A brief panic washed over me when I heard that 64 was dead again, but then I realized what I thought was a 6 was actually a G. Deeply relieved, I've taken once again to the annals of the surprisingly modest Nintendo 64 library to procure, at great psychological distress (not really), another two games in order to scrutinize their respective pedigrees. Kinda like when you check a dog's b-hole at Crufts to make sure it hasn't been juicing, only somehow even more solemnly prestigious than that. If you're unfamiliar with Nintendo's new ploy to have you spend way too much money on games that ceased being relevant twenty years ago 64 in 64 is here on Ninty's unknowing behalf to quality-control the Expansion Pack tier of their Nintendo Switch Online service, a premium subscription tier which offers the only means to play Nintendo 64 games on a modern platform. Or, at least, the only method Nintendo wants you to know about.

Our two games today are both bangers. Roll out the red carpet and buy a whole bunch of lottery scratchcards because this almost never happens. Our first choice sees us once again order our steaks extra Rare and delicious as my self-imposed rule of putting the famous bear-and-bird company's games three entries apart finally brings us back around to what might be their best N64 game yet. Meanwhile, the random selection process managed to net us a gold nugget this week, as opposed to the usual unsavory weeks-old chicken nuggets it digs up from between the sofa cushions.

Before we get into this uncharacteristically positive episode of 64 in 64, I have some rules to relay:

• Each entry covers two N64 games. We used to do three per episode, but it turns out life is precious? And should be enjoyed to its fullest? So now it's two.
• Each entry will be played for sixty-four minutes apiece. The very same number that keeps appearing in game titles for some reason. I'll give you four quarterly updates, spaced sixteen minutes apart, to squeeze in all the progress I have or probably haven't made along with a vibe check.
• Each entry will be judged on its vintage and each will be considered from a more objective historical standpoint to determine how likely it is to join the Switch Online service. This part actually requires me to get off my keister and do some research, so... grain of salt, people.
• No entry will cover a game already on the Switch Online service or is announced to be added in the future. Nintendo gave themselves a backlog stretching into 2023, but you never know with those crafty swine. Like, maybe there's a rider in Jack Black's Mario movie contract to put the super obscure, cancelled-close-to-release Saving Silverman N64 tie-in game on there.

Weird to start a feature at Episode 19, huh? I hear ya. There's eighteen others right here though:

Perfect Dark (Pre-Selected)

• Rare / Rare
• 2000-05-22 (NA), 2000-06-30 (EU)
• 325th N64 Game Released

History: The eighth (of eleven) video game released by Rare for the Nintendo 64 builds on the success they'd found with GoldenEye 007, in particular the unenviable task of making a FPS work with a N64 controller, building missions around not just shootouts but espionage by way of planting bugs or remaining inconspicuous, and an emphasis on highly customizable multiplayer modes that allowed for up to four people to play locally via splitscreen. Perfect Dark forgoes the James Bond license for a new, bespoke near-future universe where an altruistic spy network digs deeper into a conspiracy of possible extra-terrestrial origin involving one of the largest technology corporations in the world, dataDyne. The game makes ample use of its futuristic setting, introducing many weird and wonderful new weaponry and gadgets like the laptop turret gun and the X-ray-enabled Farsight rifle.

In retrospect, I'm not sure why it took me so long to cover Perfect Dark. It's one of my favorite games for the N64—I was obsessive about getting all the high scores on the shooting range and levelling up my multiplayer persona against ever tougher bots—and definitely in the running for the system's best, albeit with heavy competition from Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, and its own forebear GoldenEye 007. The Perfect Dark license is in a weird spot right now, which will be something I'll have to dissect further in the appropriate section below, and I'll admit to being a little apprehensive about seeing how well it's aged given Dan's difficulty reconnecting with GoldenEye and its awkward control scheme with Die Another Friday. As long as I can switch from inverted this time I should be copacetic.

16 Minutes In

Falling into old habits I immediately started with windbag Carrington's tour of his own Institute, which offers various inter-mission activities like looking up the in-game character index or checking out the VR suite. The reason I'm here, though, is the shooting range: as you continue to complete missions more weapons are unlocked to try out and each has a course with three levels of difficulty, starting with stationary targets and then progressing to moving ones that flip around occasionally. There were no achievements back then, but I spent a long while here trying to score gold on each new weapon as it became available. Deciding not to waste any more time—and realizing that my control stick accuracy has deteriorated considerably—I jumped onto the first mission on the lowest difficulty as a warm-up. Goal here is just to find some dude and extract him from dataDyne HQ; like in GoldenEye, harder difficulty settings give you more objectives to complete.

