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64 in 64: Episode 31

By Mento June 27, 2023 2 Comments

Well, well, well, if it isn't that rarest of rare scenarios: an episode of 64 in 64 where I'm having as much fun playing the two Nintendo 64 games as I am writing about them. However, I will be taking my first steps down a potentially dark path by breaking an unspoken rule of sorts, so this entry might prove to be... controversial? At any rate I could use a respite from the heat and high humidity this month so I'm glad I'm not going to have to flopsweat my way through another sumo game or something even more demanding. Will that translate to a better episode? Probably not, but I don't do this for you guys. Wait, no, I absolutely do, please come back! ...Aaaah, rats. Guess I gotta pencil in something impenetrably stupid for next month. Are there any more grimdark fighters that control entirely with the C-buttons left in the list? I guess I'll mac that far lane when I get to it.

Speaking of July, I'll be bringing back my Game OVA feature in the coming weeks so it seemed prudent to do some of that whole cross-feature promotional business and talk about all the anime licensed games that hit the N64. Not surprisingly, since most licensed games are made on the cheap and that often means only having enough resources to develop for the market leader console (that would be the Sony PlayStation, which I'm sure saw hundreds), there actually aren't too many N64 games featuring anime licenses. In fact, I could only find seven of them, and three of those are Doraemon. Now I like Doraemon as much as the next robot cat fanatic but monopolizing half the anime games on the system seems a bit excessive. Needless to say, these are all Japanese-only releases so lord help us and my extremely limited ability to read Kanji if they actually turn up on here. They are as follows (with the order they were released in brackets):

Doraemon: Nobita to 3-Tsu no Seireiseki (20th): The first N64 Doraemon game. Doraemon's a robot cat, as previously stated, and his adventures with the human boy Nobita and his friends usually have an educational, grade-schooler vibe to them. The subtitle means "Nobita and the Three Fairy Spirit Stones".
Super B-Daman: Battle Phoenix 64 (117th): B-Daman were these toys that had recesses in their stomachs that you could use to fire marbles at other B-Daman toys, or really anything you wanted pelted with marbles. The toyline included various extant licenses like Bomberman but Super B-Daman was a bespoke canon that later saw manga and anime of its own, tying into this game.
Doraemon 2: Nobita to Hikari no Shinden (163rd): The second N64 Doraemon game. The subtitle means "Nobita and the Temple of Light". I guess that means they visit a Temple of Light.
Neon Genesis Evangelion (218th): One of the weirder tie-ins, this N64 game based on Hideaki Anno's deeply strange exercise in deconstructing mecha anime uses a lot of badly compressed clips from the show. I forget how it actually plays, but I'm not too interested in finding out either.
Super Robot Taisen 64 (260th): Super Robot Wars 64 isn't so much based on an anime but based on all the anime, at least all the ones with mecha in them. It's the only SRT/SRW game for the system and one of its few strategy RPGs, so for those reasons I'm a little curious to check it out. I still imagine it'll be inscrutable on multiple fronts though (mechanically, linguistically, and culturally).
Nintama Rantarou 64 Game Gallery (317th): Nintama Rantarou is like Naruto for babies (or, well, smaller babies) and was an incredibly popular kids' show that saw many video game tie-ins; five on the SNES alone. This sure looks like a no-budget quickie mini-game collection.
Doraemon 3: Nobita no Machi SOS! (332nd): The third and last N64 Doraemon game. The subtitle means "Nobita's Town SOS!". Sounds like Nobita's town is probably in trouble, then.

If anime is for jerks, then so is disregarding the rules. We better restate them here for the record:

Each episode of 64 in 64 features two N64 games (sometimes three) which I play for exactly sixty-four minutes apiece: no more, no less. Except sometimes it's a bit more because I forgot to hit "go" on the stopwatch app. Whoopsie-dumples.
I picked one of these by the way. The first one, specifically, with the "(Pre-Select)" next to its name. I did not pick the second, "(Random)", because my self-loathing has yet to reach that tier. Maybe one day! Fingers crossed!
Each game then receives four quarterly updates taken while playing and rundowns of where it's from, how well it's aged, and how likely it is to see another day in the sun via the Nintendo Switch Online service. Typical answers to all three, respectively, are "some manner of hole", "not great", and "not great".
We're not touching any game already available on Nintendo Switch Online or announced to be added because that would make things too easy and/or too fun. This is serious research we're doing here. Fortunately, it looks like Nintendo's completely given up on adding more N64 games to the service so we should be in the clear for any potential double-booking. I'm sure "fortunately" is the adverb I wanted to use there.

