Oh man! GiantBomb has finally given this a page. Now I can crush it to smithereens with speeding race cars.
Developed by Stainless Games and published by Sales Curve Interactive in Europe and Interplay Entertainment in North America, Carmageddon II, the sequel to Carmageddon involves vehicular combat, much like twisted metal. It became something of a game of importance. But not the Nintendo 64 version (known as Carmageddon 64) developed by Software Creations. This is one of the worst I have ever played in my life, on the N64, even worse than Superman 64. The N64 and GBC ports, alongside a US version of the PlayStation port, were originally going to be published by Interplay Entertainment; however, due to the company being brought out by Titus, the latter released them instead, and the PS1 version was released only in Europe.
After the game was play-tested, instead of improving the controls for some reason they included "anti-frustration" measures, cheap tactics to give the player more advantages and make the game slightly more playable without actually fixing the gameplay of the game. But the controls, frame rate and camera angles all equal terrible in quality. Your car would swerve all over the place while steering like a fat man on ice in the darkness. As there is no drifting mechanic and even how hard you steer it is impossible to take tight turns on most tracks without slowing down and spastically turning. In addition about the camera, it is uncontrollable and it can snap back to the back of your car when you stop. While the car handling in the PC version and in the previous game wasn't great, it's much worsened here, as trying to hit any opponent and zombie is a chore, since no matter what car you use, it often loses control and flies to the nearest wall. In fact almost non-existent physics are also present like your car driving up walls and even drive while upside down. To rub salt into the wound, there is a glitch where you can fall into the water and can't recover back onto the track, and if you do recover you appear just next to the water, so you would most likely drive into the water again.
Compared to the PC version, this port has downgraded and awful graphics and low quality textures. No, really. The textures are incredibly blurry and the 3D models of the characters look horrifying. Additionally, the text-only cutscenes like the ones shown above are absurdly small which could cause an eye strain. Even worse, unlike in the computer version or even the PlayStation port, there's barely any licensed music in the game, and whatever music it uses is a forgettable loop.
Most maps are huge and labyrinthine with one path through the checkpoints and zero directions on where to go. There is no set path to reach checkpoints which is very confusing and can result in excessive backtracking. And speaking of checkpoints, although this game does save your progress, it does not tell you if it's actually saving the game or not. And though there is "Carmageddon" and "Quick Start" modes, Quick Start just resumes from where you left off in Carmageddon mode.
Instead of humans like in the PC and PlayStation version, which is something the original Carmageddon has, the N64 version replaces them with zombies, or even dinosaurs!! This makes no sense at all because this game is rated M for Mature, which is an unnecessary age rating given to games that have mature themes, which it does in the form of heavy violence. This means that they don't need to censor the game because minors couldn't buy the game without their parent's consent, if at all.
The AI of your opponent is cheap and completely useless. The zombies just wander about randomly while the opponent cars will, at best, ram you once or twice. The AI cars are so moronic that in one of the levels, Beaver County Quarry, they all always fall into a pit and no one manages to leave.
One of Carmageddon's most staple mechanics, wasting your opponents' cars, is hard to do because your car takes insane damage, even if you ram your opponents without them being anywhere near the speed to do any back. The weapon powerups are also very hard to find and even if you did find them, it still requires a bit of effort to waste opponents with them.
Each successive set of races adds one lap that must be completed. By the game's halfway point you have to extensively seek out ways to extend your time limit as a single race easily takes 20 minutes or longer! Worse, if you get managed to earn about more than 20 minutes of spare time by killing zombies or ramming your opponents, the counter will get bugged and it will stop counting down.
If this game reaches any levels of success, then it pretty much confirms my belief that the N64's third-party developers are just about as brain-dead as I think they are. But what was Interplay even thinking?