Okay, it took until the fake ending but Signalis is finally cooking. Enemies are not as avoidable as they were, creating actual tension, and this stage of the game feels less like a random collection of rooms. I also do want to give credit to the various puzzles, which often enough manage to be more interesting than the ones in the original RE trilogy.
I’m still fairly sure I have no idea what’s going on.
I made a handful of posts on the previous Games You’ve Played Today thread. To summarize, The game’s not quite great, but it’s generally a good time and worth playing. Their answer to the question “how do you make sprite-based Resident Evil 1?” is actually fairly interesting, at least when it comes to combat. Both the player and the enemies are more mobile than you might expect: the central combat mechanic is the ability to dash multi-directionally, tied to a stamina meter, and so dodging and weaving and creating opportunities to attack with a combination of the (always-equipped) knife and the guns become crucial. Additionally, because everyone’s so mobile, and because a fair amount of the enemies fire projectiles, the layout of the rooms becomes very important, and the developers use things like the cover created by furniture to get a lot of mileage out of a relatively limited variety of assets. I watched the trailer for Bot Vice, and yeah, you can tell that the same people made both games. Evil Tonight also has an extra mode which randomizes enemies and is more combat focused, and that’s also fun.
The game is gorgeous. While I don’t care for the various monster designs, the mansion itself is fantastically realized, and manages the trick of looking like the drama-centered boarding school it’s supposed to be while still making every room look distinct and purposeful and creepy. And while the game can’t quite replicate the feel of Resident Evil–that overhead camera–it has its moments, including some genuine jump scares.
I remain mad and bitter that Bot Vice looks like a game I should like and stands as the only game I’ve refunded on Steam and I fucking sat down and bought and played Aliens Colonial Marines
Retro:G in Akiba has SegaSonic The Hedgehog a game I wrote off ever actually playing. The pixel art is modern good, which is incredible. Isometric make Sonic go sucks, but besides the point.
i haven’t been playing dream cycle lately, not cos i don’t like it (quite the opposite) but because i don’t really wanna play games on my work + study machine atm. so i’ve been exploiting my surprise access to a real n64 with an everdrive installed (!) to knock out a bunch of games which i would otherwise not be able to emulate (it’s still very surprising to me just how poor n64 emulation is). here they are in the order i played them:
waverace 64
owns bones. immediately cool and fun and accessible right out the gate. also a surprise one-handed-game entry! you only need the middle grip to play. very chill. game rules. imagine making something this cool then never revisiting it ever again. fucking astounding. the water looks and feels so good dude.
hydro thunder
not as cool as waverace. water is flat as heck and the colours are dull. i’d still give it a whirl in the arcade if i ever saw it there why not.
san francisco rush: extreme racing:
dude lmao this game is so hard what the heck. there will be a lot of racing games on this list (idk why it just kinda happened) but this one is the only one that feels like there’s a solid (if simple) physics sim happening under the hood (no complicated like, wheel model or anything, just a weighty oblong being thrown around naturalistically by forces, in a way that feels uncommon on the n64). it’s fucking scary to scream around the (very cool and nicely vertical) tracks, and you need to use your brakes way more than i expected. really feels like a game where each jump and ramp was built iteratively around the physics rather than ahead of time. it’s cool!
monster truck madness 64
[fart sounds] game blows! starts you off with one level which is the fucking graveyard at night (yeah cool vertex lighting you got going on there, shame i still can’t fucking see anything) and you have to come first to unlock any other stages. the vehicle simulation is dogshit and the strategy is: pick up all the items (missiles, super jump, bomb (which shrinks enemies???), ghost gem(??), jetpack(???)) placed in a fixed order around the track and use them immediately. also it commits the greatest sin: putting solid (LARGE) pillars either side of its narrow checkpoints… don’t touch em! you’ll cry! i cried!
rocket: robot on wheels
looks cool (great animation (inverse kinematics??) on the player character’s little bouncy wheel body) but it is a “wander around giant map and collect 100 things also your movement is really boring” game and i’m dying too quickly to be pissing my life away on one of those.
castlevania (1999) (not called “castlevania 64” as I had always assumed)
hoo boy. it looks awesome. the action is also pretty good, all things considered. but this is very clearly a first draft made be people unfamiliar with 3d: the spaces are so huge and the punishment for poor platforming is instant death, a fact made even more acutely clear by the next game:
castlevania: legacy of darkness
it’s literally castlevania (1999) but with way better pacing and some smart design decisions that make the moment-to-moment action friendlier. i’m pretty sad that the starting character isn’t a whip-whippin belmont but i’ll take a slutty wolf twunk w his tiddies out i guess. anyway i haven’t actually played enough of either of these to give proper critiques but i got to fight like 3 bosses in 3 different areas in legacy of darkness in the same time it took me to fight 1 boss 2 different times in the same area in 99’.