If you'd like to check out the earlier episodes, you can do so either through the ranking list at the very end or this table right here:

Episode 1	Episode 2	Episode 3	Episode 4	Episode 5
Episode 6	Episode 7	Episode 8	Episode 9	Episode 10
Episode 11	Episode 12	Episode 13	Episode 14	Episode 15
Episode 16	Episode 17	Episode 18	Episode 19	Episode 20
Episode 21	Episode 22	Episode 23	Episode 24	Episode 25
Episode 26	Episode 27	Episode 28	Episode 29	Episode 30
Episode 31	Episode 32	Episode 33	Episode 34	Episode 35

Forsaken 64 (Pre-Select)

Iguana Entertainment UK / Acclaim
1998-04-30 (NA), 1998-05-01 (EU)
=93rd N64 Game Released

History: In a move typical of Acclaim, Forsaken is a game that was very much aping a then-flavor of the month, which would be Parallax's trailblazing 1995 "six-degrees-of-freedom" first-person shooter Descent and its 1996 sequel Descent II. To set it apart a little bit, Acclaim gave their particular spin a post-apocalyptic flavor and an excellent, suitably late-'90s drum-n-bass/EDM soundtrack from The Swarm, a musical project co-founded by UK TV composer Dominic Glynn. However, in a move very atypical of Acclaim, Forsaken's actually a pretty decent clone that comes close to surpassing its inspiration. It even received a serviceable N64 port, which was extremely rare for the PC-to-N64 FPS pipeline that also included the mediocre likes of Duke Nukem 64, Doom 64, and Hexen 64. It's a minor miracle that an N64 Acclaim game could rise above its station, but perhaps that's not giving enough credit to the developers Iguana UK (previously Optimus Software, later Acclaim Studios Teesside) who did some great work here. The only other N64 game they developed, far as I can tell, is 1999's Shadow Man so we might yet bump into them again. For those keeping track, there were a staggering 31 N64 games published by Acclaim and this is the third of those we've covered after Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. and South Park Rally, both random picks that are hovering around the bottom half of the rankings. (Incidentally, Acclaim were the third biggest publishers for the system, after Midway (38) and Nintendo (58) with Konami (29) in a close fourth place.)

Forsaken 64 is a game I swore I owned at one point, or maybe just rented a lot, but regardless it was one of my old favorites for the system and is one of the few remaining games with that sort of personal connection I've yet to feature here. I guess I still have this weird determination to prove that the UK gaming industry could produce globally acclaimed (so to speak) games if we really put our minds to it, beyond the Rare platformers everyone already knows. That said, it's been a while since I last played and who knows how well its multi-directional control stick movement has held up over the years; it's certainly made other N64 FPS games harder to revisit. Only one way to know for sure.

16 Minutes In

Tanks hit hard, but you know what they can't do? Fly. Just hover right over them, they can't do shit.

Man, I forgot how intense this game can be. Enemies are flying at you in all directions and I'm over here panicking because I'm still getting used to the controls. Or re-used to, I suppose. The Control Stick is used for camera movement—unavoidable, given the C-buttons are inadequate for quickly navigating a fully three-dimensional space—the A and B buttons produce forward and backwards momentum, respectively. The C-buttons instead are used for strafing in those directions; a control scheme that works perfectly when the C-buttons are remapped to a modern controller's second analog stick. That leaves Z and the right bumper for your two weapons, the types of which vary depending on what you've picked up (the game has a lot of weapon types). Adjusting to the six-directional movement takes remarkably little time, but it's nigh-impossible to use the C-buttons, camera stick, and face button accelerators simultaneously—it's like patting your head, rubbing your stomach, and scratching your butt at the same time—but maybe that's just something I either get used to trying to juggle, or I alternate between moving around normally to just strafing around in circles if I happen to meet a large enemy force or boss that needs whittling down.

