulslikes, with Lies of P and Remnant II leading the pack, but stuck playing catch-up as I am my pick for best merciless action-RPG was Mortal Shell, which like many Indie games does its best to drill down to the fundamentals of what FromSoft's series is all about in lieu of something much closer to their vast content and scope, often beyond an Indie studio's budget. Mortal Shell in particular eschewed much of the character-building the Souls games are known for in order to give players a group of titular shells, class archetypes in so many words, that offered a small amount of skill customization. Everything else, from the memorable bosses to the ever-present foreboding sense of danger, was remarkably well replicated with a fraction of the cost.

Runner-up: Unsighted (2021). No Zelda game has ever had the balls to make you Sophie's Choice the residents of Kakariko Village.

July: Tales of Arise (2021)

I was happily surprised by how much attention Tales of Arise got from this site and elsewhere, which sees the Tales franchise find a new peak—at least mechanically—as it tweaks its ever-versatile LMB System to include more in the way of evasive maneuvers to add a bit more dynamism to the combat and expand the utility of glass cannon melee types like Law. Much of the game operates like Tales has always done: there's some business with two worlds competing with each other, characters tend to be serious during cutscenes but less so during optional "skits" that offer both comedic asides and incidental lore and personal backstories, and there's a fair few character development features including Graces F's title-based progression (that is, accessing new passive skills to learn by hitting milestones and other achievements) and the usual system of arranging your combat arte bindings to find serviceable combos. This was my twelfth Tales game and for as similar as they all can be I'm still motivated to check out the rest someday.

Runner-up: Sable (2021). Like the prologue of A New Hope just with fewer crispy skeletons.

August: The Great Ace Attorney (2021)

I'm not sure if there's a term for it—jingomasochism, maybe?—but I can't get enough of games made by foreigners that constantly dump on the British. The period pieces that are The Great Ace Attorney games see Phoenix Wright's Meiji era ancestor Ryunosuke travel to London to learn how to become an effective defense attorney, inspired by his (way more confident) friend Kazuma, and while there must countenance the true horror of a jury system staffed by the dimmest and most mercurial denizens our fair capital has to offer. The highlight of these games though, at least comedically speaking, are when you're forced to correct Herlock Sholmes's mad guessworks of deductions; the game keeps it close to the chest whether Sholmes is an actual dummy or just does all this to mess with the strait-laced protagonist. Either way, it's a fun dynamic in a game that clearly didn't lose any of the franchise's surreal silliness after travelling back in time a hundred years. (The sequel's just as good if a bit more climactic; I completed it soon after since they came as a pair in their localized forms.)

Runner-up: Kaze and the Wild Masks (2021). Donkey Kong platformers really put me through the wringer this year, even when they weren't actually Donkey Kong.

September: Splasher (2017)

We're now six years removed (soon to be seven) from the annum in question but that I'm still finding Top Twenty GOTY candidates for 2017, the Busiest (Increasingly Less) Recent Year for Games, really emphasizes just how special it was. Splasher's an absolutely wonderful platformer in the Super Meat Boy mold where the controls are every bit as fluid as the viscous ammo that spurts from its titular goop-shooter (I could've made this sentence less gross, but opted not to). However, while it is certainly exacting, it never goes full masocore like its inspiration and I found its difficulty curve palatable from beginning to end. That the same devs then went on to create Tinykin, another recent platforming favorite, was no surprise in retrospect. I'm just glad if flabbergasted that I can upturn and shake the cookie jar that was 2017 and still have the occasional delicious crumb like this pop out.

Runner-up: The Room 4: Old Sins (2021). It's said the oldest sin of all is betrayal. I fed up with this world.

October: Dark Souls (with randomizer hacks) (2011)

I would argue that you've never truly played Dark Souls unless you've had the good fortune of having half the end-game bosses swapped out for Kalameet and Artorias while having to feverishly check every nook and cranny in every optional (and DLC) area for the critically important Lordvessel and Lord Souls before you're allowed to finish the game. Such was playing Dark Souls with two randomizer hacks activated—one for enemies, one for items—and certainly among the most memorable experiences I've ever had with that franchise. I also had the opportunity to discover just how broken mage builds are in those games, giving me plenty of food for thought for when the next Elden Ring arrives.

Runner-up: Hell Pie (2022). Get your fill of demonic baked goods or, if you will, a Hornish Pasty.

November: Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (2021)

The best CRPGs are where you start off losing every other fight with big centipedes and end it stomping demigods by performing eight critical hits a round. The power fantasy experience is very real in Wrath of the Righteous thanks in large part to its OP Mythic Class progression, as well as an expansive amount of content as you take on a country occupied by endless demon forces with either your military (protip: hire lots of archers) or a small adventuring crew. In the midst of all the min-maxing and munchkin malarkey I discovered a decent core of a "chosen one" trope-subverting narrative (in some way reminiscent of KOTOR II's, even), some relatable stalwart companions each with their own messes to clean up, and such a thorough exploration of the Pathfinder world and ruleset that I couldn't have found a better introduction to Not-Dungeons-and-Dragons if I tried. Now, ask me anything about my rapier dual-wielding finesse-build Slayer!Deliverer MC with all her Angelic buffs and Ranger feats.

Runner-up: Umineko When They Cry: Question Arcs (2016). What's going on? Who cares! Internet debate me, Ushiromiya Battleeeeeer!

December: Pikmin 4 (2023)

I don't even have to write anything more about Pikmin 4: my half-sane musings managed to make it into an official Giant Bomb front page article (with contributions from many other fellow mods). I like Pikmin. I love Oatchi. I don't like tower defense or stressful time trials, but those weren't enough to spoil the fun. I'm just so pleased Nintendo went back to Pikmin 2 for inspiration, vindicating my long-held belief that it's the best one by a mile. They even brought my spooky buddy the Waterwraith back. Just wonderful. My tentative 2023 Game of the Year if anyone asks, though we'll see if it stays as such this time again next year.

Runner-up: The Forgotten City (2021). Like Groundhog Day, only more Pax Romana than Paxatawney.

Animento

Just a ranking of the 15(ish) best(ish) anime I watched this year. I sure did watch a lot. The medium collectively occupied the "something to stick on while I eat" role for most of the meals I had this year. (I won't be ranking those meals too, incidentally, since most of them were sandwiches and pasta dishes. Just a whole lot of carbs; probably won't regret that in fifteen years...)

The Eminence in Shadow (Seasons 1 and 2)

You've possibly seen or heard of enough isekai shows where the protagonist becomes some untouchable godlike entity through his OP cheat skills, but what if that protagonist was also an oblivious dipshit who badly wanted to be Shadow the Hedgehog? You'd get one of the funniest (yet somehow still badass as hell) isekai parodies around. I... Am... suggesting you give this show a shot, at least up to episode 5. (Best character: Delta.)

Isekai Ojisan (Season 1)

And here we have another isekai parody, only this time with a middle-aged guy who loves the Sega Saturn showing his nephew and his nephew's girlfriend-in-all-but-name his adventures in another world through a magical memory viewscreen. Dude's so much a boomer that he predates tsundere culture so he has no idea that all the annoying women who keep insulting him are actually being affectionate (he keeps finding ways to ditch them instead) and he approaches every problem in the least smooth way imaginable. It's a lot more amusing than I make it sound. (I also appreciated the synergy between it and my Sega-themed Mega Archive blog feature too.) (Best character: Mabel.)

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (Season 1)

Still ongoing, but this fantasy anime explores the sort of emotional detachment an elf would necessarily have towards her shorter-lived human and dwarf party companions. Seeking answers on what her old party actually meant to her, and she to them, she embarks on another long quest with the protégés of her elderly and/or deceased friends. I really love the pace and quiet emotional intelligence of this series; it has the unhurried vibe of a Ghibli movie, and is as beautiful to boot. (Best character: Frieren.)

Spy x Family (Season 2)

James Bond, Killing Eve, and Stephen King's Carrie create a fake family for the sake of being inconspicuous and it's still the most wholesome thing ever, somehow. I adore the show's style too, adapting a metropolitan 1950s flair with the occasional anachronism along with some of the best intro animations since Cowboy Bebop. The second season is as delightful as the first, with the highlight being a protracted arc on a cruise ship that shows off just how stupidly strong and resourceful Yor Forger can be when she's cornered. (Best character: The dog. BORF!)

