N64 Connoisseur

Happy Quinceanera!

Happy New Year! My how time flies when you are having fun. Now, some of you will be wondering why this is not part 2 of my Link to the Past review I promised. Well, because reasons, that’s why. Here are the cliff notes: I took Christmas off. We had site troubles here at 1MC so it looked like I was going to have to skip another regular post. Well, we got the all clear a couple of hours ago which is not enough time before my deadline to write the massive conclusion that Link to the Past deserves. So, I simply flipped my next planned N64 Connoisseur piece into its place. Now with that out of the way, time for some grade A connoisseuring. The idea for this piece is stolen borrowed repurposed from a series that Patrick Scott Patterson has been doing over at Examiner where he has recapped games that turn 20 and 30 this year, respectively. Well, the N64 doesn’t have that kind of longevity yet, but we do have 15. So this piece is a salute to some N64 classics having their quinceanera this year.

Super Smash Bros.

One of the best games on the entire system and one of the best multiplayer experiences on any system, Super Smash Bros was a game built on a simple concept. You know all of those Nintendo characters everyone loves? What if they hated each other? AWESOME! Also, what if a personified glove was the boss for the single player mode? HIGH FIVE! Besides being an amazing concept, it took all of the most frustrating parts of fighting game controls and smoothed them out. This is a game that is still being widely played and deserves every accolade it has ever gotten. Now, if they would only start mass producing Falcon Punch as a soft drink…

Donkey Kong 64

The bright yellow cartridge. As a collector, I have always appreciated being able to know which cart was DK with the horrid absence of top labels. DK64 required the Expansion Pak and was actually bundled with it. This was a very fun and serviceable platformer. It featured 5 playable characters, each with their own abilities and collectables. I heard the collective groans of people who hate collecting things in games. SILENCE! Your whining has angered the Connoisseur, who happens to like collect-a-thons. You must now be punished. You are hereby sentenced to watch this in its entirety:

Harvest Moon 64

Man, Tom, I totally wish you had a new amazingly awesome review of this game someplace I could read. What? Oh, you guys. Yes, I did recently review this game on my site, and it was pretty neat.  I thought I’d be going into a straight farm sim and instead this game actually had some interesting depth and charming character. Many fans of the series actually herald this as the best entry. I enjoyed it. Good heavens, though, how did you people survive through that awful, awful music? I mean really, I had to keep looking out my window to make sure stray cats were not mating on my porch while blowing into tightly stretched saran wrap while scratching a chalkboard while learning to play the bagpipes. Pretty rough.

Pokemon Snap

Aww snap. The best rail shooter on the N64 also turns 15 this year. If I came to you and told you that I had an idea for a game where I would send the player on a predetermined path and their objective would be to take pictures of Pokemon, you would have me committed to an insane asylum. Really, you probably should do that anyway. That aside, Pokemon Snap managed to take the charm of the Gameboy classics and bring them to life in a beautiful, vibrant fashion. Add in having to figure out how to make all of the Pokemon appear and get top notch pictures of them, perfectly timed and suddenly you had countless hours of gameplay. Thankfully, the planned sequel Selfie 64 was cancelled although rumor has it that it may yet see life on the Wii-U Virtual Console.

Jet Force Gemini

The most underrated game on the N64 will also be a decade and a half old this year. A 3rd person shooter with a light dusting of platforming, JFG was just a refreshing game to play. It was fun, it was immersive, and unlike Harvest Moon 64, the music was great. Great enough that you actually want to listen to it outside of the game. It is sadly, another one of those Rare games we’ll likely never hear from again but we still have this one at least! One player of Jet Force Gemini was quoted as saying, “You know what I could go for? Tacos.” With praise like that, what else could I possibly need to tell you?

Superman 64

Now, when I said N64 classics, that did not necessarily mean classically good. You have to admit, the game has gotten to the point where it is routinely mentioned when discussing the N64, much in the same way poop is routinely mentioned when discussing puppies. It has some clout. Just not good clout. This is a game so bad, Superman himself tried to fly backwards around the earth to reverse time so he could stop its manufacture. Before this game, no one had ever used the term “unplayable.” I would rather be locked in a sauna with a team of Olympic sumo wrestlers on “eat all the cabbage you can get your hands on” day than have to play this game for 10 minutes. It is a game without a single redeeming quality and yet somehow, through breathtaking mediocrity it has become its very own piece of folklore. Happy birthday, awful awful Superman game.

As always, there are a bunch more I didn’t have time to get to. Beetle Adventure Racing, Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes, Hybrid Heaven, and Magical Tetris Challenge to name a few. Next time we meet, I assure you, you shall see the exciting conclusion of the Link to the Past review. One more piece of business before I sign off. You may have noticed that snazzy new N64 Connoisseur logo (not the cake, that is clip art) and asked yourself where on earth something so amazing beautiful could possibly come from. The answer is Namo Dyn. Namo did this logo for me and a couple of others you’ll see soon. Need any logos or other art done yourself? Hit up Namo on Twitter. Until next time: may all of your dreams be in 64 glorious bits.