We have a Man-crazy episode for you all this week on 64 in 64, highlighting the best and less-best of the Nintendo 64 library as it enters a new age of appreciation via Nintendo Switch Online and its pricy Expansion Pack tier. Dropping a monthly sub on anything requires some proof of value, so I'm doing ol' Ninty-Tendy a favor by evaluating all the games that defined their divisive fogbox to narrow down what they ought to be including. No, no, there's no need to thank me or offer any monetary compensation for this service. (Not that I would turn down either.)
Speaking of heroism, we have another game from my list of semi-dubious personal favorites plus a comparatively fortunate random drawing to delineate this week. It's going to be tricky to figure out where either of these superhero simulators end up on the overall scoreboard - seen at the conclusion of this and every other 64 in 64 entry - but, hey, if the Ranking of Fighters guys can figure out an equitable system that works I'm sure I can too. As you know, I'm something of a scientist myself.
There can be no science without rules and laws, so here we go:
- Each week I play two (sometimes three) N64 games for exactly sixty-four minutes. The first is hand-picked by me, the others are selected randomly from the full library of 388 titles. Yes, that includes the untranslated Goemon board game, Ganbare Goemon: Mononoke Sugoroku. I'll be crossing my fingers rapidly in Naruto jutsu hoping for that one.
- For each, I chronicle my time with the game over four updates spaced sixteen minutes apart.
- Afterwards, I'll judge the game on its enduring quality and its likelihood of being added to NSO. This way I get to be petty and cruel: my two favorite modes for video game critiquing.
- Any games that have already made the leap to Switch compatibility are absolutely verboten. If you see a Zelda anywhere, it's not supposed to be here. Bad Zelda. Go sit in the O-corner of Time-outs and think about what you did.
While Zeldas aren't welcome here, links are. Here's a few of them: Episode 1 ,Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6, and Episode 7. (The same ones appear at the end too.)
Bomberman 64 (Pre-Selected)
- Hudson / Nintendo (JP: Hudson)
- 1997-09-26 (JP), 1997-11-01 (EU), 1997-11-30 (NA)
- 39th N64 Game Released
History: The first wave of N64 games involved this developer brainstorm period of figuring out how to adapt extant 2D 16-bit franchises to this new and exciting world of polygonal possibilities. It didn't help that Nintendo themselves hit the ground running with Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64, raising the bar prohibitively high for others. Bomberman 64, while adapting a familiar Bomberman story where some interstellar hooligans make trouble for Planet Bomber and its residents, saw a paradigm shift with its spherical area-of-effect explosions and bomb-expansion mechanics. It enjoyed a mixed reception as a result, though that didn't stop Hudson from making several more N64 sequels.
Hudson probably doesn't need an introduction: their little bee logo adorned many of our favorite (and less favorite) games during the 1990s. After Bomberman, their flagship product, they were perhaps best known - or perhaps reviled - for Nintendo's Mario Party franchise, as well as for cute mascot characters like Bonk and Master Higgins of Adventure Island. Hudson also helped co-create the PC Engine, a.k.a. the TurboGrafx, and was its primary source of software. Hudson eventually ran into money troubles and were bailed out by cute-'em-up rivals Konami, later being absorbed into Konami first as a wholly-owned subsidiary and then entirely with the Hudson brand dissolved like so many bath bombs in overpriced luxury spas.
I liked Bomberman 64 back in the day, since it started simple and then ratcheted up the puzzle quotient by having you figure out how to reach its "gold card" collectibles (needed for the final, secret world) and the much more elusive costume kit items by setting up a series of remote bombs in specific places so you could hop across them. I even enjoyed its twisty narrative, which is a heck of a thing to credit to a Bomberman game. Of course, time makes fools of us all, so let's see how well the first 3D Bomberman has held up...
16 Minutes In
I spent some time wandering around the first stage re-familiarizing myself with the controls. As with Super Mario 64, there's more to the game mechanics than just the newly introduced 3D movement: Bomberman's been given several new abilities with which to incinerate enemies, though several have their uses for traversal also. They include returning favorites like the bomb kick and bomb throw, but also a means to expand a bomb being held by Bomberman to create bigger and stronger explosions. Most of these are taught to you by the friendly NPC Sirius, who also challenges you in a one-on-one duel in the second level shown above to see what you've learned.
