No, you didn't imagine it last week. I'm doing a weekly feature on the Nintendo 64 wherein I play a few games for just over an hour and journal my progress, or lack thereof, for the sake of determining whether it's something Nintendo should consider adding to their Switch Online library of retro titles.
Last week was a struggle due to the randomly chosen selections and this one even more so. The things we do for science, huh?
Here's a recap of the rules:
- There are two or three N64 games. I play each of them for sixty-four minutes. One is pre-selected, the rest are randomly chosen from a master list that includes all 388 Nintendo 64 releases. Yes, even the shogi games. Fingers crossed those won't... you know, I'm not even going to finish that sentence. Why jinx myself this early?
- Four status reports for each, spaced sixteen minutes apart. These include observations about the gameplay, the visuals, my progress, and my mental well-being.
- We answer the following: Do they hang in the Nintendo Switch Online library? Does anyone want them? Does anyone know who still owns their IPs, for that matter?
(Here's Episode 1. I'll figure out the best way to aggregate all these episodes in one place as more are published.)
Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Pre-Selected)
- HAL Laboratory / Nintendo
- 2000-03-24 (JP), 2000-06-26 (NA), 2001-06-22 (EU)
- 312th N64 Game Released
History: Almighty cosmic deity Kirby makes his 3D debut here as he helps his new fairy friend protect a group of crystal shards scattered around the local planets from a shadowy, covetous foe. Like in Yoshi's Story, the game adopts the more old-fashioned left-to-right platforming approach that's enhanced with 3D polygonal graphics for its characters and environments and a Klonoa-like windy path through levels that nonetheless keeps its hero firmly on a 2D plane.
I'd never played Crystal Shards prior to this week. It was one of those big deal N64 games that arrived far too late to hope for an eventual discount before the stores would scrap their N64 section for all their new PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, and GameCube inventories, which also happened to Paper Mario (which I eventually played through Wii VC) and Banjo-Tooie (ditto, except with XBLA). With all the current hoopla about the upcoming Kirby and the Forgotten Land and its post-humanity world filled with monstrous car vore it felt like the right time to fill an important gap in my N64 playing history in much the same way that rusty Volkswagon filled Kirby's impressive gullet. This inclusion is especially timely considering this game is coming to the Switch Online library any day now, and may already be there by the time you read this.
I'll admit that I drifted apart from Kirby after the SNES era, as nothing that came later seemed to match up to Kirby Super Star or Kirby's Dream Course in quality and imagination, though it's highly probable I've slept on many great Kirby games over the years as a result (I did come back briefly for Kirby's Epic Yarn, until my Wii decided it didn't want to read its disc any more).
16 Minutes In
I actually had no idea this game did the Klonoa "2D but not" thing. I figured it was a big open world collectathon with a bunch of crystal shards to find (that bit's mostly true) in part because I tend to think of Kirby as being the testing grounds for a lot of wild, big ideas that Nintendo aren't sure enough about yet to attach to someone important like Mario. Anything too weird gets tossed over to Kirby. If the idea's cute enough, it then subsequently shows up in a Yoshi game, who sits even further down the scraps totem pole like in that prison dystopia movie The Platform.
Talking of platforms, Kirby's gameplay is the same as ever here. The one big difference, besides the 3D graphics, is that Kirby can inhale two abilities at once for a more powerful hybrid ability. This also includes eating two of the same ability for a strengthened version. To compensate, there seems to be fewer abilities than normal: I've only seen the cutter, fire, needle, and shock so far. I imagine rock is coming, given how useful it can be. (Needle + Cutter might be my favorite combo at the moment: Kirby turns his arms into a giant pair of jaws and clamps down on anything above him in what is one of the more unsettling transformations I've seen lately, car mouth aside.)
32 Minutes In
The game's structure is that you have three normal stages and a boss fight per world. The normal stages can have mini-boss fights also, though they'll sometimes have two or none at all. In a cute touch, the first world is Kirby's home planet of Popstar and has Waddle Dee, Adeleine (a new version of the recurring painter boss that throws sketch versions of enemies at you), and King Dedede (or "Three De" as I guess he is now) as early bosses that then join you for the rest of the adventure, occasionally popping up in levels to assist.
There's also three shards in each stage, but you'll sometimes need the right ability to reach them. I've left a few behind because I wasn't sure what ability I needed (this was a recurring thing in my Kirby's Dream Land 3 playthrough too, and fixed in Kirby Super Star's Milky Way Wishes mode where you could access any power after unlocking it - something I hope the series brings back, if it hasn't already). I think if I was playing the game for real, reaching all those crystal shards - which have to be important if the game's named after them - would be the sort of hook I'd need to be invested for the long run.
