#oneaday Day 587: Why are you doing that?

One thing I find quite interesting when looking at games from over the years is contemplating how, as time has gone on, we have become a lot more preoccupied with the "why" of what we are doing in a game than in the past. And, as part of these contemplations, I've come to realise that games which don't really give you much of a "why" beyond "this is what the game is" actually have their own very distinct appeal.

As a case in point, I've been playing some Nintendo 64 "collectathon" platformers recently. This is a type of game that very much fell out of favour at some point between the PlayStation/Saturn/Nintendo 64 era and the PlayStation 2/Xbox/Gamecube age. There are still some folks making games like that — most notably Nintendo — but they are by no means as common as they used to be. And a lot of it, I think, comes down to the apparent expectation that everything must have some sort of narrative context or justification.

Now, I'll hold my hands up here and say that, in the past, I have been guilty of thinking that pretty much every game would be better if it had some sort of narrative context. In the earliest days of this blog, back when the people behind WordPress gave a shit about their community rather than going all-in on AI or whatever shit they're up to at the minute, I even had a post featured for making this very argument specifically about racing games — blissfully unaware, as I was at that point, of Namco's PC Engine conversion of their arcade game Final Lap Twin and the fact they added a Pokémon-ass RPG to it. I do actually still think there's scope for racing games with stories, but I also don't think all racing games need stories — and those which do have stories had better have bloody good ones if they expect me to sit through them rather than skipping right to the racing.

Err, what was I saying? Oh, right. Games didn't always feel the need to justify the things you were doing in the game in terms of narrative. Collectathon platformers are, in many ways, the quintessential example of this: they have characters, a world and indeed a plot, but none of those get in the way of the core "point" of the game: solving puzzles and overcoming challenges to acquire shiny things that let you access more of the game. No-one ever gave a shit about why Mario was collecting Power Stars in Super Mario 64, they just knew that he had to collect Power Stars, and that was enough.

This is one of the things I found quite refreshing about Donkey Kong Bananza recently. That's a game that strikes a very good balance between having an unfolding story and just giving you a basic objective to complete before getting out of your way and letting you accomplish it. For the vast majority of your time in Donkey Kong Bananza, you are looking for Banandium Gems. It doesn't matter why. Donkey Kong wants them, and that means you want them. That's all that matters. That's all that needs to matter.

I'm not saying that games with plots have no place. Hell, you know me, I'll gladly bury my head in a 100+ hour RPG, particularly if it makes me cry at least once along the way. But sometimes it's nice to play a game that is less concerned with wanting to be taken seriously as a great work of art or a masterpiece of characterisation and worldbuilding, and more with being a fun toy that just feels good to fiddle with.

I could have probably phrased that better. But I'm leaving it like that now, deliberately. And I'm off to go and acquire some more shiny things.

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#oneaday Day 266: Beetle Drive

After writing a bit about flash cartridges the other day (and, err, ordering one for my Mega Drive when I saw it was payday) I thought it was probably time I sat and played some of the stuff I had on my Everdrive 64 X7 hooked up to my Nintendo 64. So I did. And I'm reminded that while the Nintendo 64 was a rather odd system in many ways, it also had some great games.

I will probably write some more on these over on MoeGamer at some point, but in the absence of anything particularly interesting happening today, I thought at least a couple of them would make worthwhile blog fodder.

The first one I decided to give a bit of a go was Beetle Adventure Racing, a game which I remember reviewing well back in the day, which I know is often featured in "best of Nintendo 64" retrospectives, which I know my brother likes and which, somehow, I have never gotten around to trying. So I decided I would fix that issue and try it.

Beetle Adventure Racing is really good, you guys. I'm kicking myself for not trying this sooner — and kicking myself for not taking a punt on it back in the days when the N64 was current, either, because I would have absolutely loved this.

For the unfamiliar, Beetle Adventure Racing is an arcade racer from Electronic Arts (boo, hiss, I know, but we still liked them back in the N64 days) and Pilotwings 64 co-developer Paradigm Entertainment. It was created at least in part as a sort of "advergame" for the new-model Volkswagen Beetle, which launched in the late '90s, right when the N64 was in its heyday. It's not obnoxious about it, mind; it's just a game in which all the cars happen to be '90s New Beetles, and apparently Volkswagen weren't all that precious about what EA and Paradigm did to them, because Beetle Adventure Racing sees you doing some ridiculous things with them.

