N64 Time - Duke Nukem 64

[punio75]

Have really fond memories of this game!

I love this thread!

[SUMIRE]

Very nice write-up. I just remember it being a really bad game though.

[noobish hat]

Very nice write-up. I just remember it being a really bad game though.

[Sketcz]

I borrowed it off an N64 owning friend. Let's call him Dave. Years later I discovered Dave had become a cocaine addict. Is there a connection to Yoshi's Story? Quite possibly.

I want to go back and play Pilotwings 64 now... Still my favourite N64 title. Still so playable.

When was the first Goemon 64 released? Some people (myself) say it's better than Mario 64. Much more variety.

[noobish hat]

Has anybody got all perfects on Pilotwings 64? Seemed pretty impossible to me. I like the way a lot of N64 games appeal to the completionist side of me, but most of them look literally undoable. Platinum medals in Blast Corps? The unlockable cheats in GoldenEye? The S class ranks in Mischief Makers? I doubt even the devs could manage most of them. I got TT though. I'll always have that. I might have an actual trophy made up to put on my desk.

Goemon 64 comes out this year. After playing Yoshi's Story, though, I've actually been thinking a lot more about Goemon 64 2.

[Sketcz]

The devs at RARE admitted in an interview that the platinum medal goals in Blast Corps were just made up, and none of them had actually achieved them. They theorised that several probably are quite genuinely, impossible, even with perfect save stating. Or something.

I got all Gold in Pilotwings, on actual hardware (JPN version). All scores ranging between 96 and 100 for each level. The lowest scores were all on the bloody handglider levels. I don't think I ever got above 96 for the Little States glider mission, because it was almost impossible to get the perfect photo of Nessie.

Still, you play PW64 for the joy of flight, not scores. Just take a gyro and go cruising around some islands, man. Take in the sights. Play it with the window open on a summer's day. That's what my teenage years smelled of. Summer breezes and a Pilotwings cartridge.

[noobish hat]

I don't know why, but nearly all my original N64 memories were in mine and my brother's attic bedroom, in summer, with the skylight window open. Pilotwings, Hybrid Heaven, Goldeneye. That was a hell of a time.

[The Moleman]

There's a nice little article in the latest GameTM which sums up 2D games on the 64. It basically says that very few were interested in them as 3D was the big thing at the time, I have to agree.

As a 13yr old kid with some saved up cash I was looking for a game, I can distinctly remember thinking that Yoshi's Story was just a glorified Snes game. When I picked up the box it reminded me a lot of Yoshi's Island and the shrieking, soul penetrating cries of baby Mario came rushing back, the game was put down and never touched again.

I think I bought Shadows of the Empire instead.... Meh.....

[nakamura]

Symphony of the Night is a prime example of that.

[Tetsuo]

Great write up, noobish.

A few months ago I got into rinsing Yoshi's Story after discovering its hidden depths. The idea was to try and get as high a score as possible over a single playthrough, and I got 37,000 odd.

For example: going for 30 melons on each stage is obvious, as they are worth the most points, but you also get higher points by killing enemies of the same colour as your Yoshi. Even better are the multipliers: line up multiple enemies (ideally of the same colour, and cleverly, this doesn't just apply to the Shy-Guys, hint-hint) and shoot through them all with a single egg (or jump on their heads consecutively, it equals the same amount of points), and you can get massive scores.

Because the White+Black Yoshi's likes all fruit and colours equally, they are the best ones to use, and this adds a degree of pressure to runs because if you die, you lose that Yoshi for good.

So, collect all the hearts, melons, coins, kill every enemy and look for multiplier opportunities everywhere for the best scores. The Japanese version is slightly harder because extra coins were added in the Western releases.

[noobish hat]

It does strike me as a game that would appeal to speed runners. I just wish they'd put in that tiny bit of effort to make those kinds of things 'official' by offering some kind of acknowledgement.

Anyway, here's this:

To be honest, I played this before Christmas, but I just could not summon up the effort to write two words about it. You all know what I'm going to say. It's nothing but a big disappointment. Even after everyone telling me so, including the magazine, I still wanted to believe I would get some enjoyment out of this. It looked so good in all the screenshots. The truth is that it's just incredibly dull. My biggest beef with it is that there is not the slightest hint of speed. I don't know anything about cars, but aren't Lamborghinis supposed to be pretty good?

