Video games. They're pretty cool. One such device that played video games was called the Nintendo 64 and it existed at a magical time for pop culture called the late-'90s and early-'00s, where the songs topping the charts included insightful ballads about sticking with your crappy girlfriend for the sex and being a wild wild west man and movies had CGI special effects that were practically indistinguishable from real life, like whatever this is. However, for as utopian as this era sounds, not every game that graced the N64 was a winner. That's going to create a sticky issue for Nintendo specifically, as they're looking to fill their Nintendo Switch Online service with the best that system had to offer. I'm certain the only reason they're making the process of adding new content to an absurdly expensive monthly subscription as slow as humanly possible is simply because they don't remember which games are the good ones.
That's where 64 in 64 comes in: a partially-random review process in which I scrutinize as many of the 388 games released on the Nintendo 64 as possible. Granted, I was hoping for more forgotten gems than I've currently been receiving from the random selection process, but the way I see it the more dreck we get out of the way with early the more gold remains to be appreciated later. Delayed gratification and whatnot. With that optimistic sense of wonder in our hearts, let's launch into some cold, hard rules:
- I play two N64 games a week. One has been selected by me, the other chosen by a malevolent entity determined to punish me for all my many sins (also known as a browser tool called the "Random Chooser").
- I'm playing them both for sixty-four minutes each exactly, with progression check-ins after every sixteen minute interval. I thought about eight eight-minute intervals, but how many ways can you say "I just want to die"?
- I'll let you know if I feel the game is ready for another shot in the spotlight, or if it's like that Notre Dame Dracula they just found that I'm almost certain we shouldn't be trying to exhume.
- Talking of burning and cathedrals, the fourteen N64 games currently on the NSO service are like holy water: if 64 in 64 goes anywhere near them, it'll burst into flames.
We've reached the twelfth episode, but where are all the others? Click these links to solve this groovy mystery: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6, Episode 7, Episode 8, Episode 9, Episode 10, and Episode 11.
Programming Note: This is going to be the last episode of this "season" of 64 in 64, as we head into next month and I embark on my usual time-consuming "May Madness" blogging antics. Some folks seem to be into these weekends of blurry, self-inflicted torture, so I might bring it back around autumn or winter. Some new and exciting features planned for the summer though, so stay tuned.
Hybrid Heaven (Pre-Selected)
History: Despite a string of memorable hits across the arcades and early consoles, by 1999 Konami were firmly established as "the Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid guys" and similar cinematic action-shooter games would go on to define much of their output during the N64/PS1 era and beyond. Hybrid Heaven is one such experiment: a game that combined a very MGS (or maybe that one Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode) plot where aliens take over the US government using genetically modified clones, and chose to supplement the genre-customary stealthy action gameplay with a mostly turn-based RPG combat mode inspired by pro-wrestling. To say the game was divisive was an understatement, taking into account also the degree of marketing hype built around it and the absence of a N64 MGS port to compensate. For N64 owners at the time, this was pretty much "we have Metal Gear Solid at home."
Hybrid Heaven comes to us courtesy of Konami's Osakan branch, KCEO, whom we've already met twice before with the considerably more beloved Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon and Goemon's Great Adventure (Episodes 3 and 9, respectively). Sadly, after this all we'll have left from this wing of the major third-party studio is a mahjong game, a crappy fighter (like the system doesn't have enough of those), and like a dozen sports games. Hopefully this'll be the last time we see them, but I know how my luck is with this feature's random selection process. (I'm hoping for some games from their short-lived Kobe division instead: they made the Castlevanias, Rakugakids, and the Disney DDR game.)
Just so I don't burn through all the games on the list of undisputed classics within the first dozen 64 in 64 episodes, Hybrid Heaven comes from my slightly lower caste of "dubious favorites" that I'll be pulling from regularly. I had a blast with the game back in the day, constantly unlocking new suplexes and piledrivers to use against weird tentacle monsters while ravenously consuming its ridiculous B-movie plot: something Konami used to do very well. For as much as I enjoy the N64's many vaunted masterpieces this sort of enthusiastic, imaginative trash is frequently what I live for.