At its heart, Beetle Adventure Racing is a relatively straightforward arcade racer. You can play single events as either full-field races, duels against a single opponent or time trials. There's a championship mode with several difficulty levels, each of which unlocks some new tracks. You can play two-player races. And there's a four-player battle mode that, back in the days when I had three-dimensional friends and we, as a people, went around to each other's houses on a fairly regular basis, I feel we would have had a lot of fun with. One day. Maybe.

The "Adventure" part of the title comes from the design of the courses. While they're relatively straightforward (albeit surprisingly long by genre standards) circuit races at first glance, it won't take you long to notice that there seem to be a lot of scenery elements that just beg the question "I wonder if I can go over there". And the answer, usually, is yes. Track splits in two? Pick a direction. Road goes one way, railway lines head the other way into a boarded-off tunnel? Crash through that sucker and see what's in there! Curious-looking pathway running parallel to the main course, then branching off in a different direction? Check it out next lap.

Now, the nice thing about the course design in Beetle Adventure Racing is that taking these detours doesn't put you at a disadvantage, despite, in some cases, appearing to lead you in a completely different direction to the "official" course. Nope, a lot of them are, in fact, shortcuts that let you skip parts of the track — or at the very least take a different route to get to the same destination.

In the championship mode, they have a secondary purpose, too: they tend to conceal boxes with numbers on them. Crashing into these boxes gives you points. If you get 50 points in a single race, you get a continue that lets you try again if you mess up. If you get 100 points, you get a "bonus" that the game is rather coy about — I believe it's extra stages for the battle mode. There are also, I've just discovered, three hidden "flower boxes" in each stage that unlock "cheats". I haven't even seen one of these yet.

Anyway, the long and short of it is in Beetle Adventure Racing it pays to really explore the different tracks, understand the different routes it's possible to take and practice nabbing the bonus boxes at every opportunity. Because while it's relatively easy to win the novice-level races without putting yourself out too much, combining the point-scoring (and the flower box-hunting) with still winning the race makes things much more interesting than your average arcade racer.

And the tracks! While obviously a little limited by the late '90s tech and the system the game is on, they're proper "thrill ride" courses. One takes you through a not-particularly-subtle Jurassic Park homage, complete with T-Rex bursting through the bushes at the side of the course. One takes you through a volcano. An icy course sees you careening through crystal caves and negotiating huge frozen obstacles. And, as previously mentioned, they're all long, meaning you get plenty of time to enjoy them, and there are plenty of opportunities to spot the different shortcuts, detours and otherwise optional areas.

It's not quite the same as today's "open world" racers, where it's possible to go very off-piste, often to the detriment of your race performance. In Beetle Adventure Racing, the alternative routes are very much designed as integral parts of the courses, rather than simply a thing to go "huh, cool" at, then return to following the guide line for maximum efficiency.

It's a joyful, silly game that I've had a lot of fun with so far — and will likely continue to do so for quite a while yet. In fact, I think I will go and do just that right now.

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#oneaday Day 101: Body Harvest

Today, inspired by yesterday's post and my recent acquisition of an EverDrive 64, I decided to have a "fuck it, I'm playing something new" evening and booted up an N64 game I've always been curious about but never actually tried: DMA Design's Body Harvest, often described by many as a proto-Grand Theft Auto 3. Naturally, as with any sort of widespread and oversimplified opinion, that does Body Harvest something of a disservice, but it is an interesting game that I'm going to spend some more time with.

For the unfamiliar, Body Harvest is a quasi-open world action game in which you take on the role of time-travelling supersoldier Adam Drake in a quest to defeat a bunch of pesky insectoid aliens who show up every 25 years and attempt to eat everyone in sight. For reasons it's best you don't ask too much about — the game's original designer and writer has more on that — it has been decided that Drake should travel back to each of these instances of the aliens arriving on Earth and obliterate them rather than, you know, just attempting to cut them off at the source.

This then unfolds as a series of absolutely vast open-plan 3D levels in which you can control Drake on foot or in a wide variety of vehicles. It's open world and it has vehicles in it, therefore it's just like Grand Theft Auto 3, see?

