64 in 64: Episode 51—Plats All, Folks! Part Three

We're back again with another 64 in 64 for you all, in which I prove conclusively if incidentally that there's a reason people only remember a handful of Nintendo 64 games fondly and the rest not at all, but that's no reason why we can't re-litigate the third Nintendo home system's library in full in case our collective consciousness missed something. Specifically in this case the 3D platformers that sought to take some of Mario and Banjo's thunder and either did not succeed or seriously did not succeed. Since I keep bumping up against the character limit for these blogs we'll keep the intro short this time, so here's a few relevant bulletpoints:

• First, there's a Part One and a Part Two for this "Plats All, Folks!" season and you can visit them by clicking where the words "Part One" and "Part Two" turned into links. You can also check out previous 3D platformers I've reviewed in older editions of this series by zipping down to the ranking table at the end and clicking the links there (with the understanding that old blogs are still kinda busted for now).

I believe that's all the important bases covered, so let's get ready to spin wildly while blowing raspberries with our probably-not-cursed first subject for examination this week:

PAF#5: Looney Tunes: Taz Express

• Zed Two Limited / Infogrames

• 2000-08-01 (EU)

• 333rd N64 Game Released

History: Looney Tunes: Taz Express is a 3D platformer with some puzzle elements, as the idea of the game is to tether the Looney Tunes's most chaotic and powerful force of destruction to an Amazon delivery day job. He must carry crates across various locations while avoiding anything that might damage said cargo, including using his trademark spin while holding it. However, you can set it down temporarily to run around destroying the obstacles in your way whenever needs must. Despite the ubiquity of the Looney Tunes license back in the '90s, this was only one of two N64 games to ever use it (and since the other is also a 3D platformer we'll be seeing that eventually too). It's also therefore only one of two times in this season of 64 in 64 where my dumbass pun subtitle feels appropriate.

Infogrames probably doesn't need much of an introduction: It's a massive French game developer and publisher that would go on to subsume many other studios in its meteoric rise culminating with its purchase of Atari and rebranding as Atari SA before a just-as-meteoric fall that eventually led to a non-fatal bankruptcy and its auctioning off several properties to external companies. It has since bounced back, repurchased a significant number of Indie studios including Nightdive and Digital Eclipse, and now focuses on retro gaming—and possibly still hotels and speaker hats, I haven't been paying close enough attention. Zed Two is more interesting: this was the company founded by the Pickford brothers after they left Software Creations (where they made Equinox and Plok, among others) shortly before the latter became an Acclaim subsidiary. Zed Two went on to produce one of the more memorable N64 games (and previous 64 in 64 subject) Wetrix, as well as one of its less memorable games, i.e. this Euro/Australia-only licensed Taz game right here.

As much as I liked Software Creations's originals, their licensed games often left a lot to be desired: it'd be reductive and insulting to assume their mercenary gigs didn't engage them as much as their bespoke projects and it's probably more a case of providing a level of service the license-hoarding publishers paid for (which usually wasn't much), but all the same I've reason to be skeptical that I'm going to enjoy much of the following hour. Contemporary reviews were incredibly divided though, and that's always something that piques the ol' curiosity. Maybe there's something compellingly cerebral to the mostly puzzle-focused gameplay that is enough to compensate for everyone feeling let down that you aren't just breaking everything in sight in some big open-world playground, which is the Ur Taz game conceit that has been denied the world for far too long. Still, I like the developers and I have that home country bias that I've been none-too-subtle about when reviewing other UK games in this feature, so... I dunno. If nothing else, I suspect the "Start to Crate" time will be very low for this one.

16 Minutes In

Spinning, that's a good trick.

