64 in 64: Episode 49: Plats All, Folks! Part One
by mento
The internet's favorite N64 ranking show is back, just in time for the system's 30th anniversary. We'll be focusing entirely on the remaining 3D platformers for the system throughout this season, with the inauspicious opening duo of maligned ball-tamperer Glover and the incomplete tie-in Carnivale: Cenzo's Adventure.
It's the long-awaited (by someone, presumably) return of 64 in 64! I've linked to the previous entries below but if you want the quick pitch the idea here is to play through a variety of Nintendo 64 games for 64 minutes apiece and then rank 'em. Regarding the console in question, June happens to be the Nintendo 64's 30th anniversary (going by its Japanese launch, so omedetou!) and I wanted to drag this feature back out of mothballs to celebrate a birthday that definitely doesn't make me feel old in any way, shape, or form. Nope.
Specifically, though, this season will be exploring the then-nascent genre that found great traction on this platform in particular—the 3D platformer—and the goal will be to eventually cover every single remaining one I could find in the N64's moderately-sized library. That also means ranking, at some point, Rare's own Banjo-Kazooie: a game I previously passed over since it had already been added to the Nintendo Switch Online service and didn't really need me proselytizing for it. I've 16 of these lively leapers to learn more about so I'll be splitting this season across two months, with each month receiving four 64 in 64 entries featuring two games apiece. (Jeff Gerstmann may have the science on lock but I've got the arithmetic.) If all goes well we'll have a definitive ranking of all the N64's 3D platformers, from the highest highs of Super Mario 64's Tall, Tall Mountain to the lowest of lows of Blues Brothers 2000's spacious Chicagoan sewer system. (I'm at least relieved I won't have to play through that one again.)
If you'd like to get all caught up—keeping in mind images are still broken for older blogs—here's a link to Episode 48, which includes the master list. (Sadly, its table is full of dead links to previous entries, but blog issues are understandably low on the list of fires Chuck and co. need to put out right now especially as we enter Not-E3/SGF season.) For the sake of keeping things svelte around here I'll be using a truncated ranked list for this series that only includes the 3D platformers covered here and previously: once the feature's done I'll incorporate it into the larger "master" list and post that up somewhere conspicuous.
Oh, and it's been a while so here are the rules again:
Two games, sixty-four minutes spent on each. This time I've randomly selected each pair from the pool of sixteen I intend to cover, with a few concessions (I'll play originals before their sequels, for instance).
I'll provide quarter-hour reports on each game to let you know what I'm doing, where my mind is at, and how much I might be enjoying/suffering the playthrough thus far.
With one exception, none of these games are on NSO as far as I can tell and probably won't ever be. All the same, for each game I'll include a post-script on how likely I suspect Nintendo's working on getting them in there (hey, they just added Donkey Kong 64, so anything's possible) as well as how gracefully the game has aged in broader terms. Might there be some hidden gems that got overshadowed by the popularity of Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie? Almost certainly not but a guy can (Project) dream at least.
All that's left is to dedicate this episode to one Mike "Tolkoto" Minotti (and, in spirit, to the whole Blight crew). He hasn't passed away or anything, but after what the N64 has put him through lately with DK64 and (more recently) GoldenEye 007 he probably feels like he has.
Enough of the pre-amble: we've got some actual ambling to do, and probably even more jumping. Starting with... oh, god, why
PAF#1: Glover
1998-10-31 (NA), November 1998 (EU)
145th N64 Game Released
History: It's Glover! A magical glove, once owned by a wizard, is tasked to recover a series of crystal balls by slapping, punching, or riding them to the completion zone of each world portal they accidentally rolled into. Glover is possessed of a number of attack and traversal skills, this number increasing should he find himself riding one of the crystal balls around. He can also temporarily change the material of these balls to give them new properties, like the more bouncy rubber ball or the heavier bowling ball. Attempting to stop the restoration of these crystal balls is Cross-Stitch, the evil corrupted version of Glover's companion glove Glovel (see, it's actually Glove-R and Glove-L; we were spelling it wrong this whole time), who is capable of summoning monsters with his magical powers.