Bocchi the Rock! (Season 1)

Introverted guitar prodigy gets talked into joining an all-girl rock band, social challenges ensue. I respect this show for being a very accurate portrayal of someone so socially awkward that it's almost worth putting them into a zoo and studying them for science. Bocchi the Rock! depicts these overthinking freak-outs with some really imaginative animation work, so even while it's just a show about a fledgling highschool band it still manages to be visually distinct and wild. Naturally, it's also strong on its audio component too. (Best character: PA-san. Hope we get more of this mysterious unnamed goth cutie next season.)

Helck (Season 1)

A hulking yet cheerful He-Man-looking dude shows up at the demon capital and participates in a contest to be their new leader. His reason? "I wanna kill all the humans." This show is a rollercoaster of tonal shifts but I got swept up with both its emotional, dramatic moments as well as those times when it remembered it was a comedy. I could really use a second season to see how it all ends. Also, all the demon characters are precious and I want to hang out with them. (Best character: Hyura.)

Birdie Wing: Golf Girls' Story (Season 2)

The gayest ladies in professional sports are back for a second (and probably final) season of this raucous golfing dramedy where everyone has special golf attacks that can knock down trees and split the atom and shit. This season's biggest dramatic hurdle is the possibility that the heroines are actually half-sisters and can't be in lesbians with each other any more. It's all ludicrous superpowered soap opera nonsense, but the kind that makes certain sports anime sing. And I don't even like golf. (Best character: Vipere, the villainess that uses sexy snake pheromones or something to throw opponents off their game. She now has a yacht and a himbo and has mellowed out considerably.)

Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games Is Tough for Mobs (Season 1)

In most isekai where the guy reincarnates in his favorite video game, he's stoked. In this, the hero was hoodwinked into 100%-ing a kusoge otome dating game (the ones where all the love interests are dudes) for his crappy sister and despised the whole experience. He then dies of exhaustion, wakes up in that same game as a background NPC, panics for a while, and then decides to use every glitch and cheap DLC gamebreaker to mess up that world's careful balance while humiliating the love interests that gave him so much trouble. The sheer vindictive glee behind his actions is what makes this show shine. Some of the most fun I've had with an isekai, excepting similar parodies above. (Best character: Luxion. The AI of the overpowered, anachronistic DLC spaceship (think Invincible from FF9) that the protagonist hijacks through forbidden knowledge. The only way the two are able to bond is because the ship hates all the other characters too.)

Yuri is My Job! (Season 1)

I figured this would be another wholesome yuri rom-com: a haughty, insincere popular girl-type learns some harsh life lessons after being blackmailed into working for a "concept cafe" where the staff are constantly embroiled in fictional G-rated lesbian highschool drama where they have to stay in character throughout (maintaining what I call "gayfabe"). Instead, the place is a pit of vipers and absolutely no-one is sympathetic or likeable except the cook. It's cask strength trainwreck TV suited for anyone who recreationally haunts the "Am I The Asshole?" subreddit. (Best character: The cook.)

Am I Actually the Strongest? (Season 1)

My favorite isekai are where the main characters are overpowered but spectacularly lazy and therefore do the bare minimum of good deeds to ensure they still technically qualify as heroic protagonists. Haruto quickly uses his ridiculous amount of mana to recruit a bunch of demonic underlings, create a clone golem to do all the shit he doesn't want to do (except the clone is as indolent as he is), and eventually has his ancient barrier magic create a passable internet connection to our world so his kid sister can watch anime on Netflix. This show has some slightly off-putting "doting imouto" business going on (she is adorable, yet still) but is otherwise a low-key joy of a hangout anime. (Best character: Flay.)

Skip and Loafer (Season 1)

Just a cute highschool romance thing. The girl is a motivated overachiever from the boonies who's a little overwhelmed after moving to Tokyo; the guy is a nice, chill slacker with a bit of a dark past. Can these two crazy mismatched kids find love with- Yes. The answer's yes. But it's sweetly wholesome for what it is and it does a great job making all its characters feel like real people. (Other equally cute HS rom-coms that almost made this slot: The Dangers in My Heart, Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible, and Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie.) (Best character: Nao-chan. Finally, a sympathetic and fully-realized trans character in an anime that isn't Tokyo Godfathers.)

Too Cute Crisis (Season 1)

Alien lands on Earth to judge whether or not it should be blown up. Finds a cat. Has an existential crisis because of how cute it is; the rest of the galaxy has nothing remotely as kawaii. She then learns that the whole planet is full of equally adorable critters and the whole show is just a lot more of that, really. The end credits include real photos of pets sent in by viewers. I'm just impressed with the sheer dedication to its core tenet of "animals = cute". (Best character: Maybe the cool old guy who really loves his hamster?)

Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon (Season 1)

The most resourceful dude on the planet wakes up in a fantasy world as a sapient vending machine with a handful of canned electronic phrases and a whole vending skilltree. That is, a skilltree dedicated to more efficiently dispensing soft drinks and udon and even print pornography at one point. It feels like the end result of an elaborate dare between mangaka; how do you turn a premise like "guy becomes a vending machine in a fantasy world with medieval-level tech" into an entertaining and occasionally insightful isekai? It just about kinda manages it. (Best character: Boxxo.)

Tearmoon Empire (Season 1)

A proud member of the "lucky idiot" anime sitcom archetype, Tearmoon Empire can be reductively summed up as "What if Marie Antoinette still had a continue left over?". The spoiled and self-obsessed princess of an empire on the brink of implosion due to the vast disparity between its richest and poorest citizens has her eventually captured, imprisoned, and executed when the inevitable revolution comes to pass. However, she wakes up back as a pre-teen and realizes she must mend her ways (and empire), Ebenezer-style, to escape the guillotine. Of course, she's still guileless and selfish and kinda dumb but things just miraculously turn out well for her regardless. It's mostly just a sweet confectionary nothing of a show, but sometimes you have to let yourself eat cake. (Best character: Mia Luna Tearmoon, of course. Desu wa!)

Rising of the Shield Hero (Seasons 1 and 2) / Arifureta (Seasons 1 and 2)

I'm putting both of these here since they share the premise of "guy gets isekai'd with a bunch of others, gets betrayed, gets reaaaaaal pissy about it for the rest of the show, still accrues a harem of ladies anyway because moody, emotionally-withdrawn guys are hot I guess". Nonsense power/revenge fantasies for loner otaku. Still kinda fun though in a grunchy sort of way. (Best character: The chocobo and the M dragon, respectively.)

Bonus: All the old junk I watched for Game OVA this summer

Shout-outs to the Dirty Pair movie. Best anime Bond intro in the biz. Also to the 1988 Appleseed OVA and its fucked up keyboards.

(Incidentally, for this next season Solo Leveling, Delicious in Dungeon, and My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered are the shows I have my eye on (along with the second halves of Frieren and Shangri-La Frontier).)

(Incidentally x2, since I'm already in for a penny in for a pound vis-á-vis showing my entire weeb ass this year, 2023's best VTuber was HololiveEN's Ouro Kronii.)

Games I'm Looking Forward to in 2024 (Besides All the 2023 Games I Didn't Play Yet)

Here's ten games that will (probably) come out next year that might tear me away from my already dismally-neglected backlog.

• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Ichibanimal Crossing? Sign me up. Well, actually, the fully turn-based entries in this series will still take a backseat to the traditional gameplay spin-offs I've yet to play (so, Ishin! and The Man Who Erased His Name). I can't imagine it'll be anything short of amazing though.
• Ys X: Nordics. I don't think the localization has a confirmed release date yet but it hit Japan in September and how long does it take to translate a Ys game? As long as NISA doesn't go around calling dungeons "Big Holes" again we should be good. Either way, it's going to be my GOTY and my Best Music winner next year, so look forward to that.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak. Speaking of Falcom, we'll be getting the first Kuro no Kiseki in English sometime in the middle of 2024. It's the... eleventh Trails game? And I'm about to start on the fourth. I guess I'll see it later, then.
• The Plucky Squire. That one charming game where you leave the book you're in and go exploring around the desk it's sitting on. I assume it's out soon if they're promoting it this hard. Pikmin 4 and Tinykin has me jonesing for more "hanging out in some dude's enormous house pretending I'm a Borrower" games.
• Ufouria: The Saga 2. I just learned about this around a week ago. Sunsoft's making a sequel to their NES Hebereke explormer—one of the earliest of its kind, first released in 1991—and dropping it on everything. It has the potential to be absolute trash, but I want to believe in Bop Louie and his pals.
• Dragon's Dogma II. I mean, I guess I can check it out even if the appeal of the first was always lost on me, Berserk references be damned. It better have a new track from B'z. Keep that Dangan alive and flying into free.
• Senua's Saga: Hellblade II. I liked but did not love the first Hellblade yet there's something very immersive and intense about what they're doing with these games that demands closer attention. I just hope it has a bit more substance to the parts where you're not just freaking out at whispery voices. If I just wanted to scream at stupid rune puzzles for hours I have God of War right here.
• Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. *Just a whole lot of banging on tables yelling for more Suikoden while Konami sits in a mud bath with cucumber slices over its eyes and pretends not to hear me.*
• Pepper Grinder. I don't know much about this game, but Vinny keeps telling me to pick it up.
• Beyond Good & Evil 2. Yeah, right.

