The Closeout Warrior

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.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I bought Wave Race. I don’t really get into racing games that much, and I certainly don’t know anything about Jetskis. I guess I was just mesmerized by the neat water effects and the NOT AT ALL ANNOYING announcer who repeats the same half-dozen clips every few seconds and is completely un-turn-off-able.

The game is, then, about racing personal watercraft around various courses. Each one has its own water conditions, layout, and setting. You and a few other schmucks get to ride around, trying to pass the giant balloons on the proper sides. See, if you pass the balloons on the wrong side too many times, you lose. If you go outside the track boundaries, you lose. And if you don’t finish the race fast enough… erm… you lose.

The difficulty in controlling the Jetskis is all over the place. It’s tough to get traction on water, so you’re always slipping and sliding around all over the place. You have to learn the nuances of the control scheme like briefly letting off the gas, turning, and then jamming on the gas again when you hit the proper angle. Once you finally master that little nugget, you get thrown into courses where there is actual turbulence in the water. These make giant waves that throw you into the air, throwing off your course, killing your momentum, and making you lose. You’re supposed to be able to somehow press a direction on the control stick and you will go through the waves… or skip over the tops of them… or something else entirely. I don’t really know because I couldn’t ever do it properly. I would do pretty well until the weather kicked in, then I just couldn’t handle the ridiculous amount of directions and buttons, and balloons, and announcers required to win any races, so I didn’t win very many. And if you’re not winning a racing game, or even getting any better at its special brand of esoteric controls, then you need to move on to something else.

So I did.