16 Minutes In
My memories of this game came flooding back almost as soon as I was done with the intro, and what an intro it is: you have a black-haired dude named Johnny, the apparent protagonist, as he watches TV, skulks around his apartment, listens to a voicemail message from his estranged girlfriend, and answers the door to a man who conspiratorially whispers something about replacing the President of the United States when "their operatives are in place." Johnny is completely nude throughout all of this, incidentally. He then meets a "Mr. Diaz" in the subway (by this time he's clothed) and instantly gets murdered for his trouble, with the action switching to Diaz as he's taken underground to a high-tech facility for reasons yet unknown. I mean, I know them, but then the particulars of this grand sci-fi conspiracy plot have long since been etched into my gray matter. For now, I've been exploring this underground facility listening to its BGM and trying not to draw any parallels between it and MGS2's Big Shell (there must've been a lot of notes getting passed back and forth as far as I can tell).
Man, I'm actually excited to be playing this again; excitement that I know will dissipate the first time I'm required to engage with its puroresu combat. Still, I hope to progress through as much of this game as possible before the time limit is up, though as a RPG hybrid (the title's not just a non-sequitur) I can't imagine that'll be too far. I suspect I won't even make it out of the Diaz portion of the game.
32 Minutes In
More underground lab business. We automatically start tinkering with a computer spitting out a bunch of alien language until it opens all the cell doors for the biological experiments down here; my dude did that on purpose to create enough mayhem that he can do his dark deeds without anyone observing too closely, seeing as they have a bunch of weird monsters to worry about instead, but it does create the minor issue of also having to deal with these things whenever one corners us. This is where the turn-based combat comes in, though I forgot it's actually mostly real-time. How it works is that you and your opponent pace around looking for an opening while a power gauge fills. If you can wait until it's completely full, get into range, and then activate the combat menu you can get in a decent hit before the enemy can retaliate. When on the defensive, you can choose to counter, guard, or side-step an attack: I believe success is determined by the type of attack that's coming your way, making it a bit of a rock-paper-scissors type of scenario. Another factor is that the enemies are often built different, with different body parts being vulnerable to harm (or invulnerable). This factors into which arm or leg you use to attack, left or right, and where both of you are standing when the attack is activated. Strafing around to an enemy's weaker side is a strategy that might come up later, as will be things like grapples and chokes when I eventually unlock them. Right now, all I can do is punch and kick, though more moves will show up eventually (I forget how, maybe it's a levelling up thing? I'm doing that, too).
The action outside of these battles is considerably more straightforward. You can aim and shoot your Defuser at mechanical sentries, jump over obstacles (if close enough, you climb over them instead), and crawl under barriers. Exploration nets you recovery items and you can talk to NPCs for hints; they think you're Diaz, so they're not hostile. It's all been relatively accessible so far, and as the game is closer to MGS than RE there's no tank controls to worry about either.
48 Minutes In
Embarrassingly, I got my ass kicked by some dumpy-looking jerk wearing a fanny pack, so I'm back at the start of this second area of the lab after reloading. I should probably mention now that the entire game is set in this one location, and you just keep descending floors until you eventually find what your dude is looking for. Hybrid Heaven definitely has one of those "need to know" sort of narrative delivery formats, where much is kept from the player until the game deems it necessary to fill us in. Great at establishing a certain degree of mystique but it's a little frustrating to be kept in the dark too. Given how linear it's been up to now though, not knowing my character's motivations isn't affecting the game's progression much.