Glover showed up around late 1998, about a week before Ocarina of Time (ouch), and comes to us courtesy of UK studio Interactive Studios. There's quite the legacy to unpack with these guys, starting with the fact that the studio was founded by the Oliver Twins—they of Dizzy, Prince of the Yolkfolk fame—and was first called Dizzy Enterprises until the studio eventually settled on Blitz Games. Glover was one of their earliest releases but they stuck around well into the PS3 era mostly putting out licensed games based on SpongeBob or The Fairly OddParents: a few of their originals include the 360-era reboot Dead to Rights: Retribution, the first Fuzion Frenzy, and the XBLA arcade puzzle game Droplitz. Glover was the studio's only N64 game, and it was only one of two N64 games published by toy giant Hasbro's video game subsidiary Hasbro Interactive: the other being an adaptation of the board game Monopoly. Of all the N64 party games to buy for your kids...
You know how in crime movies where the veteran guy decides to come out of retirement for "one last job" and it immediately all goes to shit and he realizes he probably should've stayed retired? So, yeah, here's me playing Glover. No, I'm not actually going to blow my top because the random chooser chose this, of all games, to be this comeback season's inaugural entry. After all, the goal of "Plats All, Folks!" is to play everything on this list, so learning how to stop worrying and love the Glove was inevitable either way. What it does do is strike a pretty telling tone for how I suspect this season's going to go, as well as setting a low bar for all the other featured games to surpass: will they reach the basic level of platforming competency that would put almost anything above a Glover, or will they prove to be such uninteresting licensed dreck that the ambition and inventiveness of Sapient Glove Man Plays With His Balls ends up being far more preferable? Since we're bringing back the ranking table at the end, I guess we'll find out eventually. Be sure to post your estimates in the comments below on whether this eventually resides in the top half or bottom half of the games being ranked once all is said and done because right now I really can't be too certain just how blessed/cursed Glover might be in comparison to what's to come. That's the oft-joyous mystery that is 64 in 64 in a nutshell, I suppose.
16 Minutes In
Something about the giant hole on the top of Glover's head just feels so ominous. Like there's nothing in there. This soulless glove... thing.
Progress here was limited to getting through the intro cutscene, the tutorial area, and about one and a half of the normal levels of the first world: Atlantis. I'm grappling with the controls well enough but there's something about the ball transformation mechanic that still intimidates me a little. Like, it seems a few of the different forms are far more difficult to work with and don't seem to exist for any reason I can see beyond making the game harder. I suppose later stages might prove me wrong and find some smart applications for them, but I probably won't see them in the time I have. My goal is to at least complete the first world, Atlantis, which comprises of three of these normal stages and a boss fight (and a special bonus stage; I can unlock it by grabbing all these floating playing card collectibles in any given world, which of course I was going to do anyway).
Sorry to burst any bubbles, or a particularly fragile sphere of your choice, but I don't think Glover's all that bad. Of course, I've only the early courses to go on so far but despite a few annoyances here and there—it takes a bit to get used to how your movement is reversed when you're riding on top of a ball, though at least there's something about the physics involved that makes intuitive sense—it seems like an entirely fine one of these with a mild puzzle-platformer element as you figure out how to get your ball past or across various hurdles. I like the music, Glover controls well enough with or without his balls, and it's visually on par with most N64 games I've reviewed so far. As we move forward, I'm just going to stick Crabby Mento in a cage for a little while until I need him.
32 Minutes In
I spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time trying to figure out how to climb this wall of water to grab those garibs (as the game calls them) up there. Time well spent, as I'm sure you'll agree.