The graphics are good. In fact, it might just be the best looking racer on the system so far. Even some of the details in the environment are nice, but the overall design is very nothingy. The tracks aren't memorable and there's no sense of fun. A great example of good graphics not making a good game. I got more enjoyment out of Cruis'n USA. I am dead serious. And the music. Oh satan, the music. It's not good. It's techno drivel of the worst kind. "Pit stop! Pit Stop! P-p-p-p-pit stop!" Shhhhhhut upppppppp! Oh that reminds me: pit stops! What are they doing in a game like this!? This isn't Formula One! You're in there for like half a minute. There's no way you could win a race after that.

The game's just got nothing going for it other than its looks. The vehicle selection is rubbish, they're all slow, you can't so much as adjust a wing mirror in terms of customization, there's no weather effects, and I hate its face. I played it for about 4 hours just so that I could tell you not to bother with it. I hope you're grateful.

[noobish hat]

I put Automobili behind me and finished Duke Nukem 64. Well. It's hard to know where to even start with this. Ok, the game has a big problem. It came out after Goldeneye and is clearly not up to competing with it. Doom 64 was pushing it, and that came out ages ago. But Doom had something to offer that Goldeneye didn't have: simple no-nonsense shooting action and a scary and intense atmosphere. DN64 falls on its arse in both areas. As far as controls are concerned, it's painfully obvious that the entire system has been crowbarred in from the PC version, rather than designed from the ground up specifically for the N64, like Doom 64 and Goldeneye.

As far as I could figure out from messing with the control options (the pre-set options, I should point out, since there is no full customizability like in Doom 64), you are forced to relinquish easy access to at least one area of control that is constantly required throughout the game: strafing or looking up and down. I cannot abide FPS games with no strafing, so I was constantly having to use the d-pad to aim my view up and down, as well as cycle through the jetpack, health items, etc. I usually make fun of ignoramuses who laugh at the N64 controller and seem to believe that all three prongs were intended to be used simultaneously. I wasn't laughing this time though, because on this occasion it was the god damn designers who were the ignoramuses. Can you imagine how inconvenient it is to have to switch hands like that throughout the game?

In the menu there is an option of auto aim, but it seems to do nothing. Goldeneye had a beautiful auto aim function. In Doom it was less elegant because there was no visible adjustment, but if you fired at an enemy on a higher level than you, the bullets would find their mark, so long as your vertical alignment was fine. In DN64, there's none of that. If an enemy is even slightly higher than you are, you're not going to hit them unless you use the d-pad to look up. What's worse is that, unlike in Goldeneye, your aim doesn't automatically return to normal once you start moving around again. That means every time you look up or down, you have to painstakingly try to get it level again once you're done. This would be unforgiveable even in a normal game, but in DN64, almost every sodding enemy is on a different level to you. There's flying octobrain things, there's flying bombs that crash into you and explode, there's enemies on ledges and in apartment windows, and every other enemy has a jetpack or a flying vehicle of some kind. On top of this, the entire game is exploration based; you will not get anywhere in this game unless you search every nook and cranny for hidden doors etc. In some levels this is not such a big problem because they have standard rooms with flat walls and right angles etc, but the majority of the environments have irregular structures, caves, cliffs, and half destroyed buildings etc. You're constantly having to look up and down and all around. The game desperately needs a mouse. No concession was made to this being on a console at all.

Anyway, I was saying that the control cannot compete with Goldeneye. So what's left? What's Duke Nukem's trump card? Obviously, it's the b-movie over the top violence, smut, and filthy language. That's the whole reason Duke Nukem is so popular. And, of course, most of this has been excised from the Nintendo version. The strip club in the first level is now a Duke Burger. The captured babes no longer have their tits out. Duke still has some of his quips, but all of the swearing has been removed, so most of the best lines are not included. I am really strongly against this. Not just censorship in general, which is clearly stupid, but the particular hypocrisy here. It's the sex vs violence thing again. You can show any horrendous murder you like, but oh god, no, not some tits. I can summarize the entire thing with this singularly distasteful image, which really put me off the game:

Nintendo must have looked at images like these before censoring, and said 'those naked women are inexcusable. We cannot have naked women in a Nintendo game. It's unnatural, people would sue us. Get rid of them, now." To which a developer possibly replied "You're the boss. I'll get rid of this bound woman with the severed spine too, shall I?" "What? No, leave that where it is. Now get back to work, I have some ignorant American parents to pander to." It honestly makes me sick.