Forsaken's mission structure is essentially a meritocracy: you get different missions at the first main split depending on how well you do, with each split potentially splitting again further down the road. I guess the idea is that you have an "easy" campaign if you limp through that first mission like the neophyte you are and once you've completed all of its missions you can go right back to the start and effortlessly stomp it with all the practice you've had, leading to the harder routes. That first mission simply involved destroying all the enemies—testing both your skill in combat and the ease in which you get around the 3D levels quickly—while the second involved carrying a nuke to the heart of a base and then escaping in time. I'm now on the third map, which looks to be a similar hunt to the first.

32 Minutes In

The mission select monitor, which I guess might double as a virtual pool table. Nuke is the first mission, I'm here because I game over'd.

Ah. Something else that I forgot is that this game uses an extra life system rather than restarting the current mission; it means that you can quickly head back to where you died to recover all your power-ups without resetting the stage, but you can only die so many times before you hit a game over that wipes all your progress. That's what just happened to me on the fourth mission, which had me chasing down a boss called the Metatank but dying before I could reach him. It simply means I'm going to have to be a little more judicious in future playthroughs, taking corners carefully and not allowing myself to become overwhelmed by enemy firepower; if all else fails, just fly backwards out of there and try to snipe them from the corridors. Pride? Pride will just get you killed in the post-apocalypse. That, and a whole bunch of lasers being shot at you.

Needless to say because the screenshot above already says it, but I've had to start over. I did bump up my initial lives count via the options menu and with a more cautious approach to levels I'm hoping to at least make it through the second half of this 64 minutes in one piece. One benefit of restarting is that I now have access to the second campaign set, having replayed the first level with a better result, though I'm not sure jumping into a harder mission set is necessarily going to be conducive to my survival. Still, it's better than repeating missions 2 through 4 again.

48 Minutes In

I've always appreciated the level design in these six-degree games. The way it hides passages and secret areas by putting them above or below you in unexpected ways.

Dang is this game tougher than I remember. Enemies can really deplete your health quick if you're not constantly moving, and having to mentally make the switch to strafe mode over forward momentum takes the old gray matter precious milliseconds I could be spent not getting vaporized by enemy drones. I thought I was real hot shit going with the harder missions after clearing the first with a better score, but that alternative second mission really opened my eyes to how unprepared I was for the game's harder content. It pits you in a battle against multiple other bounty hunters, essentially CPU with the same strengths and weapon variety you have albeit none of the ammo limitations, to chase after this golden orb and escape safely. Those AI opponents made mincemeat out of me in seconds, zipping around so fast I could barely react to their presence. For the sake of my own ego I'll opt for the possibility that these battles are meant for a player that has already beaten the game's easier set of missions and will leave them well enough alone for now.

So a few extra wrinkles I've discovered, besides the whole limited lives thing. One, your secondary weapon has a strict ammo limit, which I already knew about, but the same goes for your primary weapon too. If you deplete the energy meter that your primary weapon runs off, it'll cause its rate of fire to plummet and make you a sitting duck. You have to replenish it with certain purple collectibles (the shield recharges are also purple, but it's no big deal to confuse the two as you'll regularly need both). The other thing is how frequently enemies will collide with you in their dying moments, vindictively dipping your health with these kamikaze attacks, necessitating some distance between you and your enemies: getting too close means taking the brunt of their firepower and this posthumous collision damage both, and that's been a major cause of many deaths so far. For as tough as Forsaken is, there's so much I'm constantly learning about it—between enemy behaviors, more efficient controlling, and effectively using each weapon type—that I can see it being the type of game that has a small amount of content that you might still spend hours eventually mastering. Feels like I'm going to hit a figurative ceiling before too long though, as opposed to all the literal ones I keep flying into.

64 Minutes In

Check out that health bar on the top left. Skin of my teeth stuff. In retrospect, the sexy lady riding a jetbike probably wasn't a choice that offered a whole lot of defensive power.

With that, I manage to make it a little further than in my first attempt and can rest easy knowing some improvement has been made. That fourth mission's Metatank boss, by the way, is dropped directly into the starting room for that orb mission. It's just there for you to handle with whatever weak starting weapons you have, so your options are to peck away at its health slowly in an internecine battle that will unlikely end well for you or just pick a direction and flee until you find a few power-ups. Besides the starting weapon Pulsar, which has some decent firepower once you've found some weapon pods to upgrade it, there's also: the Suss-Gun for a much higher rate of fire (i.e. the spray-and-pray option); the Transpulse for shots that ricochet around making them devastating in narrow spaces; the Trojax, which lets you charge up powerful shots ideal for sturdier enemies like turrets and bosses; and the Beamlaser, which I only saw once, that's hard to aim but punches holes through anything. And those are just the primary weapons: your subs tend to be a mix of rockets and mines, effective in the right situations.