Even more deliberately obtuse than the narrative is the combat system, though I believe I figured out how to unlock new moves. By using a part of your body enough times - left arm, right arm, left leg, and right leg - you level up its offensive quotient, and that might be what unlocks new techniques. It might also be that, like Grandia, you have to progress far enough with a number of different skills to unlock the more elaborate maneuvers. That's one of the reasons it's worth varying up your approach, in addition to making it harder for the CPU to predict your next action and evade it (though who can say if you can truly fool an AI with these sorts of footsies). While MGS1 is the clear-cut comparison to make, I'm actually getting more of a Vagrant Story vibe: just exploring these levels, jumping on and off boxes, and slowly sussing out the nuances of a Byzantine combat system.
64 Minutes In
All right, I'm revising my understanding of the combat mechanics again. My new theory is that you learn moves after having them done to you, because that's how I unlocked the hook punches. Those arrived courtesy of the aforementioned fanny pack fanatic that, fortunately, went down this time after enough convincing, and I was able to make it a little further along before my time with this game was up. I also learned that many new techniques become available if you attack an enemy prone on the ground, including the Boston Crab and leg locks. Good way to ensure an enemy won't get back up, even if you can't put a lot of power into them. As far as the current narrative is going, the various jumpsuited NPC drones working down here have now been informed of Diaz's betrayal and are looking to take me down; they're smarter if not tougher than all the monsters down here, and capable of healing themselves with items like I do, which also makes them great punching and/or kicking bags if I need to practice with a specific limb.
It might sound bizarre, but I was getting into this playthrough and wanted to keep going after the compulsory sixty-four minutes. Doing so would be a violation of whatever dumb rules I invented, but if nothing else it's an indication that this game hasn't aged as poorly I dreaded. Either that, or its problems are more related to long-term fatigue: the combat engine is sophisticated enough that the game is probably going to take a long time to roll all those new techniques out, and nothing about the running around and platforming indicates that it has as much innovation or variance in the tank to keep up. While I didn't even make it down two floors - mostly the fault of that game over, which is just a less ego-bruising way of saying El Chumpo over here screwed up - my perhaps implausible nostalgic affection for this game still persists.
How Well Has It Aged?: S'fine. It may well become too repetitive before long, but the curiosity piqued by both its mystery plot and its equally mysterious combat systems means that it gets its hooks in almost from the jump. Despite action-adventure games with antiquated control schemes often feeling like total horse pucky to play mere years afterwards, Hybrid Heaven's controls have been super intuitive and easy to work with. Its environments are simple enough to traverse, perhaps to their ultimate detriment, and the combat really feels like something you could invest a lot of time into figuring out if you were so inclined, rather than perfunctory showdowns designed to break up the platforming acrobatics with some fisticuffs.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Konami. My current expectations are that either Konami's heart grows three sizes over the current year and they get all the way on board and drop all their non-sports games on NSO, or they don't bother at all unless someone else does the work for them. If they only end up porting a few, it'll be the Goemon, Bomberman, and maybe Castlevania games that'll be first in line - and that's only if Konami can't find a way to put them into compilations and sell them at a premium instead.
Blues Brothers 2000 (Random)
- Player 1 / Titus Interactive (EU: Virgin Interactive)
- 2000-10-13 (EU), 2000-11-16 (NA)
- =347th N64 Game Released
History: The Blues Brothers, from 1980 featuring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, is one of the best feature films to come from the Saturday Night Live stable of recurring characters. A movie full of wit, heart, good music, and a gleefully destructive car chase through a shopping mall. Eighteen years and at least three dead cast members later, someone thought it best to make a belated sequel: Blues Brothers 2000, which replaced Belushi with John Goodman, Joe Morton, and some kid. Far as I know, absolutely no-one liked that movie, which could be why it was deemed deserving of a tie-in game. Actually, it was more like Titus Interactive were hoping that the sequel would become as popular as the original and anything with its name slapped on it would sell equally well, and commissioned a game that feels like it took six months to make but ended up coming out two years after the movie did, long after everyone had blocked it out. So far, so promising, right?
