Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1.
Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii)
2.
Return of the Obra Dinn (PC)
3.
Battlefield: Hardline (PS3)
4.
Call of Duty: Black Ops (PS3)
5.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II (PS3)
6.
Dead Nation (PS3)
7.
Kileak, The Blood 2: Reason in Madness (PS1)
8.
Paro Wars (PS1)
9.
in Stars and Time (Steam)
10.
Tetris Battle Gaiden (SFC)
11.
Super Tetris 3 (SFC)
12.
Battlefield 4 (PS3)
13.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3)
14.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (PS3)
15.
Call of Duty: Black Ops III (PS4)
16.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (PS4)
17.
Call of Duty: WWII (PS4)
18.
Resistance 3 (PS3)
19.
Tearaway: Unfolded (PS4)
20.
Grow Home (PS4)
21.
Grow Up (PS4)
22.
Ratchet & Clank (2016) (PS4)
23.
Dark Sector (Steam)
24.
Nagano Winter Olympics '98 (N64)
25. Multi-Racing Championship (N64)
Continuing to indulge in my madness for N64 games, I was feeling in the mood for a racing game. This wasn’t one I’d heard of until very recently, but I’d at least heard good things about it. What I didn’t realize until I’d already started it, however, was *just* how early an N64 title this is, having come out before the console was even a year old. It went on to explain a lot of things about how it’s put together, but it also made a few more things all that much more impressive given just how young the hardware was at the time. It took me about 2 hours to beat all 3 (that’s right, 3) main races and see the credits as well as messing with the Match Race mode a little afterwards.
As is so often the case with these racing first rally type games, there is no story of any kind. There are cars, there are races. Need you more reason than that to get on the road and RACE!? This is a racing game made by Genki, the guys who would go on to make the Tokyo Extreme Racer series, but that is admittedly a series I know basically nothing about. Rather than TER, I’ve seen a fair bit of comparison online to Sega’s arcade racers, and it’s not hard to see why. This game a ton of very “home port of an arcade racing game” qualities despite being a game completely exclusive to the N64. Not only do you start *far* behind the other 9 racers at the start of each match, but you’ve even got a time limit with a checkpoint system just like an arcade game. I find losing to be more than enough of its own penalty for doing poorly, personally, but given that you can practice the courses in the Free Run mode whenever you want anyway, it’s not a terribly big deal.
Those courses we have are, to be blunt, few. As stated at the start of the review, there are only three courses in the whole game. There are three more to unlock, technically speaking, but they’re just mirrored versions of the first three tracks. That said, “3” in this case is a little misleading in terms of showing the game’s content. While the tracks aren’t super long, a rather novel feature they do have is not shortcuts as such (though this game does have those) but specifically marked forks in the road. Different routes have differently difficult corners as well as different terrains, so depending on how you’ve tuned your car and how you prefer to drive, different routes will make more sense to try and grab you that first place at the end. Be that as it may, 3 tracks is still 3 tracks. Even if the intended gameplay loop is tweaking your car’s tuning to get the best times you possibly can, that’s a pretty darn niche gameplay loop for a console-exclusive game. It’s not exactly hard to blame people for being disappointed with this compared to other N64 racing games (especially ones that came later in the system’s lifespan).
But that is what it is. Sure, there may not be many tracks, but how do they race? The answer is pretty damn well! Genki have put together an arcade-y simulation sort of game that’s like something between a Mario Kart and an F-1 World Grand Prix (to use two other early N64 titles as examples). You’ve got 10 cars to choose from with 8 unlocked at the start that compose of four-wheel drive range rovers and more street racing-y stock cars. Each has their own plusses and minuses, but not even the manual will tell you which does which out of the box, and it’s up to you to see which one you like the feel of the best. My personal favorite was the KINGROADER, with its big four-wheel drive and “This car is the best car!” written on the side x3. You may not be familiar with that car, but that’s because this game has the very fun decision to just make up a bunch of original cars rather than license real ones. As someone not very into real cars, this makes the game much more enjoyable to me. It never does get boring seeing the massive orange Kingroader or the big silly stock cars with Imagineer or Ocean (the game’s publishers) plastered all over them X3
As mentioned earlier, you can tune each car’s specifications to fit the particular track and particular route you’re trying to drive. It’s hardly F-1 World Grand Prix levels of crazy fine tuning, but I’d say Genki have struck a nice line between accessible and customizable here. You can set the off- or on-road-ness of your tires, your gear and aerodynamic-ness for your max speed vs. acceleration, how quick or slow your steering is, the soft or hardness of your suspension, and how hard or soft your breaks work. This is another thing I wish the manual told you about in more detail, though I’ve got to give a big thank you to my friend Minerva (who knows a lot about how cars work) for teaching me the ropes on just what things like “suspension softness” actually affects XD.
