Bienvenintendo everyone and a warm welcome back to 64 in 64: a monthly reminder that the Nintendo 64 maybe enjoys more nostalgic-empowered acclaim than it perhaps deserves. Well, considering the two games of Episode 43 there's no "perhaps" about it. As someone who rocked a N64 instead of a PlayStation throughout most of that era (and I thank the PS2 for being backwards compatible) there's some competitive part of me that always wants to go to bat for it, championing the first-party games that were trailblazers and nonpareils while occasionally making excuses for, well, almost everything else. We're getting close to what may or may not be the end of this feature, and it's starting to become evident how little there is left I can elevate as a timeless classic. There's still a few, fortunately, and despite the Pre-Select whiff this time I feel confident in the remaining slate. I guess the point I'm making here is that I'm not counting the little guy out just yet, even if in some ways it feels like the writing is on the wall.
Instead of writing on the wall, how about I write all over your screens some more as I explicate on the rules here:
- 64 in 64 has two N64 games played for 64 minutes each. I selected one, and I let a computer pick the other. I tried to get When I'm Sixty-Four as our official theme here but apparently licensing The Beatles music is, like, suuuuper expensive? Who knew.
- As I struggle with each game I'll provide, in real-time, quarterly updates on how this power hour(-plus) is proceeding. That'll be preceded with some historical background on the game's development and my own prior experience with it, if any, and followed by musings on how well the game's held up and its chances of making it onto Nintendo's Switch Online retro gaming catalog. If I can interject more yapping into any given project, you better believe I'm gonna. Just look at how long this bulletpoint has already become if you need proof.
- For reasons that I swear are not masochism-related, we're not playing anything already in the N64 library of the Switch Online service. Well, unless we've already played it. As of... today? (how unusually topical of me) that now includes Perfect Dark (which I've already covered) and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (which can already be bought on Switch via its Nightdive remaster).
Those are the rules, and here are the past episodes:
Starshot: Space Circus Fever (Pre-Select)
- Infogrames / Infogrames
- 1998-12-04 (EU), 1999-06-29 (NA)
- =158th N64 Game Released
: Not content to let Gallic rivals Ubisoft take all the 3D platformer glory with their Rayman sequel, Infogrames created their own colorful collectathon with Starshot: Space Circus Fever. The protagonist is the titular Starshot, a juggler with the also titular Space Circus, who ends up tasked with saving said circus from crushing financial debt as well as the machinations of their chief competition Virtua Circus (I suppose the Nintendo/Sega rivalry was still pretty prevalent at this time). To do this, he must travel across various worlds to find new performers for the Space Circus in order to raise its popularity while also procuring the fuel needed to keep the Space Circus trucking. After Starshot's debut on the N64 the game was soon ported to PC as well and presently can be bought from Steam due to the revitalization efforts of Pixel Games UK.
By 1998 Infogrames was already a major player in the European gaming market and had around this time started a string of ambitious acquisitions and mergers that would make Embracer balk at the imprudence. Prior to purchasing GT Interactive, DMA Design (which they immediately sold to Take-Two for peanuts; how'd that work out for you?), Legend Entertainment, Beam Software, or Atari (their future namesake) but after buying British shovelware shovelers Ocean Software, 1998 saw them poised to conquer a lot of European game distribution channels. They're still at it after some several decades spent regrouping, having only recently acquired retro gaming paragons Nightdive Studios and Digital Eclipse (and MobyGames, for some reason) to establish themselves as something akin to an archivist of ancient video game lore. You might still be able to buy an Atari speaker hat from them if you're lucky.
There aren't many non-licensed 3D platformers for the N64 that I have zero experience with, so I'll admit to putting this up for review purely to slake my own curiosity. Maybe Infogrames took their rivalry with Ubisoft (which is mostly in my own head) seriously enough to really shoot for a Rayman-killer but the more realistic side of me suspects this was some cheap and cheerful attempt to cash in on a burgeoning trend, a thin conjecture that I base only on Infogrames's entire output past and present. It's always best to approach a bright and happy game about a space circus with the right amount of dry cynicism, I've always believed.