OK, so the description I yanked off an anonymous wiki is pretty accurate. You have these sort of Crash Bandicoot style levels (which makes it that much weirder that the main goal is to not break any crates) with a little bit of 3D wriggle room but are otherwise mostly linear courses to your destination, which is some dude's door that you're meant to deliver the package to—except the door isn't actually attached to anything; cartoon logic, I'll let it slide. Abandoning the crate for a while to get your bearings is allowed for the first stage but they're finding ways to disincentivize doing that from the second onward. For example, that second stage had me pressing buttons to build ramps to reach the top of a mountain all the while an enormous buzzard was circling above me poised to snatch the crate and take it to its nest if I left it alone for more than a hot second. After completing those two introductory stages—where, beyond the mythological bird, there were no real dangers besides my own impatience—the third drops me into "the big city" (which I guess would be Hobart) filled with taxis and trucks careening all over the place like it was one of those GTA IV mods with the traffic speed set too high. There are spots I can leave the crate where it'll remain unmolested—it creates a metal box around them for protection—so I imagine the idea is to run around these city blocks looking for the most concise route to the end that will let me save the crate from too many motorist mishaps.

Thanks to a momentum gauge Taz is very sluggish to get anywhere. Once Taz builds speed he's still hard to control (which, well, I guess fits Taz) but can at least go into his spin, which makes him not quite invincible but close enough as well as letting him destroy barriers and other obstacles. You can't spin while holding the crate, as already outlined, nor do you want to do much of anything carrying that thing besides booking it for the exit. Trying to figure out where you can temporarily ditch the crate so you can actually enjoy the game, for at least as much as that's possible, seems to be half the puzzle here. Either way, this is going to be a long sixty-four minutes.

32 Minutes In

Replacing all steering wheels with boomerangs was a bold move by the Australian Department of Transport.

Most of this block was taken up by that third level, where you can find additional security zones for your crate as you navigate the mean streets of the big city and avoid getting flattened by every cabbie and trucker, presumably all of whom simultaneously had an extremely venonous spider or some other Antipodean zoological nightmare drop from their sun visors directly onto their faces. I will admit that, for as much as I didn't particularly enjoy what was going on here, I have noticed that every level takes the box-lugging gimmick in a slightly new direction. I've always held the belief that certain genres like platformers are at risk of growing stale quickly without some ingenuity and variance between its levels; something Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie do quite well, for as routine as sweeping up all their collectibles can occasionally become. That modicum of admiration was further bolstered by what followed immediately after that city level: a UFO showed up out of nowhere to steal the crate and gigantify Taz into a kaiju, with the next level essentially putting the usual container-conveyance on hold so I can leap on the same cars that were pissing me off just moments ago.

Let's talk controls for a moment. Like many third-party developers flummoxed by Nintendo's proprietary Bop-It! of a controller, they reduced the number of necessary tools to just the control stick and the two big A and B face buttons. The stick moves Taz, obviously, while A jumps and B lets you switch to a spin if you've built the momentum gauge high enough. This control scheme changes when you pick up a box: B will gently place the box on the ground while A causes Taz to throw it into the air as high as he can, which usually isn't ideal but sure is very easy to do by accident if you're walking along with the box in tow and want to hop over something real quick. Dropping the box from any height (rather than putting it down) causes it to switch damage states, and it can do this three times before breaking apart completely and forcing you to go back to its original spawn point for another one. Worth noting is that Taz can lose health but can never die, owing to his legendary constitution: instead, at low health it takes him that much longer to muster the energy for one of his spins, which can be a big problem for areas with insufficient room for a run-up. If you left the crate behind somewhere you can also hit C-Up to have the camera switch over to it, just in time to watch some manner of bogan (whom did not exist five seconds ago) kick it to pieces.

48 Minutes In

Oh now they can drive in an orderly line of traffic. You're on my list of cities I have beef with, Hobart! Right next to Branson, Missouri and Podgorica!

The kaiju level boiled down to finding the UFO and assaulting it several times until it gave up, shrunk Taz back down, and then abducted both he and the crate and took them to Mars. Turns out the UFO belongs to Marvin, big shocker, and now we're here to find a way back home before the delivery company gives the recipient a heart attack by updating "your package is presently 150 million miles away" on their order tracker. Mars would be devoid of life were it anything like this universe, but instead here it's almost completely covered in gross yellow swamps and laser turrets. The gimmick of this level is to temporarily shut down the lasers by forging ahead through the swamp without the crate, hitting the shutdown button, then hauling ass back for the crate and very slowly (because you can't jump with the box and it weighs you down) trudge through that same potentially toxic Martian goop to where the lasers can't reach you or your fragile freight.