Almost done with Atlantis now, just about to fight the boss of this area and then check out this bonus zone. Atlantis 3 was considerably more involved than Atlantis 1, with more traps, secrets, enemies (some of which can be destroyed for collectibles), and tricky navigation areas. I wonder if future areas will have a similar escalation, where they might introduce a few new factors in the gentle first stage and then start multiplying them for the third and final course. Well, I suppose that's just how level design works in general.
Let's talk ball control. In a neutral state Glover sort of caresses the ball and guides it in whichever direction he's moving. It's pretty easy to keep the ball safe like this and it lets you slap the ball to send it flying with the A button, or alternate between bouncing and throwing the ball depending on if you tap or hold the B button—the former for small platform height differences and the latter for greater ones as well as horizontal gaps. Glover can also ride the ball if you jump on top of it or enter deeper water, which reverses movement as said before but can be fairly quick to get around once you're used to the change. They clearly put a lot of thought into the fact that the player will be stuck trying to maneuver this thing through various obstacle courses and wanted it to be as painless as possible which, if not having the balls at all wasn't an option, is probably the best way they could've approached this. Sort of like putting the work into trying to make your escort quests more palatable instead of just lifting them out of the game entirely like a non-psychopath would do.
48 Minutes In
I love sushi but this serving seems a little too raw for my liking.
Well then. Let's break down what happened here. I beat the boss in about two minutes—it was a stack of three sea creatures and tossing the bowling ball their way was enough to defeat two of them, with the last squashed by a standard ground-pound (or... fist-pound?)—and then I spent the next fourteen minutes in abject agony over in the bonus round. So, what I thought was a simple enough victory lap where I might grab a few extra lives was instead an in-engine parody of the classic arcade game Frogger. You are turned into a frog, can jump either a small or large distance, and can move between turtle shells (which quickly sink) and logs as you make your way up the screen to the exit. Thing is, every object had a curved edge so if you weren't fully on it you'd slip off and into the water which, as we all well know, is fatal to amphibians. The whole process was excruciating. Then again, strictly speaking how much can a purely optional bonus stage really detract from the experience? If you weren't some completionist or RA fanatic you'd probably only play it a few times before quitting in disgust. A quandary to ruminate on as we enter the final quarter here.
I mentioned the ball transformations and the bowling ball specifically. Part of the whole rich Glover lore is that Glover can magically transform the crystals he's meant to recover: for instance, he changes them all to rubber balls as they're falling off the castle to preserve them during the intro cutscene. The bowling ball is heavy and can take out enemies, though its weight makes it awkward to move around and especially up slopes. There's a smaller metal ball that's good for aiming at targets and, like the bowling ball, sinks in water if there's a switch down there. Then there's the original crystal form, the only special quality of which is that it's very fragile and will shatter with any significant amount of force, whether it's from an enemy attack or just falling a fair distance. I suspect I'll be throwing the ball around more often in the next zone since it's a Carnival (kind of a weird coincidence given our next game down here) so here's hoping the bonus stage isn't quite as brutal as... wait, I guess I won't have the time left to see it. Hooray!
64 Minutes In
Wow, this game became bullshit precarious walkways hovering over an endless abyss faster than I expected. At least the draw distance is... nope, never mind.
I wasn't quite on the money earlier about how each new world might reset the size of the later stages, because Carnival 1 was the largest level yet. After a few nail-biting narrow bridges and ramps the second half of the level brought you back down to earth to play a few carnival games: slots (where you can "lock" reels but have no idea initially what the iconographs mean), plinko (each of the four ending holes leads to different rewards, though only the far left is necessary for progression), and whac-a-mole (this just involved killing regular enemies as they pop out of holes). A neat way to take advantage of that setting though the circus music was starting to drive me a little crazy. I'd say that I'm relieved that I won't be playing any more of this world or this game but some dark impulse is pushing me to see the rest of it once I'm done here. Man... do I really need the RA mastery for Glover? Of all games?