The Stuff I Wrote

First, we have the usual 50 annual Indie Game of the Week entries. Most of the highlights can already be found above in the "Games of a Year" section. I'm not going to spam this spot with fifty links but by all means check out the 301st IGotW—Psychonauts 2—and keep hitting that "next" button at the bottom. Hopefully you find a few underappreciated gems you were interested in reading more about, and better still if you were inspired to go check them out yourself. Bon voyage!

We also continued both the Mega Archive and 64 in 64 this year, which each saw twelve updates. The former explores every Mega Drive game in chronological release order as I ensure our wiki is up to date on all its old Sega tapes, leaving us at the start of the autumn of 1993 when it resumes; the latter does something similar with the Nintendo 64 through a procession of mentally-draining hour-long playthroughs, half of which were selected randomly and do not see the system anywhere near its best. Either way, I love my retro gaming and I'll take any excuse to write about it in more depth than is maybe warranted; I'll be sure to come up with some more ideas for 2024.

Some of the shorter features for 2023 include: Go! Go! GOTY! 2022, where I started the year playing and talking about many games I missed the previous year; May Magnanimity, where I spent May going through my Itch.io backlog after one enormous charity bundle too many; The Dark Souls Randomizer, which has a self-explanatory title but is otherwise a real fascinating way to play through a modern icon; Game OVA, which has me comparing and contrasting classic (and less classic) anime with their quickie video game adaptations; The Kobayashi Mario and MisSimian: Chimpossible, two quixotic playthroughs where the goal was to get the full Retro Achievements sets for their respective N64 games or die trying (i.e. give up); and the second edition of VN-ese Waltz, which had me round up a bunch of neat (and kinda dark) visual novels on Steam that I wanted to check out.

I'm proud of all of them. Sorta.

And I'm proud of you for reading. Kudos. Thanks to the GB forum/blogging community for all your support this year and I hope you have a rad 2024. I'll have lots of entertaining nonsense for you to read even if nothing else clicks for you in the coming months.

Oh, and here's Alpha, as promised. Next best girl after Delta.

Welcome back to the very last episode of 64 in 64 for 2023. I wasn't going to see the year out without the December edition of this most vaunted exercise, though sometimes I wonder if my punctuality is necessarily a virtue. Speaking of virtues, the Nintendo 64 itself could be considered Nintendo's Virtue Boy (wait...) due to its diehard refusal to adapt to any flash-in-the-pan technological gimmicks and instead stick to its cartridge guns despite everyone else—and I do mean literally every other console manufacturer of this era—switching to CD-ROM. I can respect that, or at least the part about being too obstinate for one's own good. Hence why I keep pushing through this godawful library, I suppose. Just kidding; the N64 is a singular delight and I don't regret embarking on this feature for a moment. Wow, that sounded totally sincere, didn't it? The power of the written word at work.

I wish I had some seasonally-apposite glad tidings for you regarding this week's pair of candidates but it looks like I made a slight tactical boo-boo and now I've got two racing games to contend with, neither of which has a Metacritic score of over 71. Not exactly my most favored genre but then I can't be featuring 3D platformers every time, not when I run the risk of inching ever closer to having to showcase Glover or Earthworm Jim 3D. I can only blame this double-booking snafu on hubris, as I do with many of my catastrophic life decisions. Still, I managed to slake my curiosity about two games with connections to two much more famous (and much better) N64 racing games so that's... that's something.

Well, that should be enough psyching up the audience with sheer positivity, so let's move onto some rules:

1. Each episode of 64 in 64 sees two games for the N64 played for sixty-four minutes apiece. In the process, I write down my thoughts in intervals spaced sixteen minutes apart.
2. I also cover the game's production history and supply a moderately-informed take on its enduring appeal and the likelihood of it being added to the Switch Online service. Gotta offer more than just schadenfreude, after all.
3. The first game was pre-selected by me based on a number of criteria, most of which boil down to "Do I actually want to spend an hour playing this and writing about it?". The second game was coughed up by a random selection process that very rarely has my or indeed anyone's best interests in mind.
4. Unless previously covered, we're not going after anything already in the Switch Online N64 library. It would make too much of what we're doing here redundant, and the last thing I need to be is any more redundant. (Maybe I should make that a New Year's Resolution too, hm.) As of December that now officially includes 1080 Snowboarding and Harvest Moon 64. Will there be more? I sure hope so.

If you've read this far and are still somehow also hoping for more, then by all means consult the table of previous episodes below. I've been quite productive. Or, well, "productive".

Mickey's Speedway USA / Mickey no Racing Challenge USA (Pre-Select)

• Rare / Nintendo
• 2000-11-13 (NA), 2000-12-01 (EU), 2001-01-21 (JP)
• 356th N64 Game Released

History: Mickey's Speedway USA is a Disney-themed cart racer that sees the funny animals from the House of Mouse's mirthful menagerie compete in a series of races across the United States while trying to overcome the weapons of their rivals, course hazards, chicanes, and standard New York traffic. It was the ninth Rare game for the system (out of eleven) and was simultaneously developed with its Game Boy Color port. Likewise, its predecessor Mickey's Racing Adventure was a GBC exclusive, so this is a case of a portable series being adapted for home console rather than the typical inverse. Usually a good sign that it'll be stuffed with an impressive volume of content and features, something the GB was notoriously well-known for providing.

Rare doesn't require any introductions at this point given this is the eighth game of theirs we've exhibited. They probably didn't need an introduction the first time either: the British studio was something of a third-party showboat at this time, being one of the few companies outside of Nintendo to really do right by the system as the other SNES old guards all flocked instead to the PlayStation (and Saturn, to a lesser extent). Rare's N64 tenure is best known for mascot platformers and racers like this one, so it's a little odd that they never thought to bring back their own mascot team, the Battletoads, for the console. Maybe they were too busy working on good games instead?

The reason I'm invoking my Inner Minotti this month is because this is the second cart racer that Rare developed for the N64, and given the first was Diddy Kong Racing (still sitting pretty at #2 in the current ranking) I'll admit to perhaps some wishful thinking that it might be anywhere near as transcendental. After all, you'd be professionally obligated to treat the intellectual properties of others as well as or better than your own, right? I'm sure that's how it's worked for every licensed game since forever. But yeah, I've been meaning to get all the Rare games on the list as a little side-project so we can have a definitive ranking of their entire N64 oeuvre, and this was one of the only two left. The other's Killer Instinct Gold which... well, I like ultra combos and killer grooves as much as the next guy but fighters aren't really my thing. Neither are racers, to be honest, but I can't well admit I don't like them given that aforementioned #2 slot. (Ew, "#2 slot".)

16 Minutes In

Well... this isn't too bad I guess. It's definitely a standard cart racer but it's curiously a lot closer to Mario Kart 64 than Diddy Kong Racing. I facetiously claimed that external licenses should probably be given preferential treatment but I suppose that's actually true for "safe" treatment: refusing to push the boat out too much in case you potentially alienate the fanbase you're borrowing. Mickey's Speedway USA definitely feels basic to a fault: the courses have very little in the way of hazards or notable features, instead presenting some occasionally twisty tracks in otherwise quotidian locations like the Indianapolis loop or an Arizonan desert. Biggest problem so far has been dealing with how good opponents are on tricky turns: the game does have that Mario Kart hop-and-drift mechanic for squirrely sections but the CPU is way better at it than I am. What they're less effective with are the power-ups, which is a dynamic I actually kind of prefer: that CPU in most Mario Kart games can screw you up with a red or blue shell on a regular basis is dispiriting when you're just trying to race them fairly, so to have that de-emphasized for the sake of having more fundamentally-skilled racers that you use these weapons against to even the playing field is a much more palatable arrangement. Likewise, there are some other small features I find myself appreciating that I wish were in other cart-racers: one is that the CPU opponents are constantly trash-talking each other (Mickey even called me a "palooka", which I'll just have to learn to live with) but they'll direct it at specific opponents if they just got hit by one of their weapons. I'm gratified to know that a baseball (the green shell) or the mud slick (the banana skin) I just left behind hit the guy in second place because now he's yelling at me, swearing revenge.

