Welcome to another quiet Summer Saturday, everyone. Even though we only just recently confirmed that the SNES Classic is definitely a thing, though I'll need to see one to believe it, there's already buzz going around for an N64 Classic follow-up. Definitely feels like putting the game cart before the horse, but as the Beastcast pointed out there's some copyright/trademark business going on that points to the very real possibility of another miniature console in the coming months, possibly provided the SNES Classic does as well as (or better than) the NES Classic did. Like the Beasters, I'm sort of contemplating what that particular "best of" library might contain. The N64 set a certain troubling trend for Nintendo consoles leading up to the present day in how they were often lacking in third-party support, with the competing PlayStation and Xbox offering a more palatable format for developers.
There's no doubt Nintendo will easily fill up half that mini console's capacity with first-party bangers - Super Mario 64, Paper Mario, F-Zero X, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Pokemon Puzzle League, Pokemon Snap, Super Smash Bros., Wave Race 64, Mario Tennis, Mario Golf, Kirby 64 and Pilotwings 64 - but I wonder what kind of third-party representation it will court. Rare's an obvious choice, but they'd either need to get Microsoft's permission or just stick to those Rare games with Donkey Kong characters (Diddy Kong Racing and Donkey Kong 64). I've a few more ideas of what I'd like to see on the N64, though these are a little more esoteric:
- Hybrid Heaven was an incredibly odd Resident Evil-style action game that created an elaborate wrestling system for its combat, having you suplex and head-lock various mutated monstrosities while exploring a massive subterranean base busy replacing world leaders with pliant genetic clones. It's not a particularly great game by any standard metric - the most damning for his chances at inclusion on this project being its sheer obtuseness - but it helped set a trend for bizarre third-party games on Nintendo consoles that would help define their distinctiveness: think Zack & Wiki for Wii, or Chibi Robo for GameCube.
- Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon was the first of three Goemon games for the N64, but the only one to be fully 3D, following the likes of Mario and Zelda to recreate a facsimile of its original SNES games within this new dimension. Goemon and his friends travel around Japan in pursuit of a pair of dandy, music-loving aristocrats from Europe who are turning traditional Japanese buildings into European castles for the sake of "prettying up the country". After a certain number of games since the already strange The Legend of Mystical Ninja for SNES, the series had taken on many more in-jokes and silly non-sequiturs, giving this N64 entry a personality all of its own. It's actually a fairly decent action-adventure game on top of that, retaining Zelda's dungeons and overworld exploration which could be expanded by finding new traversal-enabling equipment.
- There were a few good Tetris games for the N64 - The New Tetris and Tetrisphere, both of which would make fine inclusions due to the evergreen popularity of the Russian block-stacking simulator. I'd like to propose that Wetrix join them. The creation of the Pickford Bros, who might be better known for Plok (recently featured in a GDQ event!) and some classic C64 games, Wetrix was a novel idea for a 3D puzzle game where the goal is to drop pieces to build reservoirs to contain water. The deeper these reservoirs, the more points the player would earn. It's deceptively difficult, and far more compelling than it has any right to be.
In addition to those, I might also suggest Space Station Silicon Valley (a pre-GTA 3 DMA Designs 3D platformer that required some lateral thinking as your microchip protagonist body-swapped with various robot animals), Bomberman 64 (which went for radial explosions to better fit the 3D world, which worked better than it sounds), Doom 64 (which is an entirely new Doom, even if it doesn't quite match up to the originals), Extreme-G (which is one of the finer local multiplayer games for the system, and a rival for F-Zero X), Mischief Makers and Sin & Punishment (both Treasure games, who briefly jumped from Sega to Nintendo to bring their particular brand of reflexes-intensive games to the N64). I think there's more than enough to fill up a hypothetical N64 Classic, despite what naysayers may claim. Of course, I'd much prefer a SNES Classic myself. The chances of finding one aren't promising, though...
What are promising (sorta?) are this week's updates to my recurring blog features:
- The Top Shelf briefly looked at Capcom's Onimusha 2 before I ran into some unfortunate disc-loading issues and had to stop. I suspect this will be a trend moving forward, though let's knock on wood for the foreseeable future. I liked what I played of it, even if all the new features didn't really add much, and for now the Onimusha series is on standby until I see a remastered set for modern consoles. I won't hold my breath, but I also don't want to go onto 3 and 4 after skipping 2 in case I miss some precious lore.
- The Indie Game of the Week was the PS4 artsy platformer Bound. Bound couldn't make its mind up between being another Journey - which is to say, a relatively grief-free action game that emphasized the ethereal beauty of its world and the pathos of its protagonist's titular pilgrimage - or the type of challenging platformer fare that the speedrun community would embrace, with all its speedrun-friendly customization settings for New Game Plus. I think as the former it works fairly well, but I don't think it has the chops to draw in a crowd interested in pure platforming nirvana. For one, the graceful balletic movements of its ballerina princess protagonist led to sluggishness in parts, which would be a speedrun killer in most situations.
No supplemental section this time, for two reasons: the first is that I didn't play any more Tales of Zestiria this week - I've spent most of those free gaming hours polishing off the great Salt and Sanctuary (last week's Indie Game of the Week). The second reason is that I'm taking over the Community Spotlight today and really need to focus on it. Should be up at the usual time, though it might be a little lighter than usual. I dunno how ZP manages to fill that thing week after week...
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