Even for not much of a racing fan like myself (this is about as complicated as I can stand it), I’ve can’t help but admit that I can see what the people into games like F-1 World Grand Prix are into with these sorts of games. Tuning your car just a *little* bit more to try and take that corner *just* the way you want to feels SO good when you finally get it right. It’s got a kind of satisfaction to it not unlike that gained from just getting good at racing the particular track itself. Especially when you take into account the different routes available in each track, I think that, especially for the time, the small offering of tracks isn’t nearly so much of a death knell for this game as it may seem at first blush. Especially if you’ve got a buddy to race against in the 2-player mode, I could easily see someone getting a lot of fun out of this game with just how well the cars handle and just how much the terrain of each track affects the required approach.
However, this game absolutely does show its age in some ways that make it a bit difficult to recommend in spite of the fun I had with it. For starters, this game has the very annoying quality that, likely due to dealing with hardware limitations, a lot of early racing games have where the other racers literally do not exist in the same state that you do. They’re more like glorified obstacles rather than truly replicating other racers. I’d say no more than 3, maybe 4 other cars than the player truly exist at any given time: Two ahead of you and one or two behind you. Rather than racing with their own AI-guided pace and ability, playing for even an hour or two makes it pretty clear that they just dynamically spawn themselves in once you’ve passed the guys behind them, and what *actually* decides races is just how fast you’re racing them rather than outwitting or outplaying opponents over a larger track.
Now, given that this isn’t a racer with attack items to worry about the AI cheating with (like most of the early Wipeout titles, for example), this isn’t nearly as massive a problem as it could be. However, it is made a much more annoying problem by the nature of how your enemy racers don’t exist all the time, but they don’t exist normally at all. All nine other AI racers don’t really “drive” along the track, as such. It’d be more correct to say that they’re guided along like a big, invisible slot car track where you’re the only real racer. This means that they have particular routes along the track that each one takes no matter what. And I really mean *no matter what*. If you T-bone a guy mid-turn and keep him from actually making the corner into the route he was trying to take, he won’t spin out and be forced to take the other one. He’ll just phase through the wall and go onto his originally intended route regardless, so he’ll have barely slowed down at all, but your pace will have been totally destroyed.
There are some other more minor complaints, like how I wish the game really had an in-game mini-map option, but they’re small potatoes compared to the bigger problems mentioned above. None of these are things that completely destroy the experience or anything, of course, and they’re all things that can just be overcome by racing better and tuning your car more tightly. Be that as it may, it makes the whole experience feel that much more frustrating, and it’s qualities like this that really make it hard to go and recommend retro racing games like this when better simulated and similarly tightly designed later improvements exist on later hardware. It’s times like this that I see just why my personal favorite racing games are from the GameCube and PS3-eras of gaming rather than on my beloved N64.
Aesthetically, the game is quite nice if still a bit simple. The weather as well as day/night effects really add a lot to each track mechanically as well as visually, and it’s a really neat touch that your and your opponents’ headlights will flick on when they’d realistically need to. It’s a mid-’97 N64 game, so it’s not like the graphical fidelity is completely untouched by time, but I find it to have a delightfully retro charm nonetheless, and anyone still a fan of old polygonal stuff will doubtlessly feel the same way as long as they don’t mind a game without properly licensed cars (a complaint I don’t really empathize with myself but do intellectually understand the issue). The music is very arcade-y and fun, and the game’s announcer is also something I had a lot of fun with. He’ll shout out the upcoming turns and such alongside the on-screen graphics doing similar things, and it adds a lot to the campy atmosphere of the races that I enjoyed a lot.
Verdict: Recommended. There’s a lot of competition for great racing games on the N64, so highly recommending a game like this that has so many push and pull factors can be kind of difficult. I had a lot of good tense moments and genuine fun with this game despite its faults, but those faults are going to hit at different strengths depending on what type of experience you want out of your 3D racing games. Keeping your expectations in check and not trying to enjoy this game as something rather what it is will do a lot for your enjoyment here. That said, I still think this is a very well made and fairly novel racing game on the console despite its age, and it’s worth checking out if you’re a fan of things like Sega’s arcade racers but for some reason want to play that kind of thing on an N64 x3
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