No, if anything, Body Harvest is closer in execution to something like 16-bit classic Hunter, but with a bit more focus. Because despite unfolding in wide open environments, there's not a lot of incentive to go off exploring; for the most part, completing the game involves running through a series of objectives one at a time, dealing with alien invasions that tend to punctuate getting from one place to another, and attempting to ensure that the little meter indicating how many humans have been eaten doesn't fill up.

It's a game I'd always assumed to be a bit more complicated than it actually is, though to be honest I'm kind of relieved. Body Harvest, although incredibly clunky by modern standards, and even by N64 standards, feels like it has some focus to it, and you're rarely left in a situation where you have no idea what to do or where to go. Being a game from the fifth generation, though, you're not bombarded with tutorials and guide NPCs telling you to shoot the hinges or whatever, meaning there are sequences where you'll have to determine what the best course of action is — even if that action makes you a bit of an asshole, such as a point where you shoot the blades off a windmill because you need one of the cogs that runs it.

Body Harvest scatters a lot of vehicles around the map with good reason: it's a lot easier to get around in them, and they provide considerably more protection for Drake. It's possible to fight while driving a vehicle, either using Drake's weaponry if it's a civilian vehicle or the weapons fitted to the vehicle itself if it's military hardware, and the game's excellent lock-on system means that you don't need to faff around aiming too hard; you can just concentrate on positioning yourself strategically and/or avoiding incoming attacks. In fact, the lock-on system is so good I can't help but wonder how they managed to completely balls that aspect of Grand Theft Auto up so badly, and not even come anywhere approaching to fixing it until the ever-present, never-ending Grand Theft Auto V, which is, of course, the twelfth game in the series.

But yes. Aside from unfolding in a kind-of-sort-of open world and having vehicles in it, Body Harvest doesn't have much to do with Grand Theft Auto. There's no picking and choosing what missions to do, there are no side activities aside from a few collectibles here and there, and your progress through the game is, outside of a couple of opportunities to sequence-break, linear.

But that's fine. It works well for the game, and it keeps you on your toes, always pushing you onwards into the next section of the game world rather than keeping you confined to one place. I appreciate how the game gives you a feeling of freedom, but doesn't overwhelm you with it.

The one aspect that I can see being troublesome is the save system. Each level is absolutely enormous, and is split into several distinct "stages", each of which culminates with a boss fight of sorts, which, early in the level, tends to take the form of eliminating a large static structure that is trying to pelt you with lasers. Upon clearing one of these "stages", a beacon is dropped which acts as both a save point and a fast travel point; outside of that, you can't save, meaning if you fuck things up after an hour of poncing around the open world, you'll have to do all the important stuff again.

Still, this at least gives failure some degree of consequence, and encourages you to perhaps find more efficient ways to complete your objectives — or just memorise the things you need to do. I haven't fallen foul of it yet, but I suspect I will before long!

As an N64 game, Body Harvest is ugly. It was renowned as a particularly ugly N64 game even on its original release and, as you might expect, time hasn't been all that kind to it. But if you can look past that — I certainly can — there's a really enjoyable game with a menacing atmosphere, a moody soundtrack and some satisfying bug-squishing combat to enjoy. I like, so I'll definitely be playing some more of this.

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#oneaday Day 97: EverDriving the '64

Inspired by my success with the GDEMU for the Dreamcast, I decided to pick up an EverDrive 64 for my Nintendo 64. Long-term, I'm planning on grabbing one of these excellent devices for all my cart-based consoles, as I've been burned just once too many by duff cartridges purchased from second-hand sources. As much fun as it is to collect things and have the satisfying tactile thunk of slamming a cartridge into a slot, it's even more fun to have games that actually work.

For the unfamiliar, an EverDrive is a cartridge designed to work with a cartridge-based system… obviously. In most cases, they have a micro SD card slot, on which you load some simple OS files for the thing to be able to do its thing, and then any ROM files you want to use. This effectively means in most instances, you can carry around the complete library for a system on just one cartridge. Very convenient — particularly as the EverDrive also takes care of managing save data, and even allows you to back up and restore Controller Pak saves so you don't need umpteen of the little buggers to be able to save your progress.

The one small issue I've found is that when running NTSC games on my PAL N64, there's a horrible "ghosting" effect on the image that makes playing those games undesirable. It's a bit of a shame, as there are a few North American NTSC N64 titles I wouldn't mind playing, but to be honest, I suspect the EU library will keep me busy for quite some time.

