#265. John Romero’s Daikatana
July 31, 2000
Ion Storm
Eidos Interactive/Kemco
$149.99 on Amazon
Now what I’m about to say might be taken as fuckin’ wild when talking about what is considered to be one of the worst N64 ports of all time, but Daikatana – pardon, John Romero’s Daikatana for the N64 – is just…below average? The control scheme doesn’t make any sense and I can’t use the weapon the goddamn game is named after like in every other port, but looking at this and comparing it to my introduction to despair and regret after begging my mom to buy me The New Superman Adventures and I’d say it isn’t nearly in the same league as “FLY THROUGH MY RINGS, SUPERMAN.” It’s a janky shooter with ambition far too great for the N64’s capabilities, but I didn’t find it nearly as unbearable as it has infamously been claimed to be. But is that really a good thing when I can also say with utmost certainty that I ain’t playin’ this ever again? So, yeah. Not legendarily shitty. Just regular shitty. — W. Quant
#264. NFL Quarterback Club 2001
August 24, 2000
High Voltage Software
Acclaim
A huge step backwards for the franchise, which despite its early lead was getting the shit kicked out of it by Madden in a full blown, NFL Blitz style beatdown at this point (Blitz was also beating the shit out of QB Club now that I mention it). This disgraced entry is reminiscent of disgraced cover star Brett Favre’s late-career attempt at relevancy when his Minnesota Vikings were pummeled by the Chicago Bears 40-14, losing the division in the last game he’d ever play. This series would limp along and do one more entry on the next generation systems, but by ‘01 it was already dead, like Favre’s hopes at being remembered solely for his on-field football heroics and not as a rich asshole that allegedly siphoned funds from a welfare fund to bankroll a volleyball stadium at his daughter’s college. These games really sucked, Brett. — M. Roebuck
#263. Twisted Edge: Extreme Snowboarding
November 10, 1998
Boss Game Studio
Midway
$27.99 on Amazon
Had I been a bright-eyed child when Twisted Edge: Extreme Snowboarding was released, I might have been impressed by its four character designs, sluggish handling, and wonky aerial spins. I might have enjoyed opening this game as a holiday gift and chilling with my man Ganz, whose insane curly-Q beard is sadly nerfed in his two-polygon 3D model.
Or maybe I would have just played 1080° Snowboarding instead, which was released seven months prior.
Twisted Edge‘s piddly amount of tricks and stiff controls make me yearn for the physics-defying absurdity of SSX and its subsequent titles. While the character designs are lovably tacky, they feel a bit plain in a genre that typically includes some of the strangest clowns you’ve ever seen from all across the globe. The game has very little personality and identity of its own aside from an impressively ear-rending soundtrack. The most fun I had playing this game was sitting in the sound test menu and scrolling through each track while drinking a blackberry sour. There is nothing quite like an ambitious, overcrowded MIDI soundscape with an out-of-tune, off-beat bassline. At best, it sounds like a streamer-safe version of a Primus track. At worst, it’s math rockabilly made by someone who failed algebra, and I would know – I failed algebra. — L. Fisher
#262. Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt
June 29, 1999
Realtime Associates
THQ
$24.99 on Amazon
Did you ever think that Mario Party was too bogged down with mini-games? If so, then we have just the thing for you! Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt takes what little charm from the show it can wring out with funky looking polygonal models, and mixes it with all your least favorite parts of Mario Party. So, be ready to spin the wheel, move a few spaces, and then wonder what happened that led to you, a 25-year-old, playing a game meant for actual rugrats. Also, with no mini-games, there is nothing to make one turn different from the next. Endless cycles of moving around the boring maps make five minutes feel like five eons. There is no fun here, unless you are dying to find each totem piece, the game’s main collectible, and I ain’t on my death bed yet. — G. Porter
#261. Star Wars: Episode I: Battle for Naboo
December 18, 2000
Factor 5
LucasArts
A long time ago on a console far, far away (at my dad’s house, in the basement, and under at least like, 3 feet of clothes), a series of promotional hunks of plastic were released around the triumphant return of the Star Wars franchise. Figures, Lego sets, decorative cup toppers, Rubik’s cubes shaped like Hayden Christiansen’s head, damn near everything. Some of them even had a bunch of chips and wires inside them, housing games. Star Wars: Episode I: Battle for Naboo: Revenge of the Colons was one such hunk of plastic.
To put a fine point on it, it’s Worse Rogue Squadron. Remember all the awesome rail shooter parts of that game? What if there was significantly less of that? What if instead of that, more often than not you had to clumsily bump around on land and water? That’s it in a nutshell. It battles harder for your attention span than it does Naboo. Now that’s not what I call podracing. — Walker MacDonald
#260. Turok: Rage Wars
November 23, 1999
Acclaim
Acclaim
$33.99 on Amazon
There’s a good fuckin’ reason this whole franchise went the way of the dinosaur, and I’m no archeologist, but I’d wager the meteor responsible for the extinction event was Turok: Rage Wars. Maybe archaic controls (even by 1999 standards) are an attempt at prehistoric realism, but I’m sure even some Cro-Magnon could discern that a camera angle inseparable from the directional pad is a goddamn nightmare. It’s like you’re in a neck brace and have to turn your entire head every time you want to walk or even look in a different direction.