I could see how later levels could become a chore but on the whole I didn't mind Glover at all. Maybe a bit anticlimactic to give the game an "I dunno, it's fine" after spending entire previous seasons of 64 in 64 reverse-hyping it up (down?) as some four-fingered boogeyman but given all the actual garbage that was released on N64 I've probably been a little unkind to this hapless, hopping haberdashery from my first impressions. That said, that Frogger bonus level can leap into traffic.
How Well Has It Aged?: Glove Will Tear Us Apart. I dunno, it's fine. Having level design built around navigating a ball over ledges adds (in creativity) as much as it detracts (from the frustrating level of precision required) and in terms of presentation it was never going to rustle Rare's jiggies but it's certainly no slouch. Glover is well-animated, for one, and the physics for the various different ball transformations couldn't have been easy to wrangle for how functional they are here. The camera is trash but that's true of 80% of games of this genre on N64 (and frankly that percentage doesn't get much lower if we also include 3D platformers not on N64). If Glover ends up at the exact middle of the table once we're done ranking I'd consider that fortuitous, though I guess we have a ways to go before we know for sure.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: All Out of Glove. I say that, but Glover is already available on the Switch eShop courtesy of QUByte Interactive. You can buy it right now if you felt so inclined. Where it isn't available is on NSO for probably obvious reasons if it has a price tag on the eShop. I'm going to go out on a limb (probably a hand if I had to choose) and say this is a very low priority for the service. Now watch as Nintendo announces it during their summer Direct.
Retro Achievements Earned: 10 (of 49). Standard assortment for 100% completion, between story progression and getting all the collectibles. There's also an in-game time trial mode where there's just the one achievement attached to it (but it's a big 50-pointer at least). Beyond those there's a few stage-specific challenges where you have to complete it with the crystal ball: since you can break that thing by looking at it funny I can't imagine those are easy.
PAF#2: Carnivale: Cenzo's Adventure
[no release date]
N/A-th N64 Game Released
History: Carnivale is a 1999 animated movie with a French-Irish lineage, which isn't a combination I think I've seen before (what do they even have in common besides hating the British?), and concerns four or five wise-ass kids (and their cat) getting trapped inside a magical, and what quickly proves to be malevolent, theme park. Its English dub features the voicework of Hugh Laurie (at his most nasally) and Helena Bonham Carter and was directed by the art director for The Nightmare Before Christmas and All Dogs Go to Heaven 2, Deane Taylor. You could probably piece together in your head what the movie (and this game) looks like from that. Cenzo's Adventure was meant to be a contemporaneous tie-in, to be released on N64 and PlayStation (and Game Boy Color!), but the movie's lack of success combined with troubles at TerraGlyph nixed the games mid-production, leaving only around half of this version completed (the GBC game, meanwhile, was supposedly close to finished). It's therefore the fourth game covered on 64 in 64 that never actually came out—following 40 Winks from Ep.35, O.D.T. from Ep.45, and Viewpoint 2064 also from Ep.45—and may not even have enough accessible content to last the sixty-four minutes we're spending with it here.
This will not be the only time we see TerraGlyph Interactive on this season of 64 in 64 as they were also behind the licensed platformer-adventure hybrid Scooby-Doo! Classic Creep Capers. Beyond those two games (their only N64 output), the Chicago-based company also produced a couple of Tiny Toon Adventures tie-ins for PS1 and another for PC (Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster & the Beanstalk). They also dabbled in movie production with an animation studio based in Ireland, one such movie being... Carnivale. Well, kinda makes sense now why someone was interested enough in producing a tie-in game for an animated feature this obscure.
Carnivale: Cenzo's Adventure was the only game left in my "N64 prototypes" folder that seemed relevant for this mini-series though I did not anticipate I would draw it so soon, and especially not in the same episode as Glover. I've no idea what to expect, though the few screenshots I've seen floating out there on Unseen64 (back when it was active) and TCRF do not fill me with a whole lot of confidence. Neither does the fact that they weren't close to finishing it: probably going to encounter tech issues ahoy, and you definitely want structural instability from any theme park you step into. But hey, in an alternate universe where Cenzo's Adventure successfully reached the end of its dev cycle thanks to a passionate team of creators, maybe it could've become far more successful than the license it was based on. It's certainly happened before now. Perhaps we'll even get to hear some voice samples from nutty ol' Dr. House. Let's go see what happens to all that contrived optimism, shall we?