Bomberman 64 does that fixed camera thing where you can rotate the overhead perspective between eight different settings, and already the game is using it for evil by hiding a lot of important details until you spin the camera around enough to spot them. The first course was relatively straightforward, though there's areas that need a stronger bomb to reach and I cannot recall how you acquire said bomb: whether the power-up was just hidden somewhere on the level or if it's a mechanic you unlock after more story progress. Either way, these levels are rich with bonus items and figuring out the requirements for their gold cards will necessitate several revisits. Not for me though; I'm only here an hour, so I'm going to see how far through the game I can get.
32 Minutes In
The boss fight duels in this game aren't so tough - though getting all five gold cards in one go can be - and then I was off to the third stage. I quickly found both the remote bombs and superpowered bomb upgrades (I guess I just missed the latter in the previous level) and now I'm trying to figure out how to reach all these elusive destructible objects without getting myself killed by my own explosions. I have to be very careful when putting down expanded bombs: once they're placed they can't be moved, since the bomb kick is too weak to shift them, and if I'm stuck somewhere where its radius can hit me I'm kinda screwed. Bomberman has three lives initially: if you lose them all the game kicks you back to the map screen without saving any progress. It's another good reason to return to stages several times for their gold cards rather than trying to grab them all on the first visit (it's also impossible: the fifth gold card is the time trial, and you'll definitely miss the goal time running after all the others unless you're some speedrunning savant).
Man, I'm starting to remember just how exacting this game can be. When you start futzing around with combinations of remote bombs - necessary, since regular ones will blow up long before you can use them to form a path - you need a clear plan of action and to execute it perfectly first time, since you can get yourself hurt or accidentally destroy the block the valuable item is in without being able to reach it, impotently watching it blink away (though I think leaving the current area of the level and returning might reset it). I'm going to fight against my instincts to collect everything shiny and just get to the end, though I'm sure I've reneged on a similar promise many times before on this feature.
48 Minutes In
The third stage of Green Garden, where I left off last update, has a gimmick where an enemy swoops in and moves the goalposts several times before Sirius helpfully knocks it on its ass, so it's a level that has you running back and forth quite a bit. Since I wasn't going to go through the pain of acquiring a bunch of gold cards only to hit a game over and lose them all, I just mainlined the objective and moved onto stage four, which is also the region's boss. I thought I recalled that the bosses were duels with the villain's henchmen: rather, those are always the second stage in every world (I only fought Sirius as a tutorial: the other battles will be "for real") and the last is always some enormous opponent. In this case, a dragon. By carefully aiming and throwing explosives as it got close or soared beneath the bridge-like arena, you can destroy certain body parts and that's the key to earning all five gold cards for this fight.
I've already been weaned off my completionist tendencies after a number of embarrassing self-'splosions, so I just quickly ended things with Spyro and am back here on the map screen. Despite packing all the tutorials in the first stage of Green Garden, I think you can technically play these first four areas in any order. Good if you get stuck and need to clear your head elsewhere, I suppose. Has Bomberman always been this challenging? It's real tough to judge how far away from a bomb you need to be without the discrete "this explosion is exactly five tiles long in every direction" aspect. Maybe that's why folks weren't so hot on this one. Hopefully my muscle memory from twenty-five years back will kick in soon.
64 Minutes In
Against my better judgement, I opted for the ice world next because I wanted to bump into Regulus, my favorite character, who appears in the second stage duel. This world is a real stinker overall: the first stage has you ascending precarious snowy paths while avoiding fast-moving snowboarders spawning out of nowhere while the third is the slippery nightmare you see above. The stage is literally called "Shiny Slippy Ice Floor" which is like naming your signature chicken dish "Potential Death by Salmonella." Like, why emphasize the worst thing about it? Why not focus on all the cute penguins sliding around on their tummies? Those funny little guys. I just wanna blow 'em all up.
Either way, I think the honeymoon period is over for this game. That brief, twenty-five-year honeymoon period. I don't think it's bad by any stretch and there's something for very punishing physics puzzles that still appeal to audiences today - everyone likes a challenge, as long as the rules are fair - but it's a case often encountered in retro games where the patience you had back then for this degree of horseplay has long since diminished, partly due to age and having other concerns occupy your free time and partly because modern games are so much more geared towards quality-of-life improvements and player convenience and it's easy to feel spoiled. I will go to my grave attesting that Bomberman 64 isn't as bad as many make it out to be, oblique camera trickery and ambiguous explosion radii aside, but I will admit that I'm somewhat relieved that this playthrough was only sixty-four minutes long.