polaris snocross
this was a fun surprise! also this was the first game that made me think “wow the n64 suuuucks dude” because this game is also on psx and it looks and runs wayyyyyy better on there (this will become a pattern). the framerate is bad, there is a single 6-second-long looping music track for all levels, and there isn’t really a clear strategy for how to race better than your opponents, but this game still kinda rules? it’s held up by (surprise) really cool level design, and also a pretty solid character/vehicle controller. it’s nothing mind-blowing, but the animations really sell the weight, and there’s really good speed contrast, so you get to appreciate going fast frequently, without going (too) out of control (oh and it does that thing that i associate with omega boost, where there are particles which leave screen-space trails behind them (in this case: snow) which really sell the speed and secondary motion of the camera). the (good) levels are these really dense twisting braids of “shortcuts” which don’t really make you go any faster, but are just kinda fun to find and exploit. it’s no masterwork, but it’s really fun! i would recommend playing the psx version for better framerate, audio, and visual effects, but the n64 version is still cool (and, predictably, i prefer how smeary it looks).
mischief makers
shake shake! it’s so wild to me how ahead-of-its-time the aesthetics of this game are. it looks like a 2010s gamemaker game (ok not really but u know what i mean). it also does that thing that i love where it gives you a quite complex, weird, and nuanced character controller, but doesn’t really require you to master it (except for like, at one point in stage 12 or sth where it suddenly asks you to do a crazy tight compound action to get over one random wall, and then never asks that of you again (or i’m stupid and missed whatever the obvious solution was; i really tried hard to find one!)). this is probably my third-favourite treasure game now, and it makes me wanna play stretch panic. shake shake!
mystical ninja starring goemon
i’m kinda torn about this one! on the one hand: the charm is through the fucking roof! getting pick-pocketed in the first town, talking to a kid who stoically informs me that he is unemployed, the maiden who insists that everything is… to be continued! it’s awesome. peak rpg shit right there. i just don’t really care for the action and there’s a lot of it! i’m glad they give you the whip-pipe straight away, cos it’s miles better than the default one, but i’m still like, wow, that first boss took wayyyyy too long to kill, and was wayyyy to strict. and if that’s the first boss, i hate to think what the other ones are like! it’s cool! but i kinda wish it was a turn-based rpg rather than an action game.
rakugakids
this i vow: one day i will sit down with someone who really knows their stuff and learn how to enjoy a classic (street-fighter-style) fighting game. because as it stands, i turn one of these on and am immediately having a bad time. this game has the besssst graphics (no i’m seriously go look at it and tell me those aren’t the best graphics ever) but i am soooo instantly tilted playing any fighting game. oh well!
nightmare creatures
nightmare creatures duuuuuuuuude! this game is awesome! it was recommended in the trash action thread (six!) years ago and dude they made bloodborne on da n64 in nineteen-ninety-seven mate. they made this game specially just for me: tank-controls melee-focused trash-action-horror square-pusher with no i-frames, a disgusting amount of level design, and heaps of weird platforming secrets? come on dude.
this is another one where i’m going to recommend the psx version. you get cd-sound, fmv cut-scenes, improved framerates, and the control-scheme is less eye-watering (c-up and c-right to circle-dodge-strafe around your soft-locked-on target? woof dude. on psx it’s L1 and R1 lmao), but i do think the n64 version looks better with its smeary interpolated textures and super-close choking black fog. there is also a pc version of this game which has some of the advantages of the psx version, but is weirdly very bright? which totally kills all the atmosphere. also playing on modern hardware is a bit rough because a lot of stuff is frame-dependent lmao; it’s basically impossible to navigate any of the menus as a result.
anyway this might be my favourite game i’ve played so far this year. will i still feel that way if/when i finish it? who can say. i’m definitely going to play nightmare creatures 2 tho (it released on psx and dreamcast dude wtf! nothing else, just those two consoles. LOL).
yeah James Lambert enabled by HailToDodongo have definitely shown that there are ways to make the n64 shine. but when cross-developing for cartridge and cd systems it seems like a lot of devs had to cut their n64 versions real lean.
the thing that really struck me was the realisation that the n64 has a 64mb (appropriate) storage limit! compared to a cd-rom’s 700+mb limit per disc!