16 Minutes In
Both games I covered had one of these "Test Your Strength" mallet machines. Of course, only this one replaced the puck with a humanoid mandible. Because spooky!
Uh... hmm. Not quite sure what I got myself into here. The game has a silent introduction (I'm not going to come down on an unfinished game for details like that) before you get dropped into the titular Carnivale as a lanky weirdo, Cenzo, who is one of the four kid protagonists of the movie despite looking like a grown-ass man (and is the one voiced by Hugh Laurie in the movie, no less). The Carnivale is this big open area I figure is some kind of hub and has a few robotic enemies milling around—so we got some Westworld in here, that's cool—as well as a handful of collectibles. Most of these collectibles are silver coins: you need a certain amount to enter the first two mini-game areas, which I'll get into, and seem to spawn endlessly from trees. The other grabbables include gold coins, which seem to be rarer, and a straw that can double as a ranged weapon (as a blowdart, though you need ammo for it) and a short-range melee weapon. The robots don't seem too impressed with either attack mode, so instead I just avoid them. The two silver-coin challenges include one of those strongman mallet things, which grants you the use of a (temporary) mallet I couldn't find a use for, and a duck shooting gallery which can award gold coins. Goal now is to get enough gold coins to get on what looks like a spookhouse ride.
What else can I say so far besides that there's very little direction and it really feels less like a platformer than it does one of the Zelda or Castlevania games, balancing action (what little I've seen) with adventure game style puzzles; there doesn't even seem to be any way to jump so I'm not sure who's out there pigeonholing this as a 3D platformer. Interesting though. Definitely feels like something that came out of that whole macabre Henry Selick universe, perhaps by way of an Ed, Edd, n Eddy.
32 Minutes In
The duck shoot mini-game. The clown heads are there to get in the way, you don't score anything shooting balls in their open mouths (despite that also being the set-up for a carnival game). The yellow/gold ducks get you coins but the black ducks (the game calls them brown) will wipe out anything you've earned so far, which seems overly harsh.
Already run into a technical snafu. The duck shoot freezes the game if you try to go into it a second time and so I'm left unsure as to how to raise the necessary amount of gold coins to get into the next ride. There's no saving system, though there is a password system that doesn't seem to work which, as alternative systems go, doesn't seem too hot. Honestly, a N64 game with passwords? I'm going to try switching RetroArch cores and keep futzing around with the mallet to see if I can make money through other means. I'm not that hopeful I'll see anything else this prototype has to offer but I've seen footage of others playing the game and there is like a whole-ass kart racing game in here, somewhere. Oh Carnivale, what secrets do you still hold?
Current mood is: pensive. I don't want to cast judgment on Carnivale until I've figured it out a bit more though if the idea is to keep playing the same mini-games over and over to raise the capital needed to access boss fights or these kart racing segments where actual progress can be made, that sounds like a very slow and miserable experience. I'm still holding out hope that I can find a jump button at some point, otherwise it's going to make this game's inclusion a little suspect.
48 Minutes In
Hardly the only game dealing with animal cruelty, though usually the animals can put up more of a fight than this.
Moving between different cores hasn't fixed the duck shoot problem but, irrespective of emulation issues, I did eventually figure out how the mallet works. You have to equip it by pressing C-Up first and then you can use the attack button to smash things. Unlike the straw, Cerzo never actually has the hammer visible until he swings down with it, so I must've accidentally equipped it and not realized. While I can crush the robot dogs and cats around the park, all it really does it take them out of commission for a few moments. However, what will drops coins are the tiny rats milling around the park: I noticed a yellow one in a sea of gray and it turns out they're color-coded to the types of coins they dropped. I just need to kill as many yellow ones as I can find (they're not at all common, sadly for my dwindling reserves of patience) while filling back up on silvers so I can re-enter the strongman tent for a mallet refresh.