Feels like I was finally getting to grips with the game just as the hour's up, which is definitely promising. What's more is that the game finally let me save after clearing that fourth mission, suggesting the game does have a more permanent means of progress. No idea if losing my remaining lives means being sent back to the save file with a full set or just however many I had when the save was made; if it's the latter, it might be prudent to keep replaying those first four missions until I can do so without dying once. Regardless, we're done here.

How Well Has It Aged?: Foresightfully. Forsaken still plays better than it has any right to, as a N64 port of a PC FPS that's a little more complex than the usual on-foot stuff. Actually adjusting to an environment that goes up and down as often as left, right, forward, and backwards is intuitive in part because the N64's controls are serendipitously suited for the game but also because of small quality-of-life tweaks like how the game will frequently auto-shift your vehicle around so that you're always properly oriented; without this, navigation might get confusing fast. There's a harsh but not insurmountable challenge level, a wide array of power-ups and weapons to find if you're crafty, enemy types that might require fast reflexes and damage control one moment and sneaking around corners and lips for a better vantage point the next (especially turrets, which are just too destructive to fight face on), and a handful of mission types that generally bounce between eliminating all enemies, taking out a boss, or dropping a time bomb and quickly evacuating.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Forlorn Hope. If Forsaken comes to Switch it won't be as part of the N64 Switch Online library but instead directly as a retail game, since it was remastered not too long ago by the ancient FPS restoration crew Nightdive Studios and released on both PC and Xbox One. The Switch feels like it would be a natural home for this remake too, between a revisiting Nintendo fan audience with fond memories of the N64 port and being able to adapt the system's gyroscopic controls in-game somehow to give it an edge over its contemporaries. Easier said than done, I suppose.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. Not supported.

40 Winks (Random)

Eurocom / Piko Interactive
2019-04-15 (NA/EU)
389th? N64 Game Released

History: 40 Winks is a 3D platformer from Eurocom that sees two protagonists, a boy named Ruff and a girl named Tumble, who in addition to obvious parental abuse going by their names alone are also in the unenviable position of being the only two capable of saving Dreamland from the villainous insomniac Nitekap, who in true Grinch fashion is determined not to let anyone else get a good night's sleep if he can't. (And here I thought Spyro the Dragon was the first insomniac platformer.) Worth noting is that, while the game did release on the PlayStation, its N64 port did not come to fruition despite being far enough along that review copies were sent out to (and reviewed by) various gaming magazines of the day. However, in 2019, Piko Interactive did eventually make good on the promise of a N64 40 Winks via a Kickstarter campaign to get carts manufactured.

Developers Eurocom is one of those British companies like Tiertex or US Gold that made most of their early scrip taking Japanese and American arcade games and converting them to the weird home computers us Euros were so fond of, later translating that porting experience to consoles once the Atari ST/Amiga markets dried up. They were also behind a few Midway N64 ports like Cruis'n World, Hydro Thunder, Mortal Kombat 4, and War Gods as well as the two Duke Nukem N64 games for GT Interactive (which also published this game, or were set to) so I have no doubt we'll encounter one of their "legit" releases eventually. (Did you know the "GT" in GT Interactive stood for "GoodTimes"? I sure didn't.)

So here it is, our first ever 64 in 64 candidate that was technically never an N64 game. At least, not in the sense that it was commercially available on the system back when the N64 was still active, though seeing a physical release so many years later does perhaps mean it qualifies all the same. I figured it was worth adding to the list regardless, along with about ten other close-to-done games sourced from Unseen64 and elsewhere, but we'll have to see if this "breaking of the seal" was a mistake or not. It's not like a whole bunch of the random picks I've played so far felt particularly complete either. (Some inside baseball here: I was this close to tossing a few homebrew and ROM hacks on the list too, but eventually thought better of it. I've actually been playing a Banjo-Kazooie/Ocarina of Time mash-up lately that's more fun than it has any right to be.)