Perfect Dark still controls well for an older FPS, though finer accuracy is a little beyond me unless the target is inanimate (so shooting locks is easy, headshots on guards not so much). Fortunately, the auto-aim is as aggressive as I remember so the game might actually be a little too on the easy side on Agent difficulty. It also looks great, taking full advantage of that expansion pak peripheral for various showy lighting effects coupled with its memorable semi-dystopian aesthetic; the downside being that it can get a bit framey when there's a lot of shooting going on. Oh, and it did have an option to un-invert the camera, thank the gods.

32 Minutes In

First mission was simple enough: descending through the office floors of dataDyne while popping the guards as they show up like a shooting gallery. The ground floor throws you into a pitch battle with about a dozen dudes with stormtrooper masks but the handy auto-aim going for their center mass each time meant they went down in a single shot apiece. I found someone dual-wielding the same silenced Falcon pistol I started with, so that meant even faster murdering. I seem to recall this game having more in the way of pacifist options? Though I guess dataDyne security doesn't count: they are working for the bad guys, after all, though Joanna Dark still sounded way too eager to start cleansing the place during the intro. The second part of this three-stage mission is a little more involved, as it includes searching around these labyrinthine basement labs finding the guy I'm here to extract as well as taking a photograph (or holograph, rather, because future) of a radioactive isotope sample. The latter needs to be done remotely due to the high radiation levels, introducing you to the remote CamSpy drone. You could theoretically use this drone to scout out levels ahead of time too, but I don't recall whether or not guards take issue with it. Since I probably need to return it unscathed to complete the mission I'd rather not risk some goon using it for target practice.

Once this mission's complete and I have access to the main menu again I'm going to bump up the difficulty to Secret Agent. Playing on Agent (easy) seems like the natural first port of call but it removes so many of those secondary objectives that it can feel a bit too plain, on top of not offering a significant challenge. Hiding features and content behind higher difficulty modes might be irksome, especially if you're not a skilled player or have accessibility issues, but it's also the best incentive to push players to go as hard as they feel like they can manage. At least playing these missions on something as chill as Agent lets you wander around and take note of where all the best weapons and energy shields (the body armor equivalent) can be found for when you need them on the higher settings.

48 Minutes In

The third and final section of the dataDyne mission has you ascend back the way you came in, via the building's helipad, though it's a much rougher trip with everyone on high alert. You're given someone to escort—well, "someone" being a sapient AI that resembles a flying N-Gage—and a whole bunch of badass women with shotguns that are employed as the bodyguards of Cassandra DeVries (the dataDyne CEO, who also makes an appearance here to taunt you). Having an all-female team of bodyguards feels like a very Bond supervillain sort of affectation: it makes me wonder if Rare didn't wish they'd done more with Mayday in GoldenEye beyond relegating her to a cameo role in the multiplayer along with everyone's nemesis, Oddjob. The third part of this mission also introduces night vision, which comes into play a few times when the security shuts down the building's lights. I found said night vision goggles towards the end of the second mission in some laboratory dead-end so I'm curious if I would've still had it here if I'd skipped past it back then—you can replay missions in any order so I don't believe there's a continuity factor, so I'd suppose it mostly only serves as foreshadowing.

Man, it's coming back to me just how impressive playing Perfect Dark felt after GoldenEye 007. Not to say the latter disappointed in any aspect, just that it seemed like here the developers were having so much fun coming up with new inventions, new twists, and soaking in a typically Rare amount of overstylized silliness. Dr. Caroll the floating laptop and, much later, Elvis the wisecracking alien sidekick provide to the game the sort of levity GoldenEye mostly lacked outside of sarcastic comments from Ms. Moneypenny in the pre-mission briefings. So too do the guards and their dramatic deaths when you shoot them, selling bathetic lines like "I don't wanna die!" and "She got me!" for all they're worth. It can be a little difficult to take the game seriously at times, despite how sleek and cool it's trying to be.