16 Minutes In
Where do I even begin? I guess the biggest circus elephant in the room is that Starshot plays like Starshit (you like that? I've been taking AVGN webinars). It's stuttery, the camera controls are Byzantine and follow the uncommon convention of being inverted both vertically and horizontally, no matter how far back you set it the camera will gradually zoom all the way into Starshot's nape, the draw distance is enigmatically inconsistent, all the collectibles (including ammo, which you need to attack anything) are just basic color-coded floating polygons, and the enemies in this initial beach area all seem to be invincible. I might have accidentally ticked off the locals by stomping on some sand castles, as characters I could talk to previously are now trying to kill me. The game initially has you investigating who destroyed the Space Circus's "missile parade"—a rocket they ominously fire at planets in order to advertise themselves—and this little prologue serves to introduce the two problems that are Virtua Circus and our own money troubles. One of our jobs is to procure "mega fuel" which, similar to many other collectathon platformers, is the game's way of gating off future areas until I've found the requisite number of floating knick-knacks.
My hopes aren't high for this one, especially with the amount of talking from the jump (and yeah, instead of voiceover they're all doing the Banjo-Kazooie noises in French accents), but I hope it starts earning its keep before too long with some more compelling level design and maybe a few traversal upgrades. One mechanic I appreciate is a much simpler version of the Super Mario 64 triple jump: here, you only have to hold the jump button down to launch yourself higher and higher (to a limit).
32 Minutes In
You ever play a game that's so far off the mark it's kinda baffling? Like they tried to reverse engineer a popular game and couldn't get anywhere near the same ballpark? That's what playing Starshot feels like. Like an imitation that wasn't just poorly replicated but deeply confusing on top of that when factoring in the decisions that had to be made. There's some cool ideas buried deep within here: I just found a way to fly across the world similar to the golden feathers of Banjo-Kazooie but activating it requires some finite resources that aren't easy to find and then you have to double tap the jump button while in mid-air to toggle it and then not press anything to keep it going: the intuitive way would be to hold the button down to continue flying and letting go when you wanted to stop, but it's the other way around here and it takes a while to adjust. You can summon a map, but like many functions it involves holding down the otherwise useless Z-trigger while pressing some combination of buttons, in this case Start. Precision controlling is kinda rough, much like everything else, as I may have spent at least half of this segment trying to jump across a series of surfboards that embedded themselves into cliffs.
Conversely, there's still the occasional QoL innovation that makes the entirely un-player-friendliness of the main controls that much more bewildering. For instance, besides the collectible mega fuel, every other pick up—ammo, health, and flying juice—respawns once you get far enough away, making it easier to restock. The game has no extra lives, which is shocking that it took the genre this long to discard what was no longer necessary, and instead has plenty of checkpoints for you to hit (and you can use any of them to leave the planet too, if you're revisiting for collectibles). I can only say that the dev team whipped up a design document full of great concepts and then gave themselves (or, more likely, the suits did) half the time and the budget they needed to bring it all to satisfactory fruition. Anyway, I'm determined to leave this beach planet behind to check out some other locations before we're through here but all the annoying fish and the level design are working hard to foil that plan.
48 Minutes In
This segment finally saw us finish up our business on Tensuns, the beach planet, by sabotaging Virtua Circus by destroying all four legs of its spaceship via shark mishap. The enemies started getting a lot more aggressive as you got closer to the ship, with robots flying out of reach just peppering you with bullets to the extent that you were better off just constantly moving rather than sticking around to fight (they all respawn as regularly as the pick-ups anyway). The story kicked in immediately after, with more of Starcash (the Space Circus ringleader) conversing with his many minions in the little hub area of the game in scenes that go on far too long.