48 Minutes In
I've been stuck on this last area of the one of the Rock World stages (the second overall world) trying to figure out where the last of its shards are. Despite the original goal of seeing as much of a game in possible in the assigned sixty-four minutes, old habits continue to die hard. Kirby 64's been a delightful if predictable platformer so far, and while I'm trying as many of these combination abilities as possible they're all pretty strong for almost any encounter. Bosses have been a joke and if I've died it's because I keep moving back and forth looking for collectibles and not paying attention to enemies or my health. Like in Super Mario 64, Kirby 64 still has lives but 1-Ups are very plentiful. I can't imagine I'll reach a part of the game where I'd need to wander off and farm them for a while.
64 Minutes In
I'll end on this impressive looking pyramid spaceship thing from Star Fox 64 in the background of what is the last normal stage of Rock World, just before the big boss fight of this chapter of the game. I've been surprised by how often Kirby 64 feels like a launch title: it uses the D-pad rather than the analog sticks (no point using the latter if it's going to stick to being on a 2D plane), is relatively dearth of new ideas and features that a SNES wouldn't have been able to handle, and Kirby's traditionally on the vanguard of any new wave of Nintendo games due to how effective those simple games are at carrying some new untested concepts. It's not a bad game by any stretch and I may well return to it eventually but I know this franchise can do better than a mostly OK Klonoa clone(oa). At least these new monster designs are neat?
How Well Has It Aged?: Pretty well, or at least as well as the 8-bit and 16-bit games have. Due to their cute simplicity, the polygonal graphics haven't aged too badly and the game is full of little touches that allows it to retain that Kirby charm even with the new 3D dynamic, like the way your Popstar friends keep appearing to assist.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Almost certain. I think it was on the vague roadmap Nintendo half-heartedly offered as they piecemeal yet another retro games service as a means of maintaining long-term interest in subscriptions. Maybe it'll show up a week or so before Forgotten Land drops next month to drum up Kirby hype?
Retro Achievements Earned: 0 (of 38). They exist but I had the wrong version of the ROM, I guess. I estimate I would've earned five of them. Weirder achievements include fighting certain bosses with certain abilities equipped (seems kinda annoying? Especially since many of them can't be re-fought).
South Park Rally (Random #1)
- Tantalus Interactive / Acclaim
- 2000-02-28 (NA), 2000-03-03 (EU)
- =306th N64 Game Released
History: The third and final of the Acclaim South Park tie-in games, South Park Rally had the not-particularly-novel idea to turn the TV show into a kart racer. Select from over 20 characters from the earlier seasons, many of which need to be unlocked first, as you complete courses set all across South Park. Sometimes a talking poop will help you.
Confession time: I actually own this game. Not for N64 mind, but for PlayStation 1. Suffice it to say that I was a pretty big South Park fan for the first dozen seasons and willing to risk the constant heartbreak by buying all its terrible Acclaim tie-in games; I had apparently not learned my lesson after the same shoddy treatment Acclaim gave to The Simpsons. Ironically, it was only after I stopped watching the show regularly that some actually good South Park games happened (The Stick of Truth and The Fractured But Whole).
In short, this game is bad and I am not happy it turned up on the randomizer wheel thingie. That's the kind of energy we're bringing into this one.
16 Minutes In
Naturally, the first sixteen minutes with this game was a mostly chaotic mess of random power-ups and figuring out the controls before I was able to settle into a rhythm of regularly exploiting the weak AI to succeed. South Park Rally is distinct from most kart racers in that it abandons being a standard checkpoint chaser almost immediately. While I took a few tries on the first, otherwise normal race the subsequent one where the group was tasked to hold onto an object and complete a single lap of checkpoints was made way easier by simply hanging out near the last checkpoint, grabbing it from its current owner by stunning them with projectile vomit, and finishing the race. None of the other CPU characters had this idea, which makes me wonder why the game thought to include these odd rules if the AI was just going to drive around the course as usual.
32 Minutes In
All right, some compliments. Don't get used to these. I appreciate how the game lets you store three power-ups and use the trigger buttons to alternate between them, given that something like the banana skin equivalent (I think it's that Mexican Staring Frog from Sri Lanka from the hunting episode, though it just looks like a blob with googly eyes) might be useless while in last place but would be worth hanging onto for when you get ahead - however, you'll want to be using any rockets (Chef's chocolate salty balls) and boosts (farts) you find before then. The course design is also open enough that the game can plot new checkpoints through them to create difference races while also using those same courses for the free-for-all combat-oriented challenges like the Valentine's Day Race (pictured) (also, timely) in which you have to shoot every opponent with Cupid's bow and arrow: this means bumping into whoever has them and holding onto them long enough to fwip all your opponents before you lose them again. Of course, the game doesn't bother to tell you whom you've hit so far, but let's not go around asking for the moon here.