You might be asking if this game has collectibles beyond the one box you've consigned your life over to protect and... it does! Each stage has 50 of what look like jacks (as in, the pointy toys that only people twice my age know how to play with) and collecting all fifty grants you an extra life at the end of the level. That's about it. Being that most of these courses are fairly linear I haven't had to go out of my way too often to grab the full set and I'm sure if I kept playing beyond the one hour I'd be relieved to have a stockpile of lives for the horrors to come. There's also food scattered around which replenishes some of Taz's stamina bar, though you can also just run right over it and destroy it if you're not careful. That was one mechanic from Gauntlet that absolutely needed to come back.

64 Minutes In

I'm actually offended on an existential level by the idea of having to be careful while playing as Taz.

The swamp level was mercifully short and it ends with Taz and his boxy bud entering Marvin's compound in order to find the Cannon Room: being shot out of space artillery presenting the best chance of getting this extremely breakable package back home safely. This whole level was precariously narrow walkways and more laser turrets, with certain sections of the walkway blocked off by debris that Taz had to spin through to remove. If there's one thing I like more than slowly navigating thin walkways it's running down them at full pelt to build up enough speed to spin through a thing at the end. The level culminates with perhaps the game's biggest troll yet: you set your box on a spring to have it vanish from view and by the time you've caught up it's in a huge chamber surrounded by identical crates. Either Marvin's been stealing everyone's mail for a long time or some fuckery is afoot. Turns out the solution here is to figure out which box you can damage—the rest are all indestructible—and then exit the level with it. The cannon room is next, or would be if I hadn't run out of time.

Like I said before, I appreciate the sort of restless energy that went into designing each of these levels and their distinct goals, which feels germane to its star, but certain choices like the momentum movement and making the entire game a giant escort quest are far from optimal. Taz maybe isn't anyone's first choice to front a game about sneaking around, being very careful with precious shipments, and solving puzzles. I'm not sure which member of the Looney Tunes menagerie would be a better fit, necessarily, but Bugs is every bit as popular as Taz and he already had a series of puzzle-platformer games for the Game Boy and NES to ease people into the idea. You could even introduce some kind of Elmer Fudd/Uber Food parallel as a hostile courier competitor. Regardless, this one feels like a miss though at the same time I'm not going to excoriate it because it really did give that ubiquitous license more consideration than most through its creativity.

How Well Has It Aged?: Misunderstood the Tazzignment. Not much more to add here, except it controlled like butt and any game where I have to look after a frail thing is always going to give me reflux. On the flip side, the visuals are fine (almost no music, sadly), there's some new wrinkle introduced with every level, and I did chuckle a few times at the sound effect caused when Taz falls into a bottomless pit (just imagine exasperated Taz noises trailing off into silence). If a piece of media allows me to laugh at a suffering animal then it's not all bad.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Zero Tazzurances. I have and probably will repeat a lot that licensed stuff is a tough area for rereleases due to the whole "juice ain't worth the squeeze" nature of paying for these licenses again only for no subscribers to bite because the games are notoriously sucky. That said, Digital Eclipse seems to be putting in the work getting a bunch of compilations of bad licensed games together so that's one potential comeback avenue for Taz Express. As for NSO, though, I'm going to guess Nintendo isn't willing to spin this particular machine back up again.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. It's one of the system's few PAL-only games so I guess it's on the obscure side.