As a miraculous confluence of fate I stumbled upon an art book for this game while thrifting years ago and picked it up purely on vibes and never bothered to dig deeper. Lynch really is everywhere when im not looking.
oh shit i totally forgot to mention that my favourite thing about sf rush extreme racing is that when you select your car (which is also your difficulty) when you highlight “extreme” the announcer yells “IT’S DANGEROUS” and there’s like screams and sirens in the background for like 2 seconds. it rules. you can flick back and forth between “advanced” and “extreme” (or whatever the categories were i don’t remember) and play that sound again and again it’s the best.
i had Rush 2 as a teenager and i remember getting a lot of amusement out of the stunt mode - not sure if it’s in the first. probably one of those things that’s less amusing now where there are infinite games where you can spin out jankily but i had a lot of fun with it at the time.
there’s a classic Ross’s Game Dungeon episode about the PC version of this one that i rewatch a lot for whatever reason. has that classic Ross strange cranky uncle energy
the big head. i kept being like “surely this is the last damage cycle right?” and then it would just breathe fire at me and i would take unavoidable damage.
I’m in sync with Dogs because I also indulged in N64 on the mister. The past two nights were Space Station Silicon Valley by DMA software. They went on to become Grand Theft Auto. Here I see the same limiting freedom the PS2 GTAs were littered with.
To go back and explain another way, this is Balan Wonderworld 64. This has the what if Wallace and Gromit sucked low-effort UK Humor complete with homophobia within the first 30 seconds. You control a little computer chip robot taking control of the various robot animals that have very limited abilities like “can kind of float jump” “can pick up boxes” “can melee attack” “can go out of control fast.” Then it gives you a very limited key-hole objective for your key shaped verb. Then because they grew up on the Speccy, think of what can we put in the way to incovinence and hassle the player trying to complete objectives? Also this is an N64 platformer so there are also baubles to collect.
A lot of you know, I’ll put up with a lot of crap. However, the verbs all feel like garbage. As a sheep I couldn’t even make it onto the slightly larger than sheep sized ledge to float to an island.
I kept thinking about the airplane James Woods missions in San Andreas which may win for most hostile video game I’ve ever played. SSSV has the same DMA DNA in here. If the player is having fun in the face of adversity we are failing as game designers. It should be a fight between the controls, the environment, and whatever horseshit we are telling the player to do.
Dogs posting about Castlevania 64? Now that game is the stuff. I hoot and howler for that one. Maybe I should give Rocket a for real go. I do like collecting 100 whatever bullshit. Also gotta grab an iso of Nightmare Creatures.
OK, this is true, but, if you put a controller in my hands and made me run through those training missions right now, I am confident I could complete all of them first try.
SSSV Is one of like 8 N64 games I owned. I would restart those games from scratch multiple times just because I had nothing else to do. I used cheats just to see every level of SSSV and I still have never done a full playthrough of the game. (Neither did the testers because one of the collectables you have to pick up for the true ending is bugged and can’t be aquired)
Pretty basic game unfortunately. I can’t recommend it to people who aren’t ready to put their Zelda DX slippers on
I’ll tell you the 3 remarkable things about it.
First 90% of the game is in the dark with very limited vision. It’s very cool turning the lights on after finishing a dungeon
Second this fortunately does have a jump button, unlike too many Zelda DXlikes who have decided the Zelda DX jump could not resist a focus test today
Third there’s some FFX Al Bhed translation of ancient text. Each symbol in this ancient language matches one latin alphabet letter and you walk around the world finding translation notes telling you which symbol matches which letter. Everybody talked in modern English in the past, they just used Triangle instead of E and Square instead of A
Very disappointed in this one! I REALLY got into another Zachtronics game, Infinifactory, 10 years or so ago. Opus Magnum shares a lot of (great) DNA with Infinifactory but every change feels for the worse.
In Infinifactory, everything was perfectly legible in the 3D space. You could just look at the construction and understand everything going on. In Opus Magnum, you have to juggle between the physical table where elements are placed and the montage table where their behavior is edited. The clarity is gone and fixing mistakes is a slower and more annoying process.
Also I hate the hex grid…. Everything is worse with an hex grid…. I can’t have things rotating on a hex grid…
This IGAvania’s main selling proposition is the absolute stiffness of the protagonist. No other modern game can make you feel like you’re playing some weirdo PC Engine / Megadrive Valis like quite like this one.
I replayed the whole game and played the DLC this time. Cool. The DLC outright gives you a new wolfman guy who does 3x more damage than anybody else and is both super fast and durable. Like Orlandu was a furry
super-post incoming 