Whenever control resumes, you can talk to all the floating hologrammatic heads in the hub area for various tidbits of info: one tells you the current mission, the second gives you a tourist pitch for the current planet in case there's any dangers you need to be aware of, one tells you if the current planet still has collectibles to find (but not how many of course), and the last is a literal coin-flipping robot in case you were indecisive about whether to keep doing the main story or switch to collectible-backtracking. Clicking on either the planet hologram in the center or on Starshot does the same thing—resumes the game—so I'm not sure why we needed both.
64 Minutes In
Our next goal is to head to the Killer Expo planet to find (read: steal) a lifeform detector to track down the galaxy's rarest inhabitants and use them as part of our show. I figured they'd pitch this part of the game more in the vein of "let's do impromptu auditions and see if we can find anyone talented enough to join us" but this approach makes it seem like they're looking to put together an intergalactic freak show. This comes after a sea mine-looking robot shows up on board the ship and drills itself into place, telling the crew that they either have to pay "three million omnidollars" in ten days or it'll explode. Glad to see banks have chilled out a skosh in the distant future.
I got a little ways into Killer Expo—all I saw were loading bays for ships, so no sci-fi version of Kentia Hall sadly—and then encountered a ship that was full of plague victims, with the masked doctors outside warning me away from the quarantine zone. Since I had nowhere else to go, though, I went inside after gunning down a bunch of medical professionals (glad we're the heroes) to find that there were just a few collectibles in the ship and a big door telling us to buzz off until we found a weapon with more oomph: I'm guessing this might be a backtracking thing, either that or it was some sort of adventure game puzzle I was in no mood to parse. A mysterious tutorial balloon appeared behind the quarantined ship once I got back out (I swear it wasn't there before) and it told me to walk across the nearby narrow girder holding the landing platform up to find a waterfall at the end and then ride it up to get to the rest of the world. I'd already discarded this route because, well, waterfalls don't usually have an "up" option. It's not Niagara Rises, after all (though there is a drug out there with a very similar-sounding slogan). Anyway, it's none of my concern because we're done here.
: About as Well as Real Circuses (and Freak Shows). Yeah, this was real bad. I'm not sure if I plan to throw it under the bus as hard as I did Blues Brothers 2000 (the worst game on the ranking table for quite a while) because as I've intimated a few times there are some clever ideas locked beneath some unfortunately dire execution. Even if the gameplay could've used a few more months in the oven, though, the amount of story exposition suggests a remarkable underestimation of the likely audience demographic's attention span.
: A Long (Star)Shot. It is already on Steam so I won't preclude the possibility of it coming to the NSO N64 library also, but it seems more likely if they were going to dump shovelware on that thing they'd go through the usual channels and just put a modification of that PC version on the storefront directly. Then again, we just saw two Acclaim games join the service so now it feels like any old trash has a chance.
: 3 (out of 15). A fairly standard set with two achievements for each world: one for finishing it and the other for finding all of its mega fuel collectibles. For some reason I also got achievements for maxing out on blue (ammo) and yellow (flying juice) pick-ups.
Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt (Random)
- Realtime Associates / THQ
- 1999-06-29 (NA), 1999-08-10 (EU)
- =219th N64 Game Released
: Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt, or Rugrats: Treasure Hunt as it was known in Europe because I guess we have no idea what "Scavengers" are (I'm sure the ransacked territories of Africa, Asia, and South America would beg to differ), is a licensed party game for up to four players based on the Nickelodeon cartoon Rugrats created by Klasky Csupo. It features three boards that each follow their own rules, with the four playable babies (Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, and Lil) either competing directly with each other or cooperatively teaming up against regular series antagonist Angelica. The game mostly involves collecting cookies and snacks as currency while working towards a collectathon goal unique to the current board. This was the first of two Rugrats games for N64, the other being a tie-in for Rugrats in Paris: The Movie with a similar party game format.