This evening I've been exploring a few games I've always been curious about, but never had the opportunity to play for one reason or another. The two that I've probably had the most fun with are both Midway titles, as it happens, and both arcade conversions: San Francisco Rush and Gauntlet Legends.

San Francisco Rush is an arcade racer that is markedly different from most other arcade racers from the '90s that I'm familiar with. Probably its most notable standout feature is that its courses are relatively "open", often offering alternative routes and shortcuts, and in some cases allowing you to proceed around a section of the course in the opposite direction to the rest of the pack and still end up where you're going.

Of course, open-structure races aren't a particularly uncommon sight these days — to be honest, it's harder to find a modern racing game that isn't open world outside of the hardcore sim sector — but I suspect back in the '90s, San Francisco Rush would have been quite the unusual little thing.

It's also noteworthy in that it's an arcade racer where you really do have to slow down for corners. If there's a drift function, I certainly haven't got to grips with it; thus far I've had a reasonable amount of success with just actually using the brakes (or at the very least letting off the accelerator) ahead of sharp corners — and with the game being set in San Francisco, there are lots of sharp corners.

The visuals are fairly ugly by modern standards, though I found that I quickly stopped noticing the low-resolution blurry nature of the game, and the fact that many of the races are covered in fog is entirely appropriate for the setting. It thus far seems to be an enjoyable racer, and with a decent amount of longevity, too; the main "championship" mode is 24 tracks long, thankfully with the ability to save your progress.

Gauntlet Legends, meanwhile, is a successor to the classic 4-player dungeon crawler from Atari Games. It takes the action into the polygonal 3D realm, though still plays mostly like a top-down maze game. It has all the classic Gauntlet elements present and correct: finding keys to open doors, standing on switches to open up walls, blasting generators to stem the tide of monsters. It adds a few new elements to the mix, though, including an inventory where you can activate and deactivate power-ups at will, and some RPG-lite mechanics whereby you can level up and improve your stats.

Perhaps most importantly, your health doesn't tick down gradually as you play. Bliss! This makes it one of the few Gauntlet games that it doesn't feel utterly futile to play; as much as I like old-school Gauntlet, the various home ports tend to trivialise themselves by providing you the opportunity to "insert coins" as much as you want, affording you effectively unlimited health.

Not so in Gauntlet Legends! Instead, you lose health at a much more sensible rate if you get hit or caught in a trap, and healing items give you a meaningful amount of health back. Plus you can buy more health with the gold you earn in levels, and you also get more health every time you level up.

Probably the thing I'm most impressed with about Gauntlet Legends is how smoothly it runs. While it doesn't run at a rock-solid framerate, it happily gets up to a full 50fps (I'm running PAL, remember) when you're wandering around exploring, and while the frame rate does drop a bit when the screen gets busy, it's never to an unplayable degree, and the controls always remain nicely responsive.

I'm looking forward to spending a bit more time with both games, along with revisiting some old favourites and discovering some new titles. If you have an N64 and a bit of cash to splash, I can highly recommend an EverDrive; I suspect it's going to revitalise my interest in this classic system, and I'm looking forward to getting one for my other classic consoles, too. After payday, though; they ain't cheap!

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2244: Pouring One Out for Conker

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Conker's Bad Fur Day was one of my favourite games on the Nintendo 64 — if not my very favourite. It's certainly my very favourite of all Rare's mascot platformers — the Banjo series may have, objectively speaking, been better designed and more interesting, but Conker was just more likeable for the fact it didn't give a shit what anyone thought and was, without shame, wildly offensive and absolutely hilarious.

The Xbox remake Conker: Live and Reloaded was one of the first ever "remasters" of a video game, and to date it remains one of the most impressive efforts, taking the original game and giving it more than just a hi-res upscale — it's a game that still looks surprisingly impressive today, despite running in 4:3 aspect ratio and 640×480 resolution.