64 Minutes In

The final mission for today was one of my favorites back then, as you move through the super bougie villa of Daniel Carrington, your boss, in order to rescue him from a dataDyne mercenary team. It's a bit of a maze to pass through, but its contemporary Mediterranean decor is so unlike anything else in the rest of the game which like most dystopian fiction either tends towards the spotless, angular, and futuristic or the grimy and grim (like the following mission, set in the streets of Chicago). This level also starts with a crash course in sniper rifle usage, forcing you to save some luckless Carrington Institute employee brought in as an unarmed negotiator (actually a smokescreen for your own infiltration) by shooting the guards about to deep six her over the villa's jetty. You can then use the sniper rifle to systematically remove all the purple-suited snipers across the villa's rooftops, though I don't think it's a requirement for Agent difficulty and you spend most of the second half of the level indoors regardless.

Speaking of difficulty, I forgot this game does the thing where the higher difficulty levels are locked until the previous ones have been completed. I wasn't far off with suggesting that Agent difficulty is a means of letting you get used to the layouts and surprises of these levels for when you come back to tackle them "for real". Perfect Dark still has unlockable cheats and they don't seem to be linked to completing the levels in a timely fashion (I can't imagine I made anything like a record-breaking speed run with how often I was getting lost); however, I sincerely doubt they're going to let me loose with a rocket launcher unless I'm replaying a difficulty/level combo I've already completed. Either way, I think the next time I'll play this will be with some modern controls and maybe a slight facelift (and a more stable framerate, ideally).

How Well Has It Aged?: Almost Perfect. Despite the antiquated controls this game is super beginner friendly, as evinced by having you play through the campaign on the easiest setting first as well as a really accommodating auto-aim. It also introduced a new idea or feature or weapon on every one of the four stages I played here, whether that was switching to night vision for shootouts in the dark or using a flying spycam to take pictures of experimental tech. All the weapons I kept finding—and there's more hidden around the levels, if I recall—have been added to the shooting range if I wanted a more thorough lesson in using them effectively for either the campaign or multiplayer, and the short missions are perfect for replaying on higher difficulties with tougher goals to complete and deadlier enemies to take down. Also highly recommended for fans of near-future dystopian sci-fi, The X-Files alien conspiracies, or the humble theremin. Another rare (as it were) occasion in this feature where I was sad I had to stop after an hour.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Probable. Perfect Dark has shot up to the most wanted position for the Switch Online library now that Nintendo's confirmed or already released most of the others that regularly hover around fan-made top ten lists for the system. I suspect this upcoming GoldenEye 007 port might be testing the waters for a Perfect Dark to follow. However, there's also the matter of the enhanced Perfect Dark remaster that came out in 2010 for Xbox 360 (it was also the version of Perfect Dark included in the Rare Replay collection, and was recently updated to run at 4k on the Xbox One) and whether Rare/Microsoft intends to work on a Switch version and drop it on the eShop as a standalone thing instead. Might explain why they've been dragging their heels, though I obviously have no firm idea one way or the other. What am I, Jeff Grubb? This is the Guessin' Zone.

Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Random)

• Ubisoft Pictures / Ubisoft
• 1999-10-29 (EU), 1999-11-06 (NA)
• 259th N64 Game Released

History: First released in 1995, Ubisoft's mascot side-scrolling platformer Rayman introduced the world to its floppy-haired eponymous hero as he sets out to rescue a bunch of fairies from a villain with the on-the-nose name of Mr. Dark. Four years later, the franchise was brought to the Nintendo 64 to join other platformer heroes in embracing the new 3D paradigm that emerged after the success of Super Mario 64, adopting that game's more open collectathon format while retaining the original Rayman's idea of acquiring new abilities as the story progressed. Generally considered one of the better 3D platformer adaptations of an existing 2D franchise (especially next to the likes of Earthworm Jim 3D or Bubsy 3D, whose names I really need to stop invoking in case a Candyman scenario occurs), Rayman 2 was ported to several other platforms and even saw multiple remasters for the more powerful consoles to follow. Developers Ubisoft Pictures are better known these days as Ubisoft Montpellier, the home of everything Rayman, Rabbids, and, uh, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon.