Hey. Hey now. I did not boot up the ol' Totally Real N64 just to smash rodents with a hammer all day. That's Charlie work. The entire last sixteen minutes has been entirely just this and if it transpires that this process is what's required to access each one of the game's big rides I can see why this game got 86'd as quickly as it did. If I wanted to kill rats by the dozen I'd just go boot up Super Krusty's Fun House instead; at least the clowns in that are less terrifying. Anyway, one more segment to go: we can do this. Be the mouse that roared, instead of the one that squeaked pathetically as all its organs got crushed into paste simultaneously (kids' movies, am I right?).
64 Minutes In
These accursed cymbal monkeys pop up occasionally while I'm driving to stop me and my sweet fire decal bumper car dead in my tracks but I've no idea how or why, unless it's this game's equivalent of the blue shell.
After picking through enough vermin viscera, I finally had the fifteen gold coins I needed to enter Bug Bumpers, the game's first kart racing segment. Three laps through a long and elaborate course complete with power-ups and hazards to avoid. I'd like to say that this segment was worth the effort to get here but it was around the time when I lapped all three of my CPU opponents that I realized which aspect of this game they were perhaps still in the process of tweaking. Finishing that long race put me up against the first boss of the game, a clown named Koko who... tried to beat me the same race I just completed. And was only slightly less crappy than the other guys. After a cutscene where one of the other kids was rescued (I believe her name was Ginger) it spit me back out into the hub area now with a shirtless executioner dude roaming around: once I'd grabbed another mallet I tried whacking him with it and, surprisingly, not only did he drop a bunch of gold coins but he stayed dead. That's a shame; I think I would've preferred farming him over these mercurial murines. With a few minutes left I checked all the places I could go—there was a roller coaster but I was told I wasn't allowed to go there yet, and the usual mini-games were still accessible—until I found a door leading into a tent area (which I could've sworn was the entrance to the park) and found myself in a maze full of plant monsters. Didn't quite make it to the center but I suspect beating the last boss opened whatever flap needing opening and that it would eventually lead to the next boss.
So that was Carnivale. More eventful than I anticipated and I'm glad I pushed through some early roadblocks instead of just shrugging at what I assumed were insurmountable technical problems typical to unfinished projects. It would've been a pretty dire hour if I'd spent the whole thing just wandering around a mostly empty amusement park trying to figure out why I was given a ranged weapon that couldn't harm anything, though at least all those rats would've survived.
How Well Has It Aged?: Carni-fail. In some ways it feels unfair to cover a game like this in this context given that it wasn't anywhere close to being ready for prime time. However, just like how there's a morbid curiosity about abandoned buildings (and theme parks, appropriately) there exists a similar one about games that never reached a full completion state but exist nebulously as these rough prototypes, or sometimes only as a handful of screenshots in a magazine preview back when the publishers were still optimistic about getting the game out there in time. However, I suspect that even with the novel combination of kart racing and, well, let's generously call it an action-adventure mode, I doubt a finished version of Carnivale would've knocked it out of the park.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Can't-ivalé. It would be a heck of a thing to see someone take this prototype, finish it, negotiate to have it on NSO and not just dump it on Steam instead, then sit back and watch the analytics come in on how many people wanted to play it (or even knew what it was) and derive any sense of satisfaction from going through that entire process. Maybe we're due a Carnivalé resurgence, though I suppose if one did get announced everyone would assume they were talking about the Daniel Knauf TV show.
Retro Achievements Earned: Not supported. Makes sense.
Current Ranking (3D Platformers only)
Glover (Ep. 49/PAF 01)
Carnivale: Cenzo's Adventure (Ep. 49/PAF 01)