This first block had me take on the "Traffic Troubles" grand prix, the first of three, on its middle ("Intermediate") difficulty and I finished in first place without too much issue just as the 16-minute timer sounded. I will say that it can be hard to catch up with opponents once they've a decent lead because their AI is such that they make very few mistakes; as I mentioned above, the player's sole advantage is relying the power-ups they find and most aren't effective beyond a certain range (for instance, the tracking on the red shell equivalent, an RC car, isn't great). There was also one course where the CPU conspicuously avoided one of the two boosters, so either that's a difficulty thing (they might hit both on "Professional" and neither on "Amateur") or another player handicap for its presumably younger-leaning intended audience. Whatever, I'm not so prideful that I won't stomp all over a kids' game given the opportunity. Famous last words, I suppose.

32 Minutes In

The rubberbanding is a little ridiculous but otherwise the playthrough continues to be more or less plain sailing for the second and third GPs. It is often the case that if you make a single mistake the entire cast of Kingdom Hearts just whizzes past you in a united block of animated whimsy; this has been especially true with the shorter courses, some of which take less than a minute to complete with all three laps combined. Thankfully, the GPs themselves are only four courses long apiece, though that does suggest that the game has a total of twelve tracks which seems miniscule. Maybe I'll unlock other GPs if I beat these three? Or perhaps the game undergoes some significant changes on the other difficulties? I guess I'll find out once I'm done with this third GP, Freewayphobia, after the next two races.

The game continues to exhibit a combination of extremely familiar mechanics and a few smarter, less overt features mixed into its core. It has the same starting boost trick as games of this type if you hit the gas just as the final light on the countdown pings, and there's tokens that work like the coins in Mario Kart in the sense that I think they're supposed to make me faster but it's far too incremental to actually tell. One of the smarter ideas is that there's a limited number of restarts if you botch one race particularly badly, but if it's the first race of that GP then there's no restart penalty (since you'd be starting the whole GP over, effectively) so that's a nice player convenience. This definitely feels like what you'd get if you commissioned the smart cookies at Rare to make a no-frills cart racer they could throw together in a year, rather than the super ambitious "Mario Kart 64 killer" that DKR set itself up to be (and succeeded, in a perfect world).

48 Minutes In

I'll take back what I said about this being a kids' game. Well, the part about it having the difficulty of one, at least. Mickey's Speedway USA has been significantly harder than DKR due to some very competent AI even on the medium setting, as I regularly found myself getting pushed from 1st to 5th or 6th after taking a turn too widely. Those guys are right on your DuckTail the entire race waiting for you to slip up, and the third GP makes that very easy for them with its more elaborate courses with all its strategically-placed pillars and slowdown terrain patches. With only two restarts you're pretty much screwed for the whole GP after a couple bad races, but having four pretty short courses for each cup makes it easy enough to jump back in. I lost the third GP to Pete on my initial attempt, but barely scraped through to first with the next; I don't think I won a single race either, just came second enough times to win on points aggregation.

My award for winning every GP on the medium setting was... Louie. The green nephew. His stats aren't bad, actually, so I might switch over to him (I've been using Donald so far, who like Mickey has all-rounder stats akin to Mario and Luigi) for this last segment. I also unlocked a cheat: a heckle button. How tempting. I might void any further progress sticking a cheat on though, and that one seems better suited for multiplayer trolling anyway. Question now is whether I enjoy myself by waltzing through the Amateur mode and seeing if that has also a character to unlock (not that I'll get through all three GPs in sixteen minutes; they're not that short) or going up to Professional and discovering how much more unforgiving this Mickey Mouse game for children can be. For the sake of my own credibility if nothing else, the choice is obvious.

64 Minutes In

So, playing through the first GP on Amateur revealed a couple more tidbits about the game. The first is that you can actually earn a Platinum trophy instead of a Gold one if you win every race in a GP: most of the Retro Achievements are for Platinums only, a set which only now is starting to seem a tad insurmountable. The other is that the difficulties work the same way they do in Mario Kart (I suppose I shouldn't be shocked by now) in that not only is the CPU not quite as proficient but the overall game speed is considerably slower. Most of the courses in that GP took around three minutes to complete, when the Intermediate versions were closer to two minutes on average. Still, if I were to keep playing I would only continue on Amateur for the related achievements and unlocks: there's really nothing to it for those looking for something even slightly competitive.

That's going to do it for my Disney sojourn. This game seems very plain compared to what else was on the system but by the same metric didn't really put a foot wrong. Like mashed potatoes without the gravy or fries without ketchup, it's a perfectly fine tuber-based meal (metaphorically speaking) but not one that's likely to retain my or anyone else's interest for long, especially with MK64 and DKR just sitting there close at hand. We also get a disappointingly small cross-section of Disney characters: Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Minnie, Daisy, and Pete, with Louie as an unlock. Other unlocks include Dewey (but not Huey, fuck that guy I guess) and Professor Ludwig von Drake, who is also the race organizer and inventor of all the power-ups. Guessing he's like the T.T. equivalent. Tough break.

How Well Has It Aged?: About As Well As The DeSantis Lawsuit. Besides being a basically competent racing game there's nothing that really stands out about this also-drove in the arena of cartoon cart racers that got oddly competitive during this particular console generation. Most of the mechanics are flagrantly cribbed from the market leader, there's only twelve courses that I could find (though there's Retro Achievements for two more GPs, so I guess I spoke too soon; how do you even unlock those? Highest difficulty only?), and the CPU is unusually punitive when it comes to mistakes on anything beyond the easiest setting. I did wonder who this was for—someone who loves Disney so much that they can forgive a dull game if it features those characters, while also being a decent enough gamer that they could handle its harder races and be surprisingly easygoing despite the constant abuse—but then I figured it out.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: About As Likely As DeSantis Becoming President. It's not a particularly beloved game and it will mean Nintendo would have to play nice with both Disney and Microsoft, so it scarcely seems like it'd be worth the effort. They'd be better off focusing on getting Diddy Kong Racing on there, for multiple reasons.

Retro Achievements Earned: 3 out of 72. A real murderer's row of tough achievements here including Platinums for every GP on every difficulty, beating all the staff times in the Time Trial mode, and a few relating to the Battle Mode I didn't bother looking into (but seems otherwise identical to MK64's, surprise surprise). There's apparently hidden car parts to find too? And the aforementioned two extra GP modes. Feels like I barely scratched the surface. Just to check, this game is for babies, right?

Cruis'n Exotica (Random)

• Gratuitous Games / Midway
• 2000-10-16 (NA)
• 349th N64 Game Released

History: Cruis'n, the racing franchise with the fastest of cars and the most errant of apostrophes, is conversely done with just the speedways of North America alone and takes on the wildest race courses found on this planet and elsewhere. Originally an arcade game that made a home for itself on the N64, following the same road as its predecessors Cruis'n USA and Cruis'n World, neither the arcade original nor the N64 port of Exotica were met with anywhere close to the same amount of acclaim as its older siblings. Our site's own former editor and photobomb expert Brad Shoemaker gave the N64 version a 5.8 while he was still at GameSpot, criticizing it for being a bit too easy and plain with straightforward courses you wouldn't want to dedicate hours towards learning. Well, that should suit our purposes here at least.

While Midway developed the arcade game themselves, the N64 port was handled by Gratuitous Games. This San Diego outfit was founded by Chip Burwell (so many Chips in the video game industry...) who was the former lead programmer for Realtime Associates, a company we bumped into just last episode with Charlie Blast's Territory. Gratuitous burst onto the scene with (oh no) the Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko N64 port which also happens to be the only other N64 game they developed. They stuck around long enough to produce some more ports for the following console generation, including MLB SlugFest 2003 and Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX 2, before bowing out in 2003 with the Xbox port of Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix. (Also, our Midway counter is now at nine and continues to rise to my chagrin.)