I get that this is a multiplayer experience, and I’m sure Quake with Dinosaurs was a neat idea on paper, but I really can’t imagine anyone, even at the time of its release, coming over for couch co-op night and pitching this over GoldenEye or Smash. Leave this fossil wherever you find it. — W. MacDonald
#259. Chopper Attack
November 28, 1997
SETA Corporation
Midway
$39.95 on Amazon
Chopper Attack sure is a game that was released. It is a game of a year. There’s just no doubt about that. Despite these accolades, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about it. A whole swath of B-list games with helicopters featuring rooty-tooty-point-and-shooty target practice were published during the N64’s run, and Chopper Attack is yet another addition to the pile. Does it function? Yeah. Does it feel good to play? So-so. Is it really worth any kind of deep, nuanced criticism of its highs and its flaws? Let’s be honest: no, it does not. It is as common as a housefly and as interesting as watching paint dry. No, maybe that’s unfair — it’s at least as fun as painting a wall by shooting little pellets at it. So okay, it’s a little more fun than doing nothing, but not by much.
The most memorable thing about this game is the extremely stilted cutscene where your passably stern commanding officer explains mission objectives to you. The dialogue boxes pass automatically with no player input while trumpets blast in the background, as if the military band forgot how to play Taps while preemptively mourning your death. Commander Dickweed punctuates the absurd scene with a fistpump and a very bitcrushed “YAAAGH!” to motivate you in your travels. An utterly captivating cinematic experience.
But hey, at least some of the helicopters have faces on them! — L. Fisher
#258. NBA In The Zone 2000
February 18, 2000
Konami
Konami
$85.00 on Amazon
More In The Zone bullshit. Nothing has really been fixed here fundamentally, everything is still pretty atrocious, but they’ve added some things, like a noticeable polish on the graphics and the slam dunk contest that’d been included on previous versions of the game on other systems. That’s nothing to complain about, but it also feels a little bit like being served a free cocktail on a turbulent flight. I appreciate the drink, really I do, but it doesn’t stop the violent experience happening to my body. Put another way, I would rather eat fucking dirt than play any of these games for more than a few minutes once I’m done going through them all.
Dunk contest is pretty fun once you get the hang of it! — M. Roebuck
#257. Body Harvest
October 20, 1998
DMA Design
Midway
$64.99 on Amazon
One of my earliest encounters with the Nintendo 64 was an ill-fated one. We all have that one game that was either inherited, bought out of a Walmart bargain bin, or by any other means just popped into existence for us. A hazy memory with only a handful of aesthetic details to recall it by. Some shit you’re not even fully confident you didn’t just make up. For me, that was Body Harvest.
While it’s reassuring that it wasn’t a memory hole’d fever dream after all, it isn’t really any less bizarre in reality. Relative to the hardware, the game takes some pretty ambitious swings both narratively and mechanically, but they seem to have taken precedence over the basics.
There’s this grandiose sci-fi story that aims for Starship Troopers but lands firmly at Bad Taste. There’s at least a dozen individual vehicles, a classic Doomguy rip off protagonist, and levels set in multiple countries across several decades. But you can’t jump, talk to half the NPCs, or aim independent of the camera. You could spit farther than the draw distance. Environments look like they were designed by a toddler with a bucket of loose Lincoln Logs. Anything you could kill or interact with is few and far between.
It’s the kind of thing dreamed up by sitcom writers trying to conceive of a genetically unsavory video game for Little Johnny & Suzie to pine for. Skip it, play fuckin’ Tiddelywinks or something instead. — W. MacDonald
#256. ClayFighter 63 ⅓
October 23, 1997
Interplay
Interplay
$74.99 on Amazon
ClayFighter 63 ⅓ has such a unique art style, it’s a shame that the same cannot be said of the gameplay. Featuring the most bland fighting game controls possible, there isn’t much here to love. The attitude of the game wears pretty thin early on as well, with the combo score system taking every chance it can get to call you ‘lame’ or a ‘little girly’. This game epitomizes the 90’s edge, both good and bad.
The juvenile and disgusting art is fun to look at, but when every character, including the announcer, is spouting the same tired catchphrases, the fun just doesn’t last. Well, how about the roster? As long as you ignore the horrifically racist caricatures and the character that’s just “blob of clay” there are some fun designs, including an evil snowman, an evil clown, an evil Gumby and even a special cameo from everyone’s favorite digital invertebrate, Earthworm Jim, for whatever reason. However, these are nowhere near enough to distract from the fact that most fights can be won by getting your opponent trapped on the side of the stage and spamming the punch button. — G. Porter
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