How Well Has It Aged?: So-so. While there's a certain timelessness to classic 2D Bomberman the introduction of 3D creates interesting new wrinkles that this game explores, if not fully irons out. If remade today with a slightly more forgiving interface and without these finite lives and continues - both archaic by 1997, let alone 2022 - I could totally see an audience for its precision-demanding puzzles and tough boss fights. It would be weird to market a Bomberman game based on its single-player campaign, though, and I don't think the 3D additions work quite as well for the local multiplayer - what is normally the draw.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Remote. Curiously, the matter of Konami's N64 games came up on GrubbSnax this week and The Grubbster seemed to think Mystical Ninja had a better shot of being added to NSO than Bomberman 64. I guess based on how much more fondly Mystical Ninja is remembered? In this hypothetical scenario I may have thought Konami would've gone with the more established (and still semi-active) brand, but then it's very hard to predict what Konami might do in this day and age. They have a tendency to sabotage themselves at every turn due to the sheer apathy with which they regard the video game industry. Either way, unless a third party steps in, I don't think you can count on them to make the effort.
Retro Achievements Earned: 2 (of 82). Challenging games logically attract challenge-seekers if this achievement list is anything to go by. Lots of speedruns, tough custom CPU match-ups in the multiplayer mode, and the requisite collecting of all the gold cards and costume pieces on every level.
Spider-Man (Random)
- Edge of Reality / Activision
- 2000-11-21 (NA)
- =361st N64 Game Released
History: Marvel's Spider-Man has always been a popular subject for a video game, given the hero's well-defined skills and abilities and his global appeal. Of course, it hasn't always been possible for video games to take full advantage of Peter Parker's dextrous web-slinging and acrobatics. This early polygonal Spider-Man game from Activision was one of the first to really get the full breadth of his powers right as Spidey whips around his NYC home foiling crime at every turn - the game's original developers, Neversoft, used the inventive 3D world design of their Tony Hawk's Pro Skater franchise as a basis. Notably, this game was produced a few years before the first Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie - and the character's sudden rise in popularity among non-comics folks - and instead has an unrelated story focusing on villains Dr. Octopus and the edgelord symbiote Carnage.
Edge of Reality was a studio that originally focused on producing quality ports, including Spider-Man (the N64 version is based on the PlayStation original). They also worked on all three THPS ports for the N64, the third of which would become the very last official N64 game ever released, and later ported BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins to consoles. With the financial stability provided by these solid port jobs, they went on to create their own games during the Xbox 360/PS3 era. They went defunct as recently as 2018 after a few years of inaction. Activision I probably don't need to talk about (and would rather not, given ongoing circumstances): they published at least a dozen N64 games, so we'll no doubt be seeing them again.
This is one of those cases where I have played this game before, but a different version: the PlayStation original, since it came highly regarded. With the exception of the '90s X-Men cartoon, I wasn't a big Marvel fan prior to the big wave of movies from Fox and Disney's MCU (I'm still not, really, but more so than I was) and games based on Spider-Man or really any superhero had been traditionally quite lousy, so I recall this being a pleasant surprise at the time. Hoping for two things: that the N64 port is as good as the original, and that the game in general holds up.
16 Minutes In
Man, this is so cool. It's wild to play this so many years later knowing how many superhero games it influenced, let alone Spider-Man games. You could absolutely draw a line directly from this game to the 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man game no problem. The first scenario has you swinging from skyscraper from skyscraper on the way to foil a bank robbery - thanks to a nice bit of ludonarrative, you can't visit or even see the city streets because the bad guys filled it with venomous fog - and then once inside taking down the armed goons without letting them spot you, since they're keeping hostages.
Mechanically, Edge of Reality did the best they could translating the PS1 controls to the N64. The two face buttons are for jumping and the zipline, the latter useful for immediately attaching yourself to the ceiling indoors or to the next surface outdoors (especially handy in stealth where you need to get out of sight fast). The combat controls, instead, are bound to the C-buttons and there's multiple moves with different combinations. Spider-Man automatically clings to and climbs walls and ceilings, so it's all been pretty intuitive so far. I also like that Black Cat keeps swooping in whenever you touch a tutorial "?" to explain one of the mechanics; since the game keeps wanting to position the camera directly at her rear end, I guess they should give her a good reason to be there. Neversoft indeed.
32 Minutes In
I spent a while trying to take down those guards as quietly as possible, but either the game doesn't have a stealth takedown button or I wasn't able to find it. It's certainly ahead of its time, but perhaps not as far ahead as I keep assuming: the strategy instead appears to be to take down any guards near hostages instanter, ideally before they can react, or use cover so that the distant ones don't spot you wailing on their accomplices. Either way, I finished the bank heist and the next mission has me back outdoors swinging as quickly as spider-humanly possible to the Daily Bugle to save J. Jonah Jameson from The Scorpion. As you can see from the above screenshot, I barely got there before both the level timer and my own went off.