48 Minutes In
After yet another "hold onto a thing" race, this time a pair of soiled underpants because hoo-mor, I reached what has proven to be my nemesis: the Read-A-Book Day Race. In the ever ongoing fight against illiteracy the goal of this race is to recover chickens before the Chicken Lover bookmobile driver can get his hands on them, sweeping them up and delivering them to a single checkpoint so they can be banked. Actually catching the chickens is enough of an ordeal, finding the four you're permitted to carry at once without getting hit and losing them all is nigh impossible. Yet, for perhaps the first time so far in this game, the AI has proven to be exceptionally skilled at achieving the objective. I've regularly seen them complete the race with the full ten chickens needed - which requires at least three stops at the checkpoint - while I'm still hunting around for my third overall and reversing because I just breezed past its tiny polygonal model again.
My new strategy is camping out near the checkpoint and sniping them off the AIs that drive by, but that's almost as tough as trying to hit the chickens. At least I won't have to do much.
64 Minutes In
All right, that "camp and steal" strategy worked way too well. No-one else could bank a single chicken on my next attempt. It was nice to have the illusion of challenge for a brief moment though. I neglected to mention that the game is one long championship - fourteen races in a row - and you have a limited number of continues represented by silver dollars, though you can basically trash a race looking for the secret extra silver dollars hidden across each track. Given that you usually spend one to make one, it's only really worth doing this if you're going for the Retro Achievements attached to them.
The next race, an Easter egg hunt (huh, I guess the chickens came first after all), had the same premise but didn't allow stealing which left me SOL. I barely managed to win by sticking to some of the heavier spawn areas before the time limit. Since it was also the seventh race, I somehow managed to beat half the game in an hour? And yet I feel no inclination to beat the other half, weird.
How Well Has It Aged?: Ehhhh. I think the jokes have probably aged worse than the game has. There are some encouraging ideas here, creating distinct challenges for every race even if most of them are just "hold onto a thing," and stacking power-ups probably should be in more kart racers going forward balance be damned. After all, it's not like anyone plays this type of racing game expecting it to be fair. It does well enough by the show and looking at some of the unlock requirements for the other characters you've got some T.T.-level bullshit to deal with that would certainly extend the game's otherwise short runtime. It's also sluggish, ugly, way too busy, has imbalanced CPU difficulty, and finite continues is just asinine considering how many of these races depend on lucky spawns and that they aren't separated into smaller "cups."
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Remote. Again, it's a case of negotiating new licensing rights on top of whether or not it's worth the trouble to port the game, which in this case it almost certainly isn't. The rights to make South Park games have since passed to Ubisoft but I've no idea if that also means they own the IPs to these older Acclaim games. A Canadian firm called Liquid Media Group bought many of Acclaim's IPs in 2018, including a bunch of Taito stuff they'll need to talk to Square Enix about, but that list didn't include any South Park games. Chances are they've long been scattered to the four flatulent winds.
Retro Achievements Earned: 11 (of 62). Along with completing races for the first time, there's separate achievements for unlocking characters, finding the secret silver dollars, finding a special Pinkeye power-up whenever applicable, and some expert-level challenges like somehow having twice as many continues as you started with. I did not anticipate the game having this degree of achievement support, frankly.
F1 Racing Championship (Random #2)
- Ubisoft / Ubisoft
- 2000-08-12 (EU)
- =367th N64 Game Released
History: F1 Racing Championship is the third game in Ubisoft's Racing Simulation series of semi-realistic driving games. It's a multiplatform release too, appearing late enough that it managed to receive PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast ports along with PlayStation 1 (the original platform), N64, PC, and the Game Boy Color (going to assume that one has fewer features in it). Reviews at the time suggest it was competent enough but pointed to a number of technical flaws that prevented it from becoming a bigger success. Having the F1 license probably didn't help entice too wide an audience either, explaining why it never saw a North American release.
Sadly, I don't think Drew and Danny's Shift+F1 podcast ever covered F1 Racing Championship. However, Danny did LP the other, even worse N64 F1 game - F1 Pole Position 64 - for the Shift+F1 YouTube channel. Knowing my luck, expect to see that game in the next episode.
It perhaps goes without saying that this is my first time with F1 Racing Championship, as I am absolutely not a fan of simulation-style racing games. I don't know what kind of curse has befallen me this week that I got two racing games through the random selection process and neither of them were Diddy Kong Racing (hell, I'd take an Extreme-G or F-Zero X), but either way I did not go into this one with high hopes.