Hey, it's Realtime Associates again. Through (mostly) blind luck we've managed to play almost every N64 game they ever produced: Charlie Blast's Territory, Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey, and Gex 64: Enter the Gecko were all previously featured. All that's left of theirs now is the other Elmo game and, well, I'm wondering what the odds of that ever happening could be; if I'd only played more Number Journey I'd probably have the math acumen to figure it out. The erstwhile Toy Headquarters is making a return appearance here too after Aidyn Chronicles and Conker's Bad Fur Day (which they released in Europe): they were probably best known in this era for publishing a bunch of mostly well-regarded WWE games that I strongly hope I'll never see. These days they're at the helm of another crumbling empire, the Embracer Group, as the (possibly briefly) revived THQ Nordic.
I genuinely did not anticipate that at some point I would have to cover what is probably the most inexplicable item in my own personal N64 collection—a party game I was well outside the age range for even back then—but the chocolate chips fall where they must and now I'm staring at these monstrous Klasky Csupo enfants terribles for the first time in a real long while. In all honesty, for as little archaeological merit as I suspect there is to be dug up here here I don't recall this game being completely terrible. "Mario Party for babies" doesn't really track as a descriptor when Mario Party itself is so beholden to random chance that anyone with the smallest degree of sapience can squeak out a win through pure happenstance but, I dunno, maybe that early polygonal Donkey Kong gave too many kindergartners nightmares or something. Like these misshapen melon-headed mutants are any less terrifying to countenance. Well, I've already braved Elmo and his preschool numerical misadventures and this has to be a few grades above that, if only in terms of audience age if not necessarily quality.
16 Minutes In
Since I once heard somewhere that pirates actually went out and stole shit, I went for the Pirate Treasure Hunt map for what may or may not be the only session I'll have time for today. Goal is simple enough: roll a spinner for a number (1-5, where a 6 instead lets you choose how many spaces to move up to a maximum of five) and land on a space. Though initially unknown, once you or an opponent have stood in a space once its role remains revealed for the rest of the game much like a potion in a roguelike ("life is like a potion in a roguelike" being a Forrest Gump quote that was left out of the final cut). These spaces might give you cookies (the coin equivalent) or take them away, let you search the environment (which grants you the treasures you need to complete the map or utility items that could otherwise help), summon Dil Pickles who shows up and randomizes all the spaces like the force of chaos that he is, let you purchase items with your cookies, cause you to miss a turn with a sudden catnap, or have you take a one-way trip back to the crib which similarly causes two missed turns but lets you warp to any area of the board. The babies also have an energy meter that ticks down after every space moved: if it hits zero, they're forcibly returned to the crib. Sleeping, either through catnaps or a crib visit, will regenerate some amount of this energy and you can also spend a turn to sacrifice some of your cookies for energy too. One last rule is that if you land on the same space as another baby, you compete with them in a rock-paper-scissors mini-game (though given this is pirate-themed, it's cannonball-flag-cutlass instead) and the winner can choose to take a treasure from the loser or else a bunch of cookies.
The board also has a few NPC wildcards strolling around: Susie, a recurring ally of the babies, will help them out if their paths cross (yet to happen though); Spike, the dog, will pick up a baby and move them several spaces at random; and Grampa Lou, who so far has only taken cookies away like some kind of asshole. After a string of bad luck, I (as Tommy) am far behind the pack, most of whom have at least two treasures by now. I think you still need to make it to a final spot on the map after collecting all four treasures—you can find duplicates, but you need one of each type—so that'll give those falling behind a chance to steal a win. I won't say that there's a huge amount of strategy or skill to this game, since there's only one mini-game and it's pure chance, but it almost feels more honest in establishing itself as a complete crapshoot.
32 Minutes In
Still in the pirate ship. I sorta figured one of the other babies would've swept this thing already but now that I'm seeing there's a bit more going on strategy-wise. You need to pay attention to what treasures your opponents are finding: if it's a dupe, it gets put back in the same place (ditto for any dupe utility items) and could mean making a beeline over there if it's the one treasure you're lacking. Of course, while it's convenient to be in the same area as another baby to double the amount of searching it also means more chances of losing loot to them in the one-on-one mini-game. As I figured, Susie will automatically find any treasure you're missing in the current room if you bump into her or will tell you that there's nothing left for you there which itself is handy info. Grandpa Lou has an equal chance of giving or taking cookies also, I guess because the old coot is two doubloons short of a hoard these days. It's fine, I'm allowed to be ageist: I'm pretty sure I'm closer to his age than the babies' anyway.