Of all the Cruis'n games to come up on the roulette, huh? I've zero experience with this franchise so I suppose jumping in with its weakest entry means I have the fortunate scenario of gradually escalating to the good stuff, I say with the maximum amount of cope. I know members of this site swear by that 2017 reboot with its suitably corny (in a good way) theme song so maybe I'll get a taste of that earnest silliness here as I race against dinosaurs and Martians. I have always claimed that I prefer the goofier games from this genre so- Man, how much more misplaced optimism can I muster? I'll get you for this, random chooser app.

16 Minutes In

Wow, so that's what these games are like. Like the developers saw other arcade racers and were like, "What? You have entire seconds to react in time to turns and incoming traffic, what is this baby shit?". Cruis'n Exotica has been brutal so far, and I've only been playing the "easy" courses like, uh, the Korean DMZ and the ocean floors of Atlantis. Granted, what doesn't help with twitch arcade racer ports like this are the catastrophically limited draw distances of the system—if you couldn't react to a car you didn't see in time, it's possibly also because the N64 didn't catch it either—but, much like Mickey's Speedway USA, every CPU is also rubberbanded to hell and will quickly seize on any and all mistakes you might make while driving, and given the courses are relatively short that can make it hard to stage a comeback.

That said, I've been playing the Freestyle mode—there's also Challenge and Exotica modes, the names of which tell you nothing—and trying to tackle each course one by one, making some decent progress. Exotica mode, I found out, has you take on several courses on the trot in a grand prix style with the sole target of being first each time or else be forced to use up one of your finite continues. Freestyle is a little more forgiving and switches progression for a more open a la carte approach, as well as letting you take the W even if you only came in second or third. Attempting the same course again after you've completed it puts you in a time trial challenge to beat the CPU's pre-established record: I've not been close to any of them so far, even without making any significant errors, so I wonder if there's some unlockable high-speed vehicle that'll make those more attainable. As for vehicles, I'd been rocking a standard OutRun convertible but then I found this stupid-looking solar panel car that I fell in love with so I've switched to that. I guess I only have myself to blame for failure if I'm driving around in the game's equivalent of The Homer.

32 Minutes In

It's dawning on me how messed up this game's sense of difficulty is. In this block I was in the mood for speed in Hong Kong, seeing rushin' from my house in Alaska, zoomed over Las Vegas, did not dally in Delhi down in India, was doublin' my speed in Ireland, and tip-turboed through the tulips in Holland (not the Netherlands? Just Holland?). Each course had a designated difficulty but they weren't as applicable as I anticipated: some were definitely twistier than others and with narrower roads, but the difficulty was always determined by the rubberbanding. I even beat a few track records, but on both occasions I finished outside of pole position: what had happened was that I was leading the race for almost the entire run, getting a really competitive time by hitting the turns as fast as possible without crashing, and then slipping up near the end and allowing a bunch of CPU competitors that were hovering a few yards behind throughout to take the lead right at the finish. Other times I romped home with no challengers and saw I was still five seconds or more from the record, probably because I had a rough first half of the race with how often CPU will just ram into you if you happen to be anywhere in the vicinity. Anyway, point is that the rubberbanding makes it hard to appreciate the challenges and nuances of each individual course, such as they are, since winning is almost entirely a matter of never screwing up unless it's early enough in the race that you can recover.

The game ain't great, in so many words. I don't need to reiterate that I'm not "a racing guy" for the fifteenth time today, but even I know something is off with how this game comports itself. However, I'm starting to spot a few hints of some hidden depth: one time I hit a bridge weird and ending up doing a mid-air stunt, and that shaved a couple seconds off the finishing time giving me a clue as to how to beat some of these tougher course records. There's also a bunch of what seem like shortcuts but mostly exist to separate you from the pack for a little while, which gives you a chance to get ahead without the overaggressive CPU pummeling you into submission. I doubt I'll be skilled or patient enough to dig up more "advanced tech" like this in the rest of the run but it's an indication there might be more to this game than just vindictive rubberbanding and jpeg bikini girls.

48 Minutes In

Within this block I managed to finish up the last of the Freestyle challenges: the Amazon, Tibet, and Mars. Biggest stage hazard for the first two was getting constantly shit on by pterodactyls and eagles, respectively, which produced a similar screen-obfuscating effect as the ink in Mario Kart 8. However, even Mars with its aesthetic akin to the space courses in Diddy Kong Racing was just one long twisty road with not a whole lot going on. What's odd is that there's sometimes the suggestion of a course hazard—the Amazon had a T-rex walk across the path at one point, and Las Vegas had some very low-flying airplanes—but they're all just 2D images with no collision attached to them, so the worst they can do is fill the screen if you're too close and distract you. After completing the last Freestyle course I unlocked a couple new vehicles: a forklift and a striped Mini Cooper (which I'm suppos'n is a The Italian Job reference), both of which are unexpectedly strong in the stats department. Something real terrifying about seeing a forklift going 130 mph.

I'm not really sure where my true complaint lies with this game. The sense of speed is kinda fun and there's certainly some interesting location choices. The rubberbanding, while obnoxious, is also fairly standard for racing games of this era especially in those of an arcade bent that can't be letting even expert players off easy given how those things tend to make their scrip. I'm also not sure why the CPU has to be as aggressive as it is with the side-swiping, but maybe the idea is to incentivize going off-piste with any of the copious shortcuts to create some necessary breathing room. Either way it's really just not clicking. Time to try some of the Challenge courses next.

64 Minutes In

The Challenge mode is a little more in-depth has each of the twelve regions now has four courses each. Of course, there's some overlap going on: there's two regular courses that feel like chopped up versions of what's in the Freestyle mode, a circuit course which I'm fairly sure is one of the regular courses fashioned into a ring with laps, and a drag race that gives you free nitrous if you can pull off a trick maneuver before the race starts (they all use combinations of the C-buttons and the Control Stick, and I couldn't get them to work). It also seems easier? I beat the course records on every race of both Korea and Atlantis excepting the drag races (they're like ten seconds long, and you can only get the record with that bonus nitrous) so either I got a whole lot better (unlikely) or the requirements are a bit more lax on that mode. I now suspect that the unlockable vehicles are related to your profile: in particular, the amount of miles you've driven is logged and that hitting milestone totals is what gets you the new whips.

Regardless, I'm exiting Exotica, expressly. I don't think I really hated it—hard to do so when it takes itself so unseriously—but per contra it didn't feel like a game with a whole of depth, excepting that whole stunt mechanic that clearly went over my head. Once you've reached the point where you can avoid everything there's no real way for the CPU to catch up to you easily, at least on Medium difficulty, and the courses are never so crazy that they'll trip you up with something too unexpected besides incoming cars in the wrong lane. The occasional big jump or slow patch is about as elaborate as they tend to get, putting aside the nonsense that goes on in the periphery like the dinosaurs with no hitboxes.

How Well Has It Aged?: Displeas'n But Not Embarrass'n. There's something very unpretentious about a racing game that's all about going faster than is safe, caus'n vehicles to literally fly off the road whenever they collide at high speeds, and having hot ladies in swimsuits (even in Tibet and Alaska) celebrate your victory. Like, it knows exactly what it is and what audience it's trying to draw in from across the arcade hall with its cool teen swagger, in much the same way most of Midway's games did. Exotica suggests they were thin on ideas after the more traditional courses of Cruis'n USA and Cruis'n World (I mean, where do you go after "World"? Besides Yoshi's Island?) but I think the bigger issue is one common to many arcade-to-console conversions: a game that's good for maybe ten minutes before you get distracted by Street Fighter or a rigged claw machine or watching some kid throw up all over the Space Harrier cabinet because all that super-scaling did a number on their kinetosis isn't really going to be able to stretch that type of experience out into the hours you might be preparing to spend on the couch at home getting immersed in something more substantial.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Your Guess'n is as Good as Mine. I might've figured this was unlikely to happen but then Raw Thrills (founded by former Midway employees) put out Cruis'n Blast on Switch as a console exclusive, so maybe they're keen to give Nintendo its own arcade racer franchise again. Of course, it still seems a remote possibility that they would: A) resurrect the N64 ports instead of just straight up adapting the arcade originals, B) not just stick to Blast sequels, and C) worry about Exotica before putting out USA and World first.