PAF#6: Doraemon 2: Nobita to Hikari no Shinden

• Brainsmith / Epoch

• 1998-12-11 (JP)

• 163rd N64 Game Released

History: Doraemon 2: Nobita to Hikari no Shinden, or Doraemon 2: Nobita and the Temple of Light, is the second Doraemon game to hit the N64 (I shouldn't phrase it like that) and like the first it features both Doraemon and his gaggle of human freeloaders (sorry, "friends") as playable characters after they get whisked off to another world and must find their way home. This one styles itself a bit more like a Zelda action-adventure game than the previous, with a village of NPCs and a day/night cycle that affects what you can and can't do. Beyond that I've no idea what it's like; there's precious little about the game on the English internet, as you might expect. No fan translations either.

Epoch is once again our publishers here, as the toy giant still owned the license to make products based on Doraemon from action figures to video games, but the developer appears to be a small contractor named Brainsmith. Almost nothing is known about this company, save that a few Japanese developers included it in their resumes (which suggests it was real enough) and that it was based in Osaka. Nobita to Hikari no Shinden looks to have been their only N64 game as well as only game period. According to the GDRI they've since pivoted into... cat food production. Well, there's something fitting about that, I suppose.

Hey, it's Doraemon again. What are the chances I'd draw that guy twice in a row? About 18% if you must know, though that still feels like a long shot. The previous Doraemon game was a very slight thing buoyed by its brand power and a novel approach to key collectibles that often worked like adventure game puzzles—e.g. I just got a gadget that shrinks things, where do I use it?—but otherwise it was about as paper-thin as you'd expect from such an early, licensed, non-Nintendo 3D platformer (recall that it was the first 3D platformer for the N64 that wasn't Super Mario 64). Since it's been a couple of years and Epoch brought in a contractor to help, I imagine this one's going to be a bit more involved. Hopefully, at least. Still completely in Japanese, though maybe there's less dialogue and thus it's less important that I'm able to comprehend it. Like I didn't already just say that there's whole-ass villages of people to talk to. Sometimes the hopium dosage gets a little out of control, I swear.

16 Minutes In

Yep, this is everyone. Blue cartoon robot cat? You hallucinatin' again, Nobita?

OK, yeah, underestimated how garrulous this game would be. There's a brief introductory cutscene where the crew are riding Doraemon's time-and-place-travelling magic carpet (like the TARDIS of upholstery) until Nobita pulls out a crystal he smuggled in from their last destination and Doraemon's carpet takes the "take only photos, leave only memories" mantra a little too seriously and bugs out, flinging all five of them into the vortex of space-time. Nobita (glasses kid, nominal leader) awakens alone in a forest but quickly reunites with Gian (stocky kid) and Suneo (overbite kid) as they look for a way out. A rock impedes their egress but is quickly reduced to nothing with the sudden appearance of the Small Light: one of Doraemon's gadgets capable of shrinking any item, confirming that the robot cat and his bag of gadgets are also around somewhere. They find a red crystal that resembles the one Nobita had on the way to the forest's exit, where they then meet up with Shizuka and a new female character who looks like an explorer. Shizuka's probably stoked she finally has someone to pass the Bechdel test with. The session ends with the discovery of a Zora village, though their language is currently indecipherable.

I was correct in my earlier assumption that the sequel would go even harder in the adventure game direction, as I've since found a few more gadgets (a mic, a camera, and a bucket of paint) and half the runtime has been spent on cutscenes of Nobita and pals yapping to each other. Doraemon is still a no-show, though given his name is right on the box there I imagine he'll turn up eventually. Controls boil down to the usual: control stick for movement, C-buttons for camera control (thankfully), A is jump, and B uses any item I have equipped. We may find some weapons eventually but I've not had to fight (or, given our current unarmed status, had to run away from) anything so I can't speak on that side of things yet. I have collected a bunch of blue crystals in addition to the glowing red one, so either they're a rupee stand-in or this game might be closer to a collectathon platformer than first impressions would otherwise suggest. I will say this feels like a game I could like if I were able to understand most of it? It definitely feels better made than the previous, with an evident visual upgrade.

32 Minutes In

Either this is meant to be gobbledegook or this dude is giving me my password for later. RIP Beeee3.