So, those utility items. There's three I've spotted so far: a compass that lets you go backwards (normally you're blocked from reversing course to stop you going back and forth across known spaces); a magnifying glass that doubles the amount of searches you can do in one turn (the most essential); and a screwdriver which opens up secret shortcuts. You can also buy "toy cards" from toybox squares with leftover cookies, which all work similarly to the extra dice you can get in Mario Party. I think that's pretty much all there is to this game though: right now, I've got to find those last treasures and figure out how to win. Everyone else just needs the one, though, so my chances aren't great.
48 Minutes In
Yeah, I was mistaken: you only need to find all four treasures and the game instantly ends. In this case, it was the CPU Chuckie that won so I made the bold decision to hitch my wagon to the redheaded nerd blessed by Lady Luck and selected him as my playable character for the next board: Reptar Rally. On this board, the goal is to collect a randomized milestone target of candy treats to win. Each baby has a different assortment they must get—5 of one type, 10 of another, and 15 of a third—and must move around a circular board entering candy "zones" where they can pick up a random amount of a specific candy type on each space before they complete the circuit and are kicked back out. There's no direct competition like before but you can occasionally sabotage another baby by either forcibly trading treats or dropping slippery spaces in front of them (which may still end up helping them, depending on where they slide to). The only NPC is Reptar himself, who strolls around an elevated section of the hub area between candy zones and can occasionally grant you extra treats if you're directly beneath him. I honestly wouldn't trust anything brown falling from beneath Godzilla-At-Home but then babies tend to put the darndest things in their mouths.
It feels like this board has way more opportunities to screw around with your opponents, especially as the whole trading treats thing doesn't involve a random aspect like the Mario Party equivalent does: you can take anything you want, provided you land on the right space to begin with. I'm also impressed that almost all the mechanics have been changed from the Pirate Treasure Hunt board: even the spinner is different, returning to 1-6 rather than adding the free movement option. There's no energy meter to worry about either. It could be that this is a board meant for younger players since the rules are easier, but since everyone's a horrifying dinosaur-baby hybrid (man, I've got the worst impulse to say "Not the mama!" after every turn) I'm not sure it's as "suitable for all ages" as the pirate one.
64 Minutes In
I spent most of the rest of this playthrough walking past the entrance to the only candy zone I needed to go to—the Chocolate Milk zone—in a state of persistent irritation. As with the Pirate Treasure Hunt map, it gets harder to win the closer to victory you get because it becomes that much less likely to get the final item you need so there's definitely some suspense when you're that near to the finish line. Even so, the only way I was going to be able to beat all the other babies (which is a statement where context is very important) is to hope I land on a specific space on a circular route that has 24 of the things. The candy types each baby needs is I guess pre-determined: each candy zone is actually named for the one baby that doesn't need that type. There's little reason to go into your own zone except for a single possible boon: if you land on the bonus space with your name on it you can "lock" one of the candy categories you have so it won't get stolen or lost. That's still no incentive to go after candy you don't need, but a small reprieve if you happen to get booted in there through some foul manner of chance space.
The other half of the irritation coin, besides just being screwed over by RNG all day, is that the babies have exactly one voiced line each for each type of space they can land on. To Scavenger Hunt's credit, it's impressive there's this many voice clips in a cartridge game, but the truth (one especially prevalent to Reptar Rally in particular) is that you end up hearing all these clips over and over. What's more is that all the voice clips of Chuckie that involve food are all followed by these grotesque baby burping noises. I respect the voice actor for giving the role a bit more flavor, so to speak, but I absolutely did not need to spend the last half hour listening to Chuckie's belches. That's karma at work for dropping Tommy for the new hotness, I suppose.