Retro Achievements Earned: 5 of 102. Someone out there must really love Cruis'n Exotica if there's over 100 Retro Achievements for it. Some of the more thought-out, if sometimes stupidly hard, ones in there include bespoke challenges for each vehicle in the game. Many of the standard "beat this course" achievements still require playing on the Hard difficulty, which might not be too rough if you're familiar enough with the tracks. I know I wouldn't want to try, though. I've been humbled enough for one month.

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. Mickey's Speedway USA (Ep. 37)
32. Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
33. Body Harvest (Ep. 28)
34. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Ep. 33)
35. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)
36. 40 Winks (Ep. 31)
37. Buck Bumble (Ep. 30)
38. Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Ep. 20)
39. Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)
40. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)
41. BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
42. Last Legion UX (Ep. 36)
43. Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
44. Cruis'n Exotica (Ep. 37)
45. San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
46. Iggy's Reckin' Balls (Ep. 35)
47. Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
48. Charlie Blast's Territory (Ep. 36)
49. Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
50. Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Ep. 35)
51. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
52. Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
53. Mahjong Hourouki Classic (Ep. 34)
54. Milo's Astro Lanes (Ep. 23)
55. International Track & Field 2000 (Ep. 28)
56. NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
57. Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
58. Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
59. International Superstar Soccer '98 (Ep. 23)
60. South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
61. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
62. Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
63. Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
64. Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
65. F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
66. F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
67. Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
68. Wheel of Fortune (Ep. 24)
69. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
70. Mario no Photopi (Ep. 20)
71. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
72. Dark Rift (Ep. 25)
73. Mace: The Dark Age (Ep. 27)
74. Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. (Ep. 21)
75. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Ep. 32)
76. 64 Oozumou 2 (Ep. 30)
77. Madden Football 64 (Ep. 26)
78. Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Ep. 22)

It's the final IGotW of the year so let's go out with a bang with the acclaimed time-looping adventure game The Forgotten City back from 2021. Now, I'm a big fan of any game that takes on the whole time-looping device—where the player's "mistakes" are quickly forgiven and forgotten by having the events of the game repeat themselves ad nauseam until the true path is gleaned, Groundhog Day-style—and moreover the distinct methods in which they're able to build branching narratives and UI features around the concept. The forebear of the time-looper adventure game (and still, perhaps, its strongest entry) is The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and in particular I've always admired the comprehensive way Nintendo structured a timeline for NPCs and their daily habits learned from observation through something akin to a scheduling app. Sadly, most time-loop games haven't replicated this feature since, and while The Forgotten City is no exception owing to its modest origins (three people worked on it, basing it on an earlier Skyrim mod of theirs (and you know it's Skyrim because you get a bow almost immediately)) it makes up for it with a similar foreboding atmosphere steeped in a whole bunch of fascinating moral philosophy and Antiquity-era mythology.

The idea is that you've found yourself on an island along the Tiber river in Italy, pulled out of the water by a ferrywoman introducing herself as Karen (immediate red flags) and told that a fellow traveler, a hiker named Al Worth, has entered the nearby ruins and Karen has been waiting for him to return. Investigating on her behalf, the protagonist—about whom the player can attribute a gender and a profession, both of which can be relevant to the puzzles—finds themselves falling through a trapdoor in the nearby shrine into an ancient ruined city full of eerie gold statues that turn to watch you whenever you look away. One of those statues is Al himself, who was in the process of suiciding when he fell under the same curse: he tells you not to enter the nearby wormhole to the distant past, as you'll be trapped in the same demoralizing repeating loop as he was. Still, with no other recourse in this ancient Roman oubliette, you jump into the vortex to find a bustling town of Roman citizens slightly bemused by your sudden and unusual appearance. The task is to then do what Al could not: figure out why everything is looping and how you might prevent this "Golden Rule" that causes the entire populace to be collectively punished for the sins of the one, either stopping the person destined to trigger it thereby dooming the whole town or advocating with the being behind its enforcement to dissolve it. I've probably said plenty already without hopefully spoiling too much of the mystery, but this is certainly a game that builds on the confusion of being lost in a foreign land and slowly piecing things together by talking to the citizens and exploring the chasm-bound environs in their entirety.

Being that Skyrim is twelve years old (I know, I know, essentially ancient history itself at this point) the game's had a glow-up since its mod days and both the characters and environments look pretty good, taking advantage of the different ethnicities of those living under the yoke of the then-widespread Roman empire to give everyone a distinct appearance, accent, personality, history, and attitude towards the Romans owing to their cultural background. Some are hostile towards you, though not overtly so due to the Golden Rule keeping everyone in check, and a few are even ready to scam you, though most are happy to help or are in need of help themselves. All solutions to these problems are temporary of course given the causality loop but a neat feature is having the guy who introduces you to the town—the friendly farmer Galerius—be someone you can immediately dragoon into doing all the time-sensitive tasks for you, having him dash around saving whomever needs to be saved so you can focus on other goals and leads that have drawn your attention. He's a bro of the highest order, for sure.

While the game styles itself as a first-person adventure game, in the traditional graphic adventure sense of having an inventory and using it to solve conundrums, it does still contain aspects from its original incarnation as a Skyrim mod. That is to say, that the game has a rudimentary amount of stealth and ranged combat in it, all of which is purely optional as the main reward you get from completing these action-heavy sequences is an item that greatly helps with other tasks but isn't essential for them. The game even warns you ahead of time when you take on the NPC side-mission that initializes this chain in case you're not an action type. That said, you will have to make a mad dash to the shrine you entered the town from should the Golden Rule ever be broken (and it will, eventually, due to being a necessary reset trigger much like the supernova of Outer Wilds or the mooncrash of Majora's Mask) while avoiding bow-wielding enemies. This isn't one of those time-looping games where death will reset the loop either: dying instead causes a game over and prompts you to reload a prior save (the auto-save is pretty generous, thankfully) so you really do need to make sure your escape plan is ready.

I very much enjoyed my time with The Forgotten City, taking my time to delve into the whys and hows behind the place and uncovering more information behind the enigma of its restrictive law and its equally enigmatic enforcer all the while working on smaller puzzles regarding each citizen's immediate needs and wants and figuring out how it all ties together. I would've liked for more of the info-tracking UI features I was discussing earlier, if only to make it easier to find certain NPCs during the loop (two important characters, Galerius and Equitia the priestess, never seem to settle in one place for long), but given there's only twenty characters total it's not hard to keep all the relevant info in your head and you can at least find a citizen roster if you ever needed a reminder of who someone is, where they (probably) are, and what their role might be. Like The Sexy Brutale and Outer Wilds and the other Indie time-loop games that have popped up in recent years, it takes a bit of work to get your bearings and learn the "rules" and perhaps more than a few frustrating "failed" loops where zero progress is made, but that just means gradually acquiring the full scope of things and divining the critical path to success becomes all the more satisfying as a result. For as much as I rail against run-based games, those otherwise known as the roguelike/lite genre for which constant progress resets are par for the course, for whatever reason I have way more patience for this particular interpretation of the idea.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Welcome to the second half of what might be the most cursed blog feature I've written since... well, there's probably several others this year alone. This perhaps warrants a closer psychological examination but not right now, as I've got thousands of multi-colored fruit to find first. That's right, I'm still gunning for 100% completion of the RetroAchievement set for Donkey Kong 64—the 3D platformer that needed the N64 Expansion Pak enhancement just to contain its exorbitant amount of collectibles—and the only achievements I have left after Part 1 are the difficult ones. Great!

This entry sees us poised to finish up the fifth world, Fungi Forest, and move onto the final two worlds of the game followed by the game's explosive finale against a certain corpulent reptilian emperor. (Wait, Wizpig and Grunty were overweight too. What does Rare have against fat people?) As before, I will be chronicling these achievements as I earn them and disclosing any special conditions or challenges that they presented. As always, each achievement comes with a free reading on the ol' Exasperometer, which accurately reads just how much that particular challenge rustled my jimmies. Better believe that those jimmies were rustled by the hogwash this episode. Stirred, even. Rumpled, if you prefer.

Anyway, this is Part One of Mis-Simian: Chimpossible, a title I came up with after twenty seconds and spent no longer seeking an alternative when one was so desperately warranted, and I'll also throw in at no extra cost Part 1 of the series that inspired these ape escapades that focused on a much better game. While the perceived target of this feature is to chronicle my suffering the actual goal is to highlight the imagination and insight that goes into forging achievement sets for old games, accentuating particular quirks and roadblocks and opening our eyes to new facets of games we may have already experienced several times before in a less intensive context. It's why I love achievements after all; they often do a fine job of thoroughly demonstrating everything a game has in store.

Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow

100% the fifth world, Fungi Forest. This is, I believe, the only world besides the first two (which require that you rescue Chunky from world three first) that you can't complete on the first visit. The reason being is a very annoying rabbit that you're forced to race against twice, and winning the rematch is only possible with Lanky's speedster barrel upgrade bought in world six. The irksome thing here, besides the rabbit trash-talking you throughout, is that you lose several seconds entering the barrel and going through the power-up animation: the rabbit is as fast as you but takes certain corners a little more widely, making it a very tight race. We'll be seeing that Duracell shill again in just a little while.

Exasperometer: 4.

The Tortoise and the Hare

The sixth world, Crystal Caves, is where three missable achievements can be found and can I just say that it's super cool of the achievement-makers to back-end a whole bunch of these. This one involves that annoying rabbit from Fungi Forest (I told you we'd be seeing him again shortly). For whatever reason you're required to rescue that same rabbit from a bomb he's tied to before he explodes in a mini-game, possibly because the team didn't want to create another NPC for this one mission. This achievement instead posits the suggestion of "What if you just let that fucker die?". A powerful idea.

Exasperometer: 1.

Maze in Ice

This... this one was not fun. There's a room in an igloo where you enter a spiky maze as Donkey Kong and have to navigate to its center to obtain a Golden Banana (GB). However, as soon as you enter the maze it starts spinning around while changing directions a lot, so you really need to be quick and reactive to avoid getting hit by the wall. What doesn't help in the slightest is that these passages are very narrow and DK is very not that despite his best portion control efforts, so you end up getting hurt a lot. To obtain this achievement, you need to reach the center without getting hit once. Naturally, if you accidentally grab the GB after getting hit the achievement is voided. Took me damn near a hour.

Exasperometer: 8.

A Hazy Shade of Winter

100% World Six, Crystal Caves. Not too bad but the mini-games are starting to get real tough by this point. Hardest GB was probably one where I had to kill everything as Diddy within a strict time limit, and most of the enemies were up on platforms from which they could easily knock you down.

Exasperometer: 3.

Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head

100% World Six, Crystal Caves. There's also an extra condition for this one. There's a large enemy with a club that makes it rain stalactites every few seconds while exploring; if you can find and eliminate them early on then you'll save yourself a literal headache as you continue the level. This achievement doesn't want you to do that: you have to get 100% while it still lives. Killing it before then will of course void this achievement, making it the third and last missable here.

Exasperometer: 4.

Burnt Ice (Default: Victim of the Ice Brigade)

Defeat World Six's boss. It's World One's boss again, Armydillo, with a few extra weapons. Fortunately, this is nowhere near as lengthy as the Dogadon rematch and certainly nowhere near as tough. The only troublesome spots are avoiding the ground-pound shockwaves (since it's often hard to judge how high those beams reach) and one point where you have to avoid a very persistent heat-seeking missile for a few seconds.

Exasperometer: 3.

Upgrade U

Just buy all the upgrades. That includes all those from Cranky, Funky, and Candy. The Tag Anywhere hack really made this one quicker but there's not really a challenge involved: you need most of those upgrades and you'll always have tons of coins for them after the first few worlds.

Exasperometer: 1.

My Favorite Things

The easier of the two big collectible-specific achievements. This just involves collecting every banana in the game; that is, the regular ones rather than the progress-critical golden ones. I'd say it's no big deal since you have a running tally you can refer to for anything you might be missing but we're still talking 3,500 objects to find here. Just imagine how long it would take to spin the roulette wheel that many times.

Exasperometer: 3.

Spooky Scary Skeletons

100% World Seven, Creepy Castle. The level itself isn't too hard to navigate but they did carefully hide some of Diddy's items due to him being able to fly around with the jetpack. The worst part was easily the challenges, many of which are now on their hardest setting. The last version of Beaver Bother in particular, which was already a clusterfuck due to its terrible AI, must've taken about half an hour.

Exasperometer: 5.

Madman Across the Water (Default: Protect Ya Neck)

Defeat World Seven's boss, King Kut Out. This is the boss that's just an enormous cut-out of K. Rool that you need to launch yourself into to damage. You have to do this nine times total, and after every three hits a different part of the cut-out breaks off and his tactics get a bit trickier to manage. First, he starts generating a fake (if you try to hit it you'll just fly out of the arena and lose that Kong for the rest of the battle, switching to another) and then after six hits he'll start popping in and out at split-second intervals requiring a bit of prediction work. Obviously, the no-damage achievement also requires you don't launch an ape out of the fight too. Actually, the worst part isn't the timing but rather what happens after each hit, as he'll fire lasers at you as you swim back to the main platform. You can't avoid the lasers in the water as easily as you can on land (since they don't lead much) so every time—all eight of them (ninth hit is the end of the fight)—it's a coin toss.

Exasperometer: 4.

The Secret Place

I had to look this up, but there's a secret test room you can visit after assembling all the blueprints in the game. The blueprints (which are also yellowprints, redprints, purpleprints, and greenprints depending on the Kong) are a set of collectibles, one per color per world, that nets you a total of five GBs per world including the hub (making forty all together). Only by completing it do you unlock maybe the least amazing reward ever: the chance to replay any of the GB mini-games. If you instead hit A+B simultaneously on the mini-game selection screen, you get taken to this ominous area with an unmoving DK clone, some platforms, and a banana balloon (which you have to pop to register the achievement). Kinda neat they left it in, but there's so little here that there's barely anything worth noting. Well, except for the fact you have to reset the console to get out of there.

Exasperometer: 2.

Penny Slots

The first of two achievements for beating one of the mini-games you unlock after the above blueprint hunt. This one's for playing the slot machine, which requires careful timing as you stop each of the four rollers on the banana. You have to do it three times total within 30 seconds for this setting of the mini-game. Honestly, it's not too hard once you get the timing down.

Exasperometer: 2.

Luck Be a Lady

The other achievement for beating one of the mini-games you unlock after the above blueprint hunt. This one is considerably harder than the first, since you're required to play Krazy Kong Klamour (really should've avoided any and all triple-K names, my Rare dawgs). This is the one where you have to play whack-a-mole with GBs without hitting the Kongs, which occupy the five slots the GB isn't in. The timing is intense: the GB and Kongs will appear for about half a second and your shot takes about 0.4 seconds to reach its target, giving you 0.1 seconds to react and fire in time. And then repeat it nine more times within a minute, without hitting a Kong as it'll actually increase the remaining number of bananas you need to hit. Rouuuuugh.

Exasperometer: 6.

Hacking to the Gate

Shut down the Blast-o-Matic, the big cannon pointing at DK Isles. Naturally, this is a story progress achievement and didn't require anything special. I'm just floored someone slipped a Steins;Gate reference into the DK64 achievement set. El Psy Kongroo indeed.

Exasperometer: 1.

Castle Island

100% the eighth and last world, Hideout Helm. This one's simply a (generously) timed gauntlet: you have to complete the intro area, and then ten challenges (two per Kong) to shut down the Blast-o-Matic and have your run of the place. No bananas or GBs, just a few fairies and a Battle Arena to contend with. Apparently this counts as a missable achievement due to a glitch in the North American version of the game where you can permanently miss the banana medal rewards from the Blast-o-Matic shutdown process if you decide not to collect them then and there. It'd be kinda weird if you didn't, though.

Exasperometer: 2.

Lay Down Your Arms

A Battle Arena achievement, and a real nasty one too. The hardest Battle Arena is the one I just mentioned in Hideout Helm: you have to survive two (later three) Kasplats for 90 seconds without attacking them or the weaker Kritter enemy they spawn with. The Kasplats are the guys you get the blueprints from and they're tough to deal with in these small arenas because of their big shockwave attacks (even the name of this Battle Arena, Shockwave Showdown, emphasizes this). Real hard to keep away from those constant shockwave attacks but this is one case where the Tag Anywhere hack made a significant (possibly even disqualifying) impact: normally you can only reach this place as Diddy but by switching to Tiny before entering you can use her hair twirl glide to stay in the air away from the shockwaves longer. While I feel a little bad that I got a major leg up from what was purely meant as a convenience hack, I'd hate to imagine what doing this achievement with Diddy would be like.

Exasperometer: 7.