The language barrier is starting to take its toil as I navigated the next part of this particular chapter. Getting to the village meant talking to a bunch of unintelligible mermen until I finally found a weird gray blob on someone's roof, which turned out to be the gum that lets you comprehend any language. With this I was able to rest up at the Elder's place and head out to the lake right behind the village where someone claims to have found a weird blue guy lying around. It's Doraemon! Except he's dead. RIP Bozo. Of course, as a robot, he's actually just kaput and we need to find a conveniently located Mini-Doraemon to repair him. After he joins the group, meaning we now have a full team, we return to the village only to be told to head back out to the lake again for some fruit we can eat. On the way back we have two strange encounters: the first is with an odd bird-marsupial type of creature that gives us a long spiel about crystals and dark forces and probably accused us of screwing the natural order things of up. Don't think I want to hear that from some weird chimera. The second is with what I imagine to be this game's comedic bumbling villains: a pair of flamboyant adventurers who refuse to let us back into the Zora village. I found an item earlier that worked perfectly for getting us past them—a stopwatch that can momentarily stop time, which feels wasted here when I could've just shoved them into the lake with Gian—and with that I was able to rest up before the timer sounded.

There's some more mechanics I was able to discover, or specifically were foisted upon me. I mentioned there's a day/night cycle (and at night your health constantly drops from the cold, so the lesson learned is to go find a place to rest until morning) but there's also a calendar of sorts: each day of the week appears to have different effects on the world, so for instance it was raining the whole time during Wednesday (which in Japanese is Suiyoubi, or "Water Day"). Dunno if there's any significant gameplay changes during the weather: if this were a Zelda I could probably only get something optional but valuable, like a piece of heart, on specific days rather than something major like having my story progress stymied until I sat around and skipped half the week. Given all the gadget junk I keep picking up that's maybe the case here too, in which case I'm going to struggle to figure it out without any hints. I've also spotted quite a few gadgets sitting at the bottom of lakes and rivers that I can't access, given everyone just drowns as soon as they land in the water (though I've no doubt there'll be a gadget that fixes that too).

48 Minutes In

These jerks took forever to find. Little do they know that I intend to use the art of stealth to take it back, even while loudly announcing plans from five feet away.

Got a little lost as I walked back and forth between the village and lake a few times to make something happen after eluding those two ne'er-do-wells but what it actually took to progress was sleeping at the Elder's house and moving time forward, at which point I was informed by two of the villagers that those same scoundrels had made off with my red crystal during the night. They were sitting out back in the large plains area between the forest and the town (geography sounds oddly familiar) bragging about their score. I couldn't just walk up and take the gem, since one of the crooks had a gun, so instead I went into my gadget menu and tried a few before landing on the paint: it's invisibility paint, and that let me walk right up and take the gem. It suddenly wore off, which led to an embarrassing chase, but after getting back to the village Kaoru's professor mentor had turned up at the Elder's place. He's able to decipher these stone markers at the lake, and after deciphering all three (and a fourth, which suddenly appeared and started a timer) we were able to raise a temple from the bottom of the lake. I suspect this might be the first dungeon of the game.

Not much more to add in gameplay terms. The timed challenge involved hopping across some islands in quick succession so I'm still going to say this qualifies for the whole "3D platformer" programming block we're doing here, at least more so than Ocarina of Time given its absence of a dedicated jump button. But yeah, if Doraemon 1 took Mario 64 as a template this one's definitely doing the same for Ocarina... or, well, at least I could make that claim if they hadn't released within weeks of one another. Maybe it's more a case like Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon in that they were able to preempt how the Zelda blueprint would work in 3D, with some degree of success. Tell you what, if I go into this dungeon and I'm finding maps and compasses and boss keys in chests, we'll know what's up.

64 Minutes In

Either a cue ball is mad at me or this is one of those arachnophobia filters going way overboard.