So! The controls and the atmosphere are not up to scratch and are certainly not keeping Rare awake at night. What is going on with the actual gameplay? In a nut shell, it's Doom meets Milon's Secret Castle. Pretty much every single level revolves around finding blue, red, and yellow key cards and using them to open blue, red, and yellow doors. This is so old hat it doesn't even bear discussing. The 'twist' on this, if you will, is that the paths through the levels are unbelievably obtuse. You know all the top secret super cryptic hidden stuff in Doom? Well all that stuff constitutes the essential mechanics of the exploration in DN64. There's one early level set in a prison, and at one point there seems to be nowhere to go. The last thing you achieved was unlocking laser barriers to two corridors of prison cells. I had to check in a guide to find out where the hell I was supposed to go. The cells have posters on the walls. In one of the cells, you can walk through the poster to access a secret tunnel. There's no clue whatsoever that you can do that. So, what, the game designers just intended the player to walk around the entire level, pressing up against every square inch of wall to see if you can magically walk through it? Poor! Poor design, you assholes!

This is what the entire game is like. The graphics contribute generously to this problem. The fact that almost all of the detail is just textures smeared over polygons makes it very unclear what you can interact with and what you can't. There are a lot of switches and buttons in the game that look very much like any other decorative item blended into the texture on a wall. If the switches were actually three dimensional objects jutting out, it would be clear that you can use it. This mix of 2D and 3D doesn't just affect the gameplay though, it also looks **** ugly. It looks much worse than Doom 64 did, and after playing Goldeneye, there's no excusing it. They must have known that by the end of 1997 DN64 would be competing against far more advanced games. Why on earth didn't they put in that extra effort to at least build 3D models of the enemies. There aren't even that many of them! As sprites, they look god awful:

It might be the over-zealous use of the N64's blurring function to avoid pixelation, but who the hell decided blurring was better than pixelation in the first place? Pick your poison! Only one enemy in the entire game is polygonal, the final boss, and it doesn't look good either. At this point, we were way beyond this cop-out mixture being acceptable, and DN64 really does not look like it belongs on a 64-bit system. The paltry nods the devs made in the direction of the N64 are very lacklustre. The sight of a clearly polygonal explosion interacting with the resolutely 2D enemy sprites is especially pathetic.

Can I talk about the enemies? As I said, there are not many. What's worse is that, parody or not, they all seem to be ripped off from Doom in both appearance and general behaviour. There's one that is literally just a mancubus. That's all there is to it. The weapons are also few and far between, and even at the end of the game you don't really have anything that is super effective on the enemies you were encountering at the very beginning of the game. What's really stupefying though, is why the arse the devs put in so many explosive-based weapons when most of the levels are so claustrophobic. How are you supposed to fight enemies in an enclosed space when they're firing frigging missiles at you, and all you're armed with is a shotgun loaded against your will with dum dums, a grenade launcher, a missile launcher, a trip mine, and a pipe bomb?

Now get ready for a famous Noobish Hat U-turn, because I didn't hate this game. It's maybe a 6/10 for me. Somehow I managed to enjoy myself for a large part of this game. It was only around the two-thirds point when the deadly repetitiveness started to bear down upon me. It's just the same weapons against the same enemies over and over again through a lot of sci fi spaceship looking levels, searching for coloured key cards. There are some interesting locations, mainly the earth-based stuff, but towards the end it all looks a bit samey, and I was fairly happy when it was finally over.

[Kit]

It does strike me as a game that would appeal to speed runners. I just wish they'd put in that tiny bit of effort to make those kinds of things 'official' by offering some kind of acknowledgement.

Anyway, here's this:

Spot on.

The absolute worst driving game I've ever played.

[Wools]

Can I just say, this thread has become one of my favourite on the Forum.

Great write up of Duke 64 Noobish, your writing is infectious and after reading a write up of a N64 game, I go on a Wiki and youTube rabbit hole of articles and videos.

I need a few more US N64 games in my collection!

[nakamura]

I don't mind using the look up and down with the C buttons as long as it's smooth. Quake 2 was completely broken because you couldn't changed the up and down viewpoints smoothly enough. On the lightest touch of up or down, even with the slowest setting, the cursor would move about 10mm before scrolling smoothly. It made aiming for headshots absolutely impossible. Such a shame as Quake 2 is a really nice port on the N64.
You can use the d-pad for the left stick and analogue for the right but I just couldn't get comfortable doing that. Pity.