Player 1's a bit of a mystery. Despite a number of notable N64 games like Robotron 64 and Milo's Astro Lanes (both of which they developed on behalf of Crave Entertainment) there's not a whole lot about them out there on the 'net that I can find. There's another Player 1 that recently released a bizarre hacking game called Cybermere on Steam last year, but I've no idea if it's the same company and given the seventeen year gap between games I suspect not. Titus is a bit more famous: they were a major French publisher in a similar vein as Infogrames. Around this time they were slowly building up an Embracer Group-style stable - by 2000 they had acquired BlueSky Software and had set their sights on CRPG powerhouse Interplay - but juggling all those studios proved too much to handle and they filed for bankruptcy in 2004. One of the last companies they bought was, probably not so coincidentally, this game's European publishers Virgin Interactive.
It might sound strange to say this about a movie with car chases, narrow stealth escapes, Illinois Nazis, pissed off country band hicks, and Princess Leia with a bazooka, but the original The Blues Brothers is far from what I would call ideal video game adaptation material. The poorly-received sequel is almost certainly less so, though without the pleasure of watching it (I put some work into researching these things, but there's a limit) I can't say for sure how ill-advised this tie-in was. Were it not for all its terrible review scores, I'd almost be hopeful of this playthrough: it's the first 3D platformer on this feature I'm not already super familiar with. Well... there's 64 minutes on the timer, I've got a full bottle of water, half a pack of Oreos, it's still light out, and I lost my sunglasses. Hit it.
16 Minutes In
Man, this game has "an attempt was made" written all over it. It is, as previously stated, a 3D platformer though one that has opted for a stage-based structure, with each stage being a short (like five minute) mini-game or platforming sequence. The example above is a boss fight that's actually a memory challenge, where ground-pounding one of these lunch trays reveals a symbol that you have to pair up with its twin. Other stages have included a One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest navigation mini-game where you direct people tied up in straitjackets to the prison nurse (they always follow the opposite of whatever directions you suggest), another where you run through electrified gates at the right point of their cycles, and a stage where you use vents to reach a sequence of buttons. Strong Donkey Kong 64 comparisons to be made, especially as the UI suggests there's going to be four playable characters (the same ones from the movie) once I've rescued them all.
The controls are a little awkward and the camera even more so, and some of these graphics are just wowsers, with the overall result feeling very much like a pale imitation trying to follow the genre leaders Nintendo and Rare, but it's also... not terrible? I was expecting a half-finished mess unceremoniously abandoned on some doorstep like the Blues Brothers themselves, but it's been fine so far. Not something I'd recommend wholeheartedly or even half-heartedly mind, but also not a catastrophe that would draw out any latent AVGN diatribes. I'm almost done (I think?) with the first "world," which is the prison Elwood got locked up in after the end of The Blues Brothers, so maybe the game runs out of ideas fast and later stages are either terrible or way too similar to this first batch.
32 Minutes In
The issues are making themselves more apparent the more of this I play. First is this awful rhythm mini-game that this gentleman makes us partake in every time we talk to him: either something's off about the emulation (anything rhythm-based is compromised the moment you introduce emulator lag to it) or it just sucked to begin in. The cafeteria fight also had a weird camera bug where it would get stuck behind the fourth wall so you couldn't see anything if you walked far enough forward. Combat's pretty wretched too, in part because some enemies don't stagger when you hit them so you'll always leave yourself open to counterattacks.
The soundtrack's kinda odd: the N64 didn't have redbook audio so while the game has a few of the licensed songs from the movie most of them are instrumental, like its version of Otis Redding's "Respect," but Mack Rice's "Cheaper to Keep Her" regularly employs a voice sample of a female vocalist singing the title. As the track itself has sort of a laid-back vibe the game uses it for its sneakier levels, like the nighttime prison yard area in this screenshot, but just having the BGM sing-whisper "it's cheaper to keep her" every few seconds creates a bizarre atmosphere. What does sneaking through a prison have to do with not wanting to divorce your wife for financial reasons?