I didn't find a map or a compass but this was definitely a dungeon all right. The camera got real up close on your playable character and after entering a door I was in a room with a handgun and a weird spherical enemy, so this is either aping Zelda or Faceball 2000. I recognized the handgun from the previous game: back then it was Nobita's specific weapon but it turns out anyone can use it in this game. The dungeon was fairly straightforward, with some more of those round chicken enemies, a single mini-boss fight against two sentient gravestones, and the final boss of the temple which was the defense system for the azure crystal you were in there to get. That fight mostly involved hitting three switches in the right order while polyhedrons kept shooting at me, and then eventually taking down the forcefield around the crystal while avoiding a flamethrower platform. Seemed a bit unintuitive to keep shooting at a forcefield so many times but I noticed that the blue damage effect from shooting the birdballs earlier was showing up here too, so I figured it must've had some effect. After that I got kicked back out to the village and spent the next couple minutes looking for the next place to go—the lake had an exit blocked by a stone gate that seemed to have vanished, so that seemed the obvious place to try. No time left to go see what was there though.

This game overall felt like a much more confident spin on the previous game, expanding the story elements as well as improving general gameplay and presentation. The collectathon aspect is still here with its implementation of Doraemon's gadgets: as well as the submerged items in the lake and town there were a few out of reach in the dungeon too, including the weapon Doraemon had in the previous game (an air cannon), and there's a menu option that catalogs everything you've found. Don't know if it's the same case here where you only end up using a fraction of the gadgets you find and the rest just kinda sit there in Doraemon's interdimensional knapsack but I suppose just being able to go around grabbing all of the show's most memorable devices might be incentive enough for this game's intended audience, even if I imagine not getting to use them on anything would be kinda disappointing for them. I did spot that racecar from the previous game in an underwater section of the dungeon, so I'm curious if they tried to shoehorn in a kinda bad racing mini-game in this one too (which would've made it the third game in this 64 in 64 season to have one of those, hmm).

How Well Has It Aged?: Too Much Lore-aemon. I don't doubt I'd have a more positive reaction to this game if I could follow what everyone was saying, as it feels far more beholden to that sort of story-halting puzzle format than the previous game did given that one just let you go ahead if you happened to have the right item on you; no pulling it from an inventory first like in this game. I had to feel my way around much of this playthrough as a result, though as a game for babies I won't say it took a great deal of ratiocination to determine the path forward. As you get more gadgets and have more places to visit, though, that language barrier will only ever be more of an issue going forward. I might wait until this gets a fan translation and an RA set before resuming, though I won't hold my breath for either.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Doraemon Do What Nintendon't. If the first game ever gets added to NSO only then will I feel safe in assuming this one will follow it, since it's an incremental improvement, otherwise I'm not sure if Nintendo cares enough about this trilogy to bother. Both games I've played so far were kinda intriguing for how they used the license but are so rudimentary that they're far from what I'd consider "hidden gem" territory, and that they've gone this long without fan translations would probably be enough to corroborate that if I hadn't gone ahead and found out for myself.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. Neither this game nor its sequel have achievements yet. A Doraemon game for GameCube was just added this week though, so never say never.

Current Ranking (3D Platformers only)

1. Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)

2. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)

3. Donkey Kong 64 (Ep. 13)

4. Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)

5. Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)

6. Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Ep. 19)

7. Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)

8. Rocket: Robot on Wheels (Ep. 27)

9. Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! (Ep. 41)

10. Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)

11. Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)

12. Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)

13. Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (Ep. 50/PAF 02)

14. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue! (Ep. 29)

15. *NEW* Doraemon 2: Nobita to Hikari no Shinden (Ep. 51/PAF 03)

16. Doraemon: Nobita to 3 Tsu no Seireiseki (Ep. 50/PAF 02)

17. Glover (Ep. 49/PAF 01)

18. 40 Winks (Ep. 31)

19. *NEW* Looney Tunes: Taz Express (Ep. 51/PAF 03)

20. Conker's Bad Fur Day (Ep. 22)

21. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (Ep. 33)

22. Starshot: Space Circus Fever (Ep. 43)

23. Carnivale: Cenzo's Adventure (Ep. 49/PAF 01)

24. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)