Fairies' Lamentation and Dance

Just collect the reward from capturing all 20 banana fairies with the camera. Finding these flighty fey isn't an issue thanks to some very pronounced visual and audio effects whenever they're close by, but actually centering them in the viewfinder and taking their picture without them suddenly zipping away is the hard part. Still, this is a necessary step of a normal 101% completion run so it's nothing out of the ordinary.

Exasperometer: 2.

Homeland

100% the hub level, DK Isles. With many of these GBs you have to come back later after discovering them the first time because they'll need power-ups from later worlds, but as long as you remember where everything is there's nothing too taxing here. I had an issue remembering where the second Battle Arena is: you need to shoot a mushroom on the ceiling (??) of an earlier world's lobby with each Kong once to open the path to it. No hideously difficult mini-game challenges or bosses or anything of that nature at least.

Exasperometer: 2.

This is the Savanna

Since I'm poised at the precipice of a final boss fight I desperately don't want to do, I decided to procrastinate with some sweeping up. This is the Rambi Arena high score challenge that I demurred on back when I earned that Enguarde Arena achievement, both of which are bonus modes activated from the main menu. The idea is that you smash an endless amount of beavers (I think I read a doujin like that once) for a single minute. However, since the beavers are only worth two points each, you won't be anywhere near the achievement's 175 point threshold just charging around without a plan: instead, you need to find the golden beavers that are worth 10 points and then make sure you kill it in the same attack as another regular beaver for a combo, which doubles the amount you earn. The 20 points you get for each of these golden combos is absolutely necessary to hit the goal in time; missing a single combo, or taking too long to find ol' Goldy once it respawns, ensures you'll never get close. It's almost entirely RNG, in other words, and it took more than a few attempts before I finally got it. Not so much a skill issue but a luck issue, unlike the Enguarde one.

Exasperometer: 7.

Nickels and Dimes

Now let's talk some real bullshit before we hit the big finale. This is the other big collectible achievement, along with the all-bananas one above, except it involves collecting every Kong Coin in the game. There are two exceptions with this set when compared to all the other gewgaws: The first is that you don't need anywhere near the total number (which is 974, so at least it's fewer than the 3,500 bananas) to complete the game. In fact, you can buy every upgrade with just 160 coins, which is less than 1/6th of the total. The second is that the game doesn't track coins like it does with the other items since they're not compulsory for 101% game completion. That means there's 974 of those little guys just floating out there that are completely unaccountable unless you bothered to keep a tally yourself. My total before the ending was 945, 29 away, so I definitely had my work cut out for me.

Fortunately (?), it only took three hours to find the four missing solo coins (three were Chunky's, one was Diddy's; I was at least able to compare my own coin totals to the full total found online so I could see who was deficient) and the last 25 came from one of the rainbow coins you collect from the dirt mounds. It was, in fact, the recently-discovered dirt mound attached to that earlier achievement from Part One; I guess what I'd done was to dig up the dirt mound for the achievement and then somehow forgot to collect the rainbow coin afterwards. It was the one dirt mound I could confirm that I had found too, so that figures.

Exasperometer: 10.

Returns a King

Well, this is the achievement for beating K. Rool and completing the game. Believe me when I say that just surviving this fracas is enough of an accomplishment. The way the final battle works is that every Kong Family member takes on K. Rool in a boxing match, tagging out after every four solid hits. DK's round involves using a barrel blast when K. Rool's guard is down (there's a certain number of shadow-box punches he'll do before he forgets what he's doing and starts playing to the crowd) and dodging shockwaves in the meanwhile. Diddy's involves evading K. Rool's boomerang gloves while shooting down some stage lights, each requiring two hits on some targets. Lanky's has him activating barrel lifts, throwing the barrels onto the ring to create a banana skin trap, and then summoning K. Rool (still blinded by a stage light on his head) with music so he'll run over and slip on the peel. Tiny's has her shrinking down and attacking K. Rool's toes, quickly avoiding a recurring pattern of them shooting in and out. Finally, Chunky has to power-up by hitting a switch, using a pad to turn invisible (for some reason), and then entering a barrel to go into Hunky Chunky mode so he can sock K. Rool with a perfectly-timed Primate Punch. Chunky must do this while avoiding K. Rool charging around the ring following a specific pattern of 90 and 180 degree turns that you need to carefully revise with a comprehensive document: a K. Rool Angles Thesis, as it were.

Each Kong has their own health bar, generously, but if a single one loses the whole bout has to be replayed from the first round with Donkey Kong. The kicker for newcomers (or those like me for whom it's been far too long) (or maybe not long enough) is the pattern memorization needed to avoid K. Rool's toes as Tiny and how unpredictable and fast his boomerang gloves are for Diddy. Everyone else is easy enough to survive once you know what you're doing. Worth noting also that each round has a timer, and if you run out of time the whole segment resets (though not the match) and K. Rool's health is fully recovered, whereas yours is not. Honestly, just a really unpleasant fight altogether.

Exasperometer: 8.

The Champ is Here

I'll admit, I was fully prepared to throw in the towel here, apposite as it is for a final boss fight in a boxing ring. I didn't think I had the patience to deal with a no-damage run for what is essentially a series of five consecutive boss fights. However, defeating the final boss "casually" engraved upon me the truth that most of K. Rool's phases are largely based on pattern recognition, meaning I can simply memorize what I need to do by getting some practice pulling off each phase individually. The one phase that still has an unhealthy amount of randomness is Diddy's, and his segment only arrives second (after DK's, who has the easiest and fastest round) so it's not a huge loss of time if I get whupped there. Tiny's is rough but not if you have the toe movement pattern down (it's ten sets of five moves though, so I needed to write it down) and all Lanky and Chunky has to do is stay out the way of a very large and overt K. Rool's path as he stomps around the ring in a predetermined manner. I was fully prepared to spend some considerable time on each individual segment until I was confident enough to knock them out damage-free one after the other—I am, after all, only a single achievement away from completing this set and it's way too tantalizing to abandon—but then I discovered a weird game-breaking glitch in the boss fight rematch mode in the main menu where they take Diddy's guns away (I guess I must've accidentally switched to the PAL version) and was momentarily giddy that I could have a valid reprieve from this achievement. Sadly, I rationalized that the main adventure wouldn't have saved after the final boss and so that option was still available.

I'm not sure what else to say here besides that I was sweating bullets every time I successfully passed the Diddy segment harm-free. Lanky, Tiny, and Chunky's segments aren't so much super dangerous than they are long, giving me ample opportunity to let my nerves get the better of me and slip up with a dumb error or otherwise pay the price for taking the predictable K. Rool too lightly, but somewhere around the eighth or ninth try I made it all the way to Chunky and went super conservative with my opportunities just to avoid any last-minute heartbreaks. Instead of my heart breaking, however, I broke that vile reptile's nose and proceeded to pull off an uncharacteristically energetic little jig as the achievement popped and my long banana-grabbing nightmare was finally over.

This has been my story of courage and determination: an inspiring tale of punching a giant cartoon crocodile on the snoot and being driven almost to tears by the subsequent, overwhelming emotions of satisfaction and relief. I'll be expecting the lionizing movie biopic shortly.

Exasperometer: 12.

Don't Rain on My Parade

Completing the game with 101%, earning the secret ending. Can't really claim to have beaten this game without this, IMO, but then I'm a crazy person as everything above can attest.

Exasperometer: 3.

• Final Golden Banana Count: 201 (100%).
• Final In-Game Progress Tracker: 101%.
• Final Achievement Count: 59 of 59 (100%).
• Hardest Achievement: "The Champ is Here" (no-damage victory on final boss).
• Total Number of Collectibles: 4,865.

I genuinely didn't anticipate I could pull this off, but you can verify right here that I have all the Hardcore achievements for DK64 (I had to confirm it a few times myself). Whether I'm prouder of this or the Mario 64 run is hard to say—this set was harder, though I'm not sure "commendable accomplishment" and "101%-ing DK64 for the third time" necessarily belong in the same sentence—but as before I feel all the more content for actually getting it done. Thanks again goes to the tireless RetroAchievement community for devising such sadistic challenges and to this community for being willing to hear me go on and on about gorillas and crocodiles comprising a dramaturgical dyad or however I filled the word count limit this time around. Thanks for reading, in other words, and I'll see you all again next time with a better candidate for one of these. (What was wrong with my original plan to earn the full RA set for one of the Zeldas? Truly, my actions are a mystery even to me.)