16 Minutes In
Fortunately, this game has options for both arcade and simulation, so I don't have to worry about people yelling in my ear to move into the pit stop lane because the high-performance nuts under my driveshaft are about to blow, and it even offers automatic transmission which I leapt upon immediately because F1 cars have like sixteen gears on a light day and I can't be expected to pay attention to all that. I soon failed to qualify on the Malaysian course - I managed to get as far as 14th out of 22 - but was doing quite well on the German one (which I assumed was the Nürburgring, based on what little Top Gear I've seen) until I was confused by the pit stop lane, hit a brick wall at the end of it, and had to start the race over.
One pro-tip I've picked up is that, when taking corners, you can go as fast as you want if someone's just ahead of you because you can let them absorb all your momentum for you. At that point it becomes their problem. I'm not sure if that's a tactic in actual F1 grand prix but I'd imagine so given how effective it is. I also noticed the game's races typically have four laps each instead of at least 50: I can only imagine the conversation back at Ubisoft about whether or not they'd seriously make players go through that much racing all at once, inadvertently striking upon what makes F1 so goshdarn tedious in the first place. Well, only 48 more minutes of this...
32 Minutes In
All right, so I struck out a few times but I think I've got a better chance on this German track than on the first one I tried. As you can see from the above screenshot I'm getting closer to the front of the pack, and since these are qualifiers I only need to stay in the top six to "win." Unfortunately, hitting a bad corner means occasionally spinning out your vehicle, and about one in four times your car will spin and then suddenly come to a stop facing the opposite direction which almost guarantees you dropping at least five positions. There's no "reset to track" or any of that baby shit in these older F1 games and each race I've attempted - that I didn't just immediately reset because of stupid choices - has been over five minutes long. That's a recipe for frustration right there.
But hey, let's focus on the positive. I think it's neat that your tires will temporarily be covered in dirt or grass if you go off-track and then slowly fade back to the regular dark grey as you keep driving. It's a nice little visual touch that promotes the stronger sense of realism that the driving genre as a whole was pushing towards.
48 Minutes In
I managed to finish in 3rd place in that race that the 32 minute screenshot came from, making the German track the first one I've successfully qualified for. Only three more to go! (Of this qualifier set, at least: the full game has sixteen courses.) Brazil was next but instead of whizzing around the track going a brazilian miles per hour as expected, the incredibly twisty course was more of a technical challenge. One that I was ill-equipped to deal with. The final of this set of four is a track (Silverstone?) in Great Britain (you can just say "UK," game) and it seems fairly doable: the screenshot here was taken after finishing in 10th place, only four spots away from qualifying.
Keeping things posi, the mechanic where you can see car models ahead of you even when there's barriers in the way is another cool nod to the real-life magical powers of farsight that F1 drivers are said to develop early in their careers in order to effectively take corners at unbelievable speeds. I believe it's one of many classes taught at the enchanted F1 school of Hogwhoosh's. (Sorry, I think my sanity might be ebbing away.)
64 Minutes In
I eventually qualified on Silverstone, taking third place again, and managed to do yet another 180 spin during my fourth (fifth?) replay of Malaysia before realizing there was way more game to check out beyond the meagre smattering of courses in this first stage of the championship. I spent the last few minutes of the timer taking on the Japanese Suzuka circuit on my lonesome, just enjoying the twists and turns without some jerkass trying to overtake me with that insistent buzzing all F1 cars seem to produce.
I neglected to mention but the driver I chose was Damon Hill as he's one of the few British F1 drivers I can name (David Coulthard and Eddie Irvine are here too). Though the way I was driving, he was more like Demon Hell! Which... I guess... is the version of Hell with more demons in it than usual? Whatever, I'm done with the game. Time to drive this thing to McD's and pick up some nuggs.
How Well Has It Aged?: Not so well. I'm far from an authority on the subject but I'd imagine a modern F1 game is probably a much better choice, both at delivering the level of realism you'd want but also in pure gameplay terms. More track and vehicle options off the bat, more quality-of-life tweaks, more F1 talent rosters that aren't twenty years out of date, et cetera. F1 Racing Championship is competent enough at what it does I suppose, and scores points by having no blue shells in sight.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Negligible. Unless there's a huge crowd fascinated by the 1999 season of F1 in particular I'm not sure how a NSO port of this ever gets off the ground. At least Ubisoft is still around to talk to about licensing rights. Well, for now. We'll see how they're faring after another year of clunkers and scandals.
Retro Achievements Earned: N/A.
Current Ranking
- Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)
- Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
- Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
- South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
- Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
- F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
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