I've soured on Ubisoft in the past few years, partly due to their sex crime shenanigans and partly because they're choosing to quintuple down on Assassin's Creed after leaving all their other franchises off on disappointing notes or just abandoning them wholesale a la Beyond Good & Evil 2, but I suppose I can deal with revisiting one of the bigger games they released shortly before their ascension to the headline-grabbing (as well as grabbing many other things) mega-corporation they are today. I'm more familiar with Rayman through the modern 2D reboots Origins and Legends, though I did semi-recently finally get around to playing Rayman Revolution—the enhanced remaster of this sequel—as part of a PlayStation 2-focused feature. This spot could've gone to something a lot worse than some dang ol' Rayman, and honestly it's apropos to do this in the same week that the new Mario + Rabbids sequel comes out (and I'm sure Rayman's totally OK with how they got to collaborate with Mario first).

16 Minutes In

After a brief intro that introduces everyone's favorite lummox Globox and an uncharacteristically saturnine Rayman and concludes with a dramatic escape from the antagonist pirates' flying ship stronghold The Buccaneer, the game begins in earnest as you take in a short, tutorial-heavy level that eases you into the relatively simple controls. Right now all I can do is run, jump, and shoot energy balls, though Rayman does have a few additional features like a glide fall (that hair's good for something after all) and the ability to jump up narrow gaps in walls and cling to overhead vines. Goal here is to find Lums: there's 1000 in the game, spread across multiple levels, and hitting milestones opens up new areas and, unusually for a game of this genre, new lore entries to read about the world Rayman inhabits. I'm now in the first "proper" level of Fairy Glade, with fifty Lums to track down; I've found about four of them so far, so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm here for the remainder of the time limit.

Despite a little sluggishness in his walk cycle—something common to most N64 platformers from the era that weren't Super Mario 64, including the Rare games—Rayman controls well and the game's going to do that Banjo-Kazooie thing of rolling out new abilities as I get further in, ensuring that I don't have to memorize too much all at once. It also looks and sounds great, which was always one of the strengths of the Rayman franchise and its surreal Gallic fairytale vibe. I'm naturally going to want to compare this playthrough to the one I had five years ago with Rayman Revolution, but besides some familiar story beats I think I've forgotten most of it. Unremarkable but solid, I guess is my summation so far.

32 Minutes In

Collecting Lums is actually a secondary goal for right now: our primary mission is to find the fairy Ly, the one who used Globox to free us, and save her from the pirates to recover the rest of our skills. The way to do so is to destroy the machine imprisoning her by yeeting barrels at it, solving our problems Donkey Kong style. The barrel throwing has a neat twist to it, where you can choose to throw a barrel straight up instead of forward: the reason you'd want to do this is to temporarily free your hands to shoot an incoming enemy and then catch the barrel again as it descends. In fact, this block has been nothing but cool little tricks like that, as it's also included Rayman grabbing onto ledges to pull himself up in case your jump was a little short or using the Z trigger to go into a strafing mode to make enemy fire easier to avoid. I've also collected just over half of the Lums in this zone and, with whatever new abilities Ly will provide after this cutscene, hopefully grab the rest and move on before the hour's up.

Not much else to add here except to say that playing Rayman 2 in the context of a N64 feature makes it much more impressive than playing it as part of a PlayStation 2 feature. By the time you get to that console generation it's competing with the likes of Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, and Ratchet & Clank. Absolutely still playable, of course, but it no longer feels like a top-tier contender with that sort of competition. It's also much more linear than I remember it being, with no splits in the path where I've thought "I'll have to come back later with the right ability", but I suppose that minimizes the amount of backtracking and getting lost.

48 Minutes In

The first level concludes shortly after rescuing Ly, who granted us the ability to use the ring-shaped Purple Lums to grapple hook to new areas (strange that I'd never seen one up until then, though), and through a portal opened up by a Teensie: the droopy-looking wizard things that you save en masse in Origins/Legends. The next quest is to find four masks scattered across the world and, with those, contact the all-powerful and deeply reclusive god of the planet for the strength to defeat these mechanical pirates everywhere. Rayman 2 gets its inhospitable marsh level in early, introducing a mystery—some Mike Wazowski looking jagoff in a top hat refuses to let me through the upper path until I learn "the true name of this place", and apparently Swamp Ass Lagoon wasn't an acceptable answer—and a new friend in Ssssam, this snake guy who has me jet-skiing to the next destination. Don't mind admitting that I've taken a few spills from this sequence already, either dying to enemies who were an ambiguous distance away or from trying to divert myself towards collectibles and getting so far away from Ssssam that the tether snaps. I'll beat it eventually. At least a mouthful of swamp water is a nice change of pace?

