some cool stuff on N64:
Bakuretsu Muteki Bangaioh
The New Tetris
Itoi Shigesato no Bass Tsuri No. 1 Kettei Ban!
Wonder Project J2
Doshin the Giant (64DD)
Custom Robo
Animal Forest
F-Zero Expansion Kit (64DD)
Pilotwings 64
MRC Multi-Racing Championship
Robotron 64
Body Harvest
Ridge Racer 64
Beetle Adventure Racing
WipEout 64
Penny Racers (+ ChoroQ 64 2)
1080 Snowboarding
Star Soldier Vanishing Earth
Densha de Go! 64
Banjo-Tooie
oh yeah it’s completely insane that no one’s translated itoi shigesato no bass tsuri no. 1
remind me to make a bigger post on this when i get home
one thing about the N64 is, love it or hate it, you can’t really get the same experience elsewhere. by the time of the PS2 era, consoles were quite a bit more homogenized despite some power discrepancy. 2D consoles vary pretty widely in a lot of ways, but there’s something about Saturn/PS1/N64 that’s very stark and i guess it’s the increased immersion factor from starting to feel like one was actually “entering” these worlds… e.g. there’s way less of a gamecube-specific look than there is an N64-specific look. the analog stick and bizarre controller design ensures the same is true for the input. AND the emulation has been historically shit. so, if you like the N64, you’ll be unable to really get that hit easily without resorting to hardware…
and the hardware is obnoxious. those fucking controllers, lol
wish I had “taken better care of”/“kept track of after 3 moves” my '64. I still love Banjo Kazooie, refuse to defend any of the goofy collectathons, but they all have a real charm that’s missing nowadays. I think.
im telling you get the controller i posted it’ll change your life
the first mario party game is probably the very best one, except for the games where you have to rotate the analog stick and it gave thousands of people blisters on their hands and nintendo never did a minigame like that again and didn’t release MP1 on VC for years lol
MP2 is also pretty good but i dislike some of the changes that make it less funny. it’s been too long but i remember very much preferring the first one
I sure do love games that troll players, there’s nothing funnier than being made to look like an idiot by a machine
OH YEAH i remember now:
in the first mario party only, you can actually steal coins from other players’ reserves during minigames. so in “grab bag” you can actually steal all of a player’s coins lol
they changed this so you can only win or lose set amounts in 2 and beyond, rather than being able to tap into the reserves in a mini-game directly
and i think you generally never lose any unless it’s a bowser game, so you are never staking your actual wallet
Oh this prompt is going to haunt me.
I’ve played the game boy blue kaizo hack and it’s waaaaaay more manageable than stadium with rentals only holy shit
the Mario Party 1 stick rotation games fucked up enough kid hands that for a very brief time you could send proof that you were a kid who loooooved to Mario Party and had the fucked up hands to prove it and receive a pair of special analog stick rotation gloves
that, and the mini game contest in Mischief Makers where you win a race by tapping the D-pad taught me the value of holding ones controller weird to more easily do specific tasks. Monhun claw eat your heart out
When my sister discovered this ‘technique’ we all thought she was GENIUS! The Nintendo Power come in later that same day lol ToT
Ninja Gaiden somehow did this twice in the 2000s.
I am honestly disappointed in Nintendo that they didn’t modify the rom on MP1 on switch to cap the number of rotations that could be registered per second. They edited roms to dim flashing, and those damn minigames caused just as much real pain to kids playing them.
i feel like mystical ninja / quest 64 / the bombermans 64 all sort of gestured towards a form of eccentric, open, overstuffed yet underdesigned 3d b-game that never quite materialised at scale. there was sort of a sense that anything you squeezed into the console would manifest as another set of squat, abstracted cartoony little guys wandering vaguely around empty 3d space… while in memory the ps1 library felt a lot more on the nose with “cartooniness” as a signifier when used and also more narrowly game designery about useless 3d space. i think one reason people get wistful for the thought of earthbound 64 is bc they are maybe thinking it would have carried the torch forward for squat little polygon guys with unnecessarily large houses.
mischief makers is good… the mischief makers ost is what todd rundgren might have done if he hadn’t fallen down the laura nyro hole
Whenever I imagine the quintessential N64 game I think of Chameleon Twist, a game I have never played, and because I have never played it I missed the new grand champion for best game developer company logo:
i deliberately left paperboy 64 off my list because i was sure someone else would mention but it looks like I FUCKED UP BECAUSE Y’ALL FUCKED UP