48 Minutes In
After one final prison-based stage where I had to elude searchlights by jumping over them (that's not how that works) I found myself in Chicago, or at least a comically exaggerated version of Chicago that might've appeared in Garfield: Lasagna World Tour. The game's structure at this point feels a little more obfuscated: to get to the other half of this initial street area, I first have to go into an alley to find a wrench that'll open the way to the sewers, and in there turn on Chicago's water (I'm surprised no-one's noticed it's off) to activate a fire hydrant that should shoot me up to the next part of the game. However, while I found the wrench I've yet to find the manhole it opens: there's a few in the middle of this road but I don't think they're the right ones. I keep getting hit by cars trying to figure out the button to open them, for one thing. Nothing in the alley area pointed to a manhole either - though there is another locked door that won't budge - so I'm temporarily stuck for now. I'd try Bing, but using it to search for "manholes" is just asking for trouble.
I believe I was mistaken earlier about being able to switch characters like in DK64. I did rescue Cab Blues (played by Joe Morton in the movie) from prison but I haven't been able to discover any way to switch characters or figure out if there's even any point in doing so. The game also took until now to tell me that Elwood has a ranged attack - he throws his hat like Oddjob - which would've been useful against all those enemies I couldn't stun-lock in the previous world. I've only myself to blame for not reading the manual, I suppose.
64 Minutes In
After an embarrassingly long while I eventually found the right manhole (it was in the middle of the busy street after all; it just wasn't one of the two I'd already checked) and made my way down into the sewer. The sewer was just a very, very long tunnel filled with vicious turtles, alligators, unexplained tentacles poking out of pipes, big angry dudes with moustaches (see above), and massive pits that you could just about jump over if you got right to the edge before leaping. At the end, I walked out the exit only to find that I'd missed the valve that turned the water on, so I had to do the whole thing again. After approximately 7 miles, 20 minutes, and 3,460 "it's cheaper to keep her"s later I was back out and ready to explore the upper areas of Chicago with whatever remaining seconds I had left. The first window I jumped into had another rhythm dancing mini-game - none of which, by the by, give you any rewards whatsoever - that the final timer alert mercifully cut short.
Good gravy, y'all. I knew when planning this feature that I'd need to gird myself for the many Super Mario 64/Banjo-Kazooie-imitating "also-jumped"s that showed up on the N64, but this was a rough one to start with. What began as an accessible if not particularly exciting "stages connected by a hub" structure descended into this obtuse, circuitous progression so fast it made my saxophone spin and reaching Chicago and immediately seeing two differently-colored wrenches in my grayed-out list of key items was disheartening to say the least. Is there really anything golden wrenches can do that white ones cannot?
How Well Has It Aged?: I guess about as well as John Belushi did? Look, I realize these tie-in contract developers had a hard time meeting some very strict deadlines and having to sleep at night after being an accomplice in what is essentially a way to grift impressionable grammies into buying games with familiar names for their less-memorably-named grandchildren. As a piece of cultural detritus it has value, of a sort, but as a game it probably should've been left in the past, much like The Blues Brothers license circa 1998.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Practically Zero. Titus Interactive and Virgin Interactive are long gone, Dan Aykroyd's too busy trying to sell crystal skulls full of vodka to aliens to care about producing any more Blues Brothers, and SNL doesn't like reminders of the time when it was still funny. I can't imagine who'd go to bat for this game. I can, however, imagine many who would take a bat to this game, myself included. (I need to lay off the coffee, damn.)
Current Ranking
- Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)
- Diddy Kong Racing (Ep. 6)
- Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)
- Goemon's Great Adventure (Ep. 9)
- Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
- Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
- Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
- Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
- 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)
- Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
- 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)
- Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
- Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
- F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
- F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
- Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
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