I've been looking to re-acquire a copy of Conker: Live and Reloaded for some time, since I traded my original copy in donkey's years back and haven't been able to find a replacement in recent years. By a stroke of good fortune, dropping into our friendly neighbourhood junk shop — which has a substantial retro gaming section — threw up a copy in good condition, so I dropped £12 on it and brought it home to revisit, partly in celebration of finding it, and partly to remember Conker's glory days after Microsoft revealed this monstrosity the other day:

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That, if you're not familiar with Conker, is supposed to be a young incarnation of Conker and is just wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels. This is what Conker is supposed to look like:

That second picture is from the original Xbox, by the way — you know, the contemporary of the PlayStation 2 — while the first picture is from the Xbox One, two hardware generations later. How is it that they've managed to make him look so much worse?

Anyway, that aside, I've been keen to revisit Conker's Bad Fur Day — which makes up half of the package of Conker: Live and Reloaded, the other being a surprisingly fleshed out multiplayer affair that sadly, with the death of OG Xbox Live, can no longer be played online — just for my own personal gratification. And, aside from a few frustrating sections — one of which I gave up on this evening just before writing this — it's still an absolutely great game, and a reminder of a different time.

If you are, for some reason, unfamiliar with Conker's original adventures, here's the deal. Rare were a partner of Nintendo in the N64 era, and brought us such games as Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 as well as GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. Conker's Bad Fur Day initially looked to be a similar take on the Banjo Kazooie formula — family-friendly platforming fun featuring a strong mascot character of the small and furry variety.

At some point during development, Rare decided that enough was enough, and that the Nintendo 64 probably had enough family-friendly mascot platformers — no-one was going to outdo Super Mario 64 after all, and the only people who had come close were themselves with the excellent Banjo Kazooie games. So they decided to make a radical change in direction with Conker's Bad Fur Day. While maintaining the cartoonish, anthropomorphised animal aesthetic, they ditched the "family friendly" part and instead made Conker's Bad Fur Day into a platform game for adults.

The setup is Conker waking up with the mother of all hangovers and trying to find his way home to go to bed. Along the way he gets considerably sidetracked by the sort of bizarre tasks you always find yourself doing in mascot platformers, many of which, in this case, provide convenient excuses for parodies of movies such as Saving Private Ryan and The Matrix, which were both around at a similar time to the N64 original.

Conker's Bad Fur Day eschews Rare's normal collectathon formula in favour of being a more straightforward action adventure of sorts. Giving the appearance of being open-world and non-linear (but actually being pretty linear), the game is split into several distinct zones, each of which have a number of tasks to complete, with the reward being cash for Conker to stuff his pockets with. The cash is subsequently used as a means of gating certain areas in the game, though not, by any means, to the same degree as something like Super Mario 64's star doors and the like.

What's nice about Conker's Bad Fur Day is that as well as featuring some distinctly adult (albeit immature) humour, it also treats the player like an adult. There are no on-screen objective markers, no checklists, no guide prompts — you have to explore the area yourself, listen to what the characters say and figure out what you're supposed to do and how to do it. It isn't always obvious, and that's an entirely deliberate design choice: part of the challenge of Conker's Bad Fur Day is assessing each situation and determining what the relevance, if anything, of everything in the area might be.

What's impressive about this is that it's pretty rare you'll find yourself feeling stumped as to what to do next. Cutscenes might linger a little longer on something in the environment that you might need to investigate, or characters might point something out, but it never feels like the game is dictating what you should do: progression is very much led by the player, and it's all the more satisfying for that.

And progression is rewarded with some highly entertaining setpieces, lampooning everything from the lobby shootout in The Matrix to Ripley fighting one of the titular Aliens. The game keeps things fresh and interesting by providing context-sensitive areas that provide you with the items you need in a particular location, so you're never stuck carrying around an inventory of useless crap, trying everything on everything in the hope that you might find something that works. There are also several places in the game where getting drunk and pissing on something is the solution to all your problems; try putting that capability in an inventory screen.

I'm pleased at how well Conker's Bad Fur Day holds up, and that it's not just rose-tinted spectacles that cause me to look back on it so fondly. While there are a few annoyances by modern gaming standards — long load times, particularly when you get a "Game Over" (remember them?) are probably the most frustrating, though sluggish camera controls are a close second — the good far outweighs the bad, and the game as a whole acts as a potent reminder of a type of game we simply don't seem to get any more, either from a characterisation and aesthetic perspective, or even from a mechanical perspective, with its combination of exploration, action, platforming and puzzling.

Long live King Conker. I fear we shall never see your likes again.