I was sorely tempted to jump back into that first world again since I didn't find all the Lums, but I dimly recall also being in the same boat last time with Rayman Revolution where you would re-enter that stage from a different one and get the last few items that way. Not a fan of that sort of bait-and-switch, as I can get weirdly obsessive about 100% completion, but I'm letting it slide this time since this won't be anything like a full playthrough. You're on thin ice, Rayman 2.

64 Minutes In

So yeah, that "I'll beat it eventually" turned out to describe almost the entire sixteen minute duration this time, as I faceplanted into wooden posts and mines for what felt like an eon. The tether that you use to hook onto Sssssam (I'm not even counting the "S"es any more) will snap at the slightest provocation despite ostensibly being made of invincible Lum magic and you are very limited in your movement range. You can go left and right and that's about it, and going too far in either direction will either forcefully snap you back (and almost certainly into an obstacle in the way) or abandon you to become swamp piranha food. Add to that a natural instinct to collect every Lum along the way and I can't argue I was having fun for this particular stretch of the game. Even so, it's not like the other platformers I've covered so far don't have their own teeth-pulling sequences to endure, it just so happened that Rayman 2's appeared during my short time with it. I end this session with this bonus challenge I wandered into, where you have to hit time-restoring checkpoints while collecting Lums. Maintaining a trend, I finished with 49 out of 50 Lums despite the fact it was a fully linear A-to-B course. I'm going to need to take so many OCD meds after this.

Rayman 2 mostly remained a delight throughout though. One memorable cutscene has the big bad, Admiral Razorbeard, take out his frustration at Rayman's progress on a poor random Lum that he chomps into, causing the in-game total Lum counter to dip from 1000 to 999. I suppose it sort of pre-empted the dissatisfaction early achievement hunters felt when certain games gave out weird Gamerscore amounts that broke the "ends in a 5 or 0" format. One of the game's best hidden secrets is recovering that lost 1000th Lum, though I've run out of time to do so myself.

How Well Has It Aged?: Like a Fine Cabernet Sauvignon, Such as One That a French Person or Maybe Mike Mahardy Might Enjoy. Rayman exploded after this second game and witnessing its quality first-hand makes it easy to see why. In addition to being a solidly competent take on the nascent 3D platforming genre, there's a distinct level of imagination and variety on display here that would quickly spread to the other western-made 3D platformers looking to break into a space formerly dominated by Nintendo and Rare. It also has that strong cartoonish aesthetic and cheeky personality that no amount of time can tarnish. I might suggest one downside to its inclusion on the Switch Online service is that there are better versions of the same game out there, or that Ubisoft—bereft of ideas as they are these days—might look towards some kind of remastered Rayman compilation in the near future. Maybe all the Rayman games could show up in an arcade somewhere in Beyond Good & Evil 2. Wouldn't that nice? If Beyond Good & Evil 2 were a real thing, I mean.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: D-Ubi-ous. Ubisoft published at least a dozen N64 games and some of those were actually good: along with Rayman 2 you also have Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Sucker Punch's first ever game), Tonic Trouble, and Buck Bumble, the last of which I totally didn't add on there ironically. It's anyone's guess why they and Nintendo haven't hashed out a deal for their N64 catalog, given Ubisoft is a big fan of money and will still be around to sign licensing agreements for one more year at least. It's probably the case that Ubisoft wants all its older games to itself so they can be exclusively sold via the proprietary Ubisoft Connect (formerly Uplay) digital distribution service. Still, we are seeing a Ubisoft/Nintendo co-production being launched before our very eyes this week by way of Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, so who's to say they don't continue that partnership elsewhere?

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. Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
9. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)
10. Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
11. Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
12. Mega Man 64 (Ep. 18)
13. Harvest Moon 64 (Ep. 15)
14. Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
15. Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
16. Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
17. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
18. Snowboard Kids (Ep. 16)
19. Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
20. Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
21. Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)
22. Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
23. BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
24. Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
25. San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
26. Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
27. Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
28. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
29. Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
30. NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
31. Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
32. Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
33. South Park Rally (Ep. 2)
34. Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (Ep. 7)
35. Eikou no St. Andrews (Ep. 1)
36. Rally Challenge 2000 (Ep. 10)
37. Monster Truck Madness 64 (Ep. 11)
38. F-1 World Grand Prix II (Ep. 3)
39. F1 Racing Championship (Ep. 2)
40. Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
41. Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
42. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)