: Like Fine Chocolate Milk. I realize I need to keep the game's intended audience in mind, and I do appreciate that it's not even pretending that it's all random BS (which is probably why my own random chooser was so taken by it), but I can't really argue that there's a good reason to play this game unless you have your own little ones to amuse. Would I be distraught if this ended up being the subject of some party game-themed Blight Club, though? Not at all.
: As Likely As Me Catching a Break with this Spinner. I can't really conceive of a version of reality where someone forks out the amount of cash it would take to relicense this game figuring they'd easily recoup it on the power of the Rugrats brand alone.
: N/A. Just as well; going after achievements in a game that's pure luck seems like the best way to give yourself a rage-induced aneurysm.
Current Ranking
- Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)
- Diddy Kong Racing (Ep. 6)
- Perfect Dark (Ep. 19)
- Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)
- Donkey Kong 64 (Ep. 13)
- Doom 64 (Ep. 38)
- Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)
- Goemon's Great Adventure (Ep. 9)
- Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)
- Pokémon Snap (Ep. 11)
- Tetrisphere (Ep. 34)
- Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)
- Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)
- Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Ep. 27)
- Mischief Makers (Ep. 5)
- The New Tetris (Ep. 42)
- Super Smash Bros. (Ep. 25)
- Mega Man 64 (Ep. 18)
- Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! (Ep. 41)
- Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (Ep. 42)
- Forsaken 64 (Ep. 31)
- Wetrix (Ep. 21)
- Harvest Moon 64 (Ep. 15)
- Bust-A-Move '99 (Ep. 40)
- Hybrid Heaven (Ep. 12)
- Blast Corps (Ep. 4)
- Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Ep. 2)
- Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (Ep. 4)
- Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)
- Densha de Go! 64 (Ep. 29)
- Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 2 (Ep. 32)
- Snowboard Kids (Ep. 16)
- Spider-Man (Ep. 8)
- Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)
- Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)
- Mickey's Speedway USA (Ep. 37)
- Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (Ep. 7)
- Body Harvest (Ep. 28)
- Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (Ep. 33)
- Gauntlet Legends (Ep. 39)
- Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)
- 40 Winks (Ep. 31)
- Buck Bumble (Ep. 30)
- Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Ep. 20)
- Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits Vol. 1 (Ep. 39)
- Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)
- Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)
- BattleTanx: Global Assault (Ep. 13)
- Last Legion UX (Ep. 36)
- Hot Wheels Turbo Racing (Ep. 9)
- Cruis'n Exotica (Ep. 37)
- San Francisco Rush 2049 (Ep. 4)
- Iggy's Reckin' Balls (Ep. 35)
- Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt (Ep. 43)
- Fighter Destiny 2 (Ep. 6)
- Charlie Blast's Territory (Ep. 36)
- Big Mountain 2000 (Ep. 18)
- Nushi Tsuri 64: Shiokaze ni Notte (Ep. 35)
- Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (Ep. 14)
- Tetris 64 (Ep. 1)
- Mahjong Hourouki Classic (Ep. 34)
- Mahjong 64 (Ep. 41)
- Milo's Astro Lanes (Ep. 23)
- International Track & Field 2000 (Ep. 28)
- NBA Live '99 (Ep. 3)
- Rampage 2: Universal Tour (Ep. 5)
- Command & Conquer (Ep. 17)
- International Superstar Soccer '98 (Ep. 23)
- Starshot: Space Circus Fever (Ep. 43)
- 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)
- Sesame Street: Elmo's Number Journey (Ep. 14)
- Wheel of Fortune (Ep. 24)
- Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (Ep. 15)
- Yakouchuu II: Satsujin Kouro (Ep. 40)
- Mario no Photopi (Ep. 20)
- Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)
- Dark Rift (Ep. 25)
- Mace: The Dark Age (Ep. 27)
- Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. (Ep. 21)
- Ready 2 Rumble Boxing (Ep. 32)
- 64 Oozumou 2 (Ep. 30)
- Madden Football 64 (Ep. 26)
- Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Ep. 22)
- Heiwa Pachinko World 64 (Ep. 38)
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