While the game has held up remarkably well, it's evident how many iterative features this genre has seen since 2000. I find myself missing a number of quality of life features that games of this type were still many years away from implementing. It's kinda like going back to the original Grand Theft Auto III: still playable in a modern context, but you'll start to miss all the enhancements that San Andreas, IV, and V brought to the table. (Also, how neat is it to hear Stan Lee narrate the opening of each episode? Perhaps less so in retrospect, given that he turned out to be far from cameo-averse, but it must've felt like a coup back then. At this point a Steve Ditko cameo would've been more impressive.)
48 Minutes In
Oy vey, Aunt May. I've spent the last sixteen minutes fighting the Scorpion over and over. Trouble with Spider-Man is that while he has the relative strength of a spider, he has the relative durability of one too. Specifically, the durability of a spider versus a rolled-up newspaper (apropos I suppose, since this fight takes place inside the Daily Bugle building). Scorpion's various tail-whips not only have obscene hitboxes but take off at least a quarter of your health with every hit and they're fast as hell to boot. The only thing working in your favor is that the Scorpion frequently gets distracted looking for Jameson (usually hiding behind something) and you can wait until he's lost aggro on you to sneak up with a quick combo and then escape again. The regular kick combo can be awfully capricious though: there are times where one or more hits just whiff even while standing inches away, and Spidey always gets a punch in the proboscis for his trouble.
The run you see above has been my best yet (ignore my full health bar, that's an emulation error) so here's hoping I can get back to not dying every two minutes soon. Didn't expect the first boss fight in this game against a chump like Scorpion and his creepy Christoper Collins voice to be the second coming of Father Gascoigne.
64 Minutes In
That turned out to be the run after all, but the run that follows was every bit as perilous. Framed for the recent spate of crimes caused by his enemies, Spider-Man must now escape the police by evading their attack helicopters and beat cops wearing high-tech armor (neither are as implausible as they once wer) across the cityscape. If the Scorpion fight was your do-or-die final exam with the combat controls, this sequence is the same for traversal and web-slinging. Spidey's a little more resistant to minigun fire than he is Scorpion stings, but you can get destroyed fast if you aren't constantly moving, swinging, or climbing. Worse are the parts where you're scaling a building and they keep firing missiles at the windows - don't worry, these buildings are clearly abandoned and marked for demolition, can't be going around suggesting that the police use excessive force or anything - and those are always instant death if they hit you.
I will say in Spider-Man's defense that going from a stealth stage to a timed action stage to a boss fight to this gauntlet does provide a remarkable variation in content for a game of this vintage. We're getting closer to that archetypal cinematic action game a la Uncharted where you've never quite sure what precarious scenario you'll be dropped into next. Having lived through all that and looking to take down Rhino next - I wonder if he does that thing where he charges into walls and you have to get out of the way? - I think I'm happy enough putting the game down for now.
How Well Has It Aged?: Depends. In some respects it's held up very well, contributing to a 3D superhero action game blueprint many others would build upon, but having so many newer games to compare it to doesn't do it quite as many favors. Its difficulty curve is also all over the place, though maybe there's some secret Spider-Man lore I don't know about that would've made some parts of it easier like a Spider-Steroids button that causes him to bulk up for a few minutes. With infinite continues (comes infinite responsibility?) and decent enough checkpointing, it's not in the realm of insurmountable either.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Unlikely. Activision is still around (for now) but is soon to be acquired by Microsoft, which would lead to the same sticky collaboration issue the Rare N64 games present. Then you have the Disney/Marvel Spider-Man licensing on top of that, as well as how the Sony PlayStation probably has the ideal version, and I'm not really seeing a route where this ends up on NSO. Getting all that sorted out sounds like the legal equivalent of that exploding helicopter gauntlet I barely survived.
Retro Achievements Earned: 5 (of 38). I guess this game has alternate costumes? Because many of these achievements require you to complete certain levels in certain skins. (Fortunately, while you can't switch costumes mid-game, there's a level select mode for any stage you've beaten.)
Current Ranking
- Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)
- Diddy Kong Racing (Ep. 6)
- Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)
- Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
- Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
- Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
- Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
- Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
- Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
- Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
- San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
- Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
- Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
- NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
- Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
- South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
- Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
- Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
- F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
- F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
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