The Closeout Warrior

I have to admit, I was pretty blown away by the Nintendo 64. I never really had a Playstation, and although Star Fox and Stunt Race FX were both pretty good, they suffered from a huge framerate issue. So to have a game that ran in full glorious 3D without without looking more like an interactive slideshow was pretty attractive to me.

I was looking forward to the Nintendo 64 release for months upon months. Ever since I played Killer Instinct 2 and heard the machine proclaim that it was coming to my home (glee!) in ‘1995′ I would seek out any and all information I could get about the system, and since there wasn’t much Internet back then, it didn’t take very long.

Eventually, though, my local Toys ‘R’ Us got several demo units in along with the flagship game, Super Mario 64. I, of course, had to investigate. It turns out that they had five units in the store to play on. I and three of my buddies monopolized four of them for the better part of the morning through early afternoon on multiple consecutive Saturdays. I suppose that might have been somewhat insensitive to the kids waiting in crowds behind us, but that’s one of the advantages of having a driver’s license: first dibs.

The game, though it seems kind of generic now, is to guide Mario through a series of worlds, all represented by paintings in the castle, to get a series of stars and keys. You need these to proceed since they open up new doors to go through.

The game itself is put together really well. It’s still very close to the style set forth in Super Mario World, which is a massive adventure with very little dialog to get in the way. You just hop in, and start trying to figure out how to rescue the Princess without thinking too hard, which, truth be told, is nice sometimes.

I would play this game a lot. So much, in fact, that I would end up wearing out the control stick on my first controller. The game is surprisingly long and the stars you have to find are each hidden in some unique places, most not exactly obvious. It’s kind of odd to think that a game that essentially has you running around a freaky world that doesn’t always make too much sense for the sole purpose of collecting things can be a load of fun, but it is.

And with that, I think I’ve gushed enough for one day… Where did I put those paper towels…?

I actually probably wouldn’t know anything about Jetpac if I didn’t play Donkey Kong 64. In that game, Cranky Kong tells you about a ‘real game’ you can play if you meet certain requirements. Do so, and you get… erm… ‘treated’ to one of the games from Rare’s storied past.

Jetpac tasks you with using your handy dandy jet pack to fly around a level infested with aliens. You have to assemble your ship, and then fuel it up by collecting fuel that mysteriously appears around the screen. There are also goodies to collect for points, and aliens to shoot for more points (which also has the side effect of thinning their numbers so they’re easier to avoid).

It should be fairly apparent that I don’t have some kind of bias against old games in favor of new games. I kept hearing about how awesome this game was, but it just didn’t click with me. Maybe those English folks have different tastes in games than I do, or maybe it’s a large elaborate joke that I don’t really get. But I played this game inside Donkey Kong 64 just long enough to get the requisite 5000 points to unlock whatever it was that I was supposed to unlock and then went off to play something that was a bit more fun, like Fold the Shirts From the Clothes Dryer.

I was never sure if Star Fox 64 was a sequel or a reimagining of the original game. They both feature you, as the titular Star Fox, along with your flight-buddies of a frog, a rabbit, and a blue falcon (no, not that Blue Falcon) have to save the solar system from an exiled (and criminally insane) evil-genius-monkey-scientist. I remember at the end of the original game blowing up a giant cube with Andross’s (the monkey) face all over it. I assumed that meant he was dead. But I’ve assumed lots of things in the past, mostly incorrectly.

The game goes along a lot like the original Super NES offering. You and your three buddies fly along a landscape. You end up doing all of the fighting enemies, finding hidden routes, and that kind thing. Your buddies are apparently way smarter than you and they don’t actually do much of anything. They very very rarely ever shoot anything, probably so they don’t raise the ire of the enemy pilots. Though sometimes an enemy will tail one of your buddies anyway and you have to rescue him before he gets shot down.

If you can manage to keep your friends alive, they don’t really help that much, but they do talk to you. Your guys are constantly chattering with each other and with the enemies. I thought that was pretty awesome, since I was led to believe by Sony’s hype engine that Nintendo cartridges wouldn’t have the room to have such things on them. Even though every review of the game bemoaned the fact that although there was a ton of voice-work in the game, that it didn’t sound crystal-clear (a.k.a. CD quality). To me it sounded more like staticy radio communications, you know, since they were talking over radios. So it was fine.

Also introduced in this game was a tank and a submarine to pilot. The tank being far less lame than the sub. In fact, I liked driving the tank around almost as much as driving the plane around. But the sub? I like to pretend that the lone submarine level doesn’t exist anymore.

What really gets this game going, though, is the multiplayer. You and three friends can get together and play with whatever combination of tanks and flying machines you choose and fight it out until only one is left standing. This makes for some pretty intense battles, if your friends are any good at the game at all. You also have the option of playing the mode while on foot and carrying bazookas, but that’s just dumb. You’re a smaller target, yeah, but kind of vulnerable without wearing an armored vehicle of some sort.

I would end up playing this game a whole lot. Which is kind of weird, since I normally don’t really like flying games. I suppose I was just entertained by the… ’snappy’ banter between the characters. That and the fact that they were actually talking instead of making generic animal noises.

Oh! And that it came with the new-fangled Rumble Pak that vibrated my controller whenever I took damage in game. That was pretty amazing at the time, though it’s pretty ‘meh’ these days.

Good thing that Rumble Pak had other uses later on.