64 in 64: Episode 53—Plats All, Folks! Part Five
by mento
This "Oops, All Platformers" season of 64 in 64 (the internet's favorite N64 game ranking show in my mind) continues with Episode 53, in which the early bear and bird get the worm. Or at least I wish they did. Someone needs to get that thing before it can cause any more mental anguish.
Welcome back to the second half of this special Plats All, Folks! season of 64 in 64 which, in case you missed the first half, is covering all the remaining 3D platformers released on the Nintendo 64: the one genre the system both pioneered and excelled at, depending on who you ask. Real "agony and ecstasy" pairing for our first foray back after the summer holiday; absolutely coincidental too, given I'm using a random chooser for all the programming this time (wait, is this too much like those loser CEO letting AI make all their decisions for them? I hope not) but I guess it should make for a compelling episode that represents the zenith and nadir of what the system has left in store for us. Well, at least I hope it's compelling. I did suffer for it, if that's anything.
The rules, then, since it's been a while:
64 minutes for each game. No exceptions. I, however, reserve the right to keep playing them after their entries are written for the sake of RetroAchievements. I have an eternal hunger that must be sated.
Every episode of 64 in 64 covers two games. Previously, I chose one and had the other randomly selected from the entire library, but for the time being I'm randomly selecting both from a much smaller pool of remaining 3D platformers. After this episode there'll be six more to go, so... if your favorite hasn't arrived yet, its moment is coming.
Each entry includes a history lesson, four quarterly check-ins on how the hour-long playthrough is doing, a frank appraisal of how well it's aged, my take on how likely it is to enter the NSO digital library, and its RetroAchievements support status (if any). I do my due diligence here, even with the sucky games.
I'd give my usual spiel about leaving any game that's already on NSO well enough alone but since I'm breaking that rule on this occasion I should probably just nonchalantly whistle instead. I'm sure their lawyers are plenty busy putting some dude away for life for sticking a (non-Mario) calculator app on his Switch.
I've conveniently combined all links to previous episodes with the current overall ranking of 64 in 64 in this handy list. A truncated version of the rankings that only covers the 3D platformers will be available at the end of this article as well.
All right, let's get started with... oh man, why did this have to show up first. Always take the bad news before the good, I suppose:
PAF#9: Earthworm Jim 3D
1999-11-04 (NA), 1999-12-17 (EU)
269th N64 Game Released
History: Earthworm Jim was a highly successful run-and-gun platformer and the first original game by Dave Perry and his new company Shiny Entertainment, after having previously worked on licensed games like Cool Spot and Disney's Aladdin for Virgin Entertainment, in which a normal earthworm gains sapience and martial prowess by donning a high-tech exosuit that falls from space. The two original Earthworm Jim games were celebrated for their smooth animation and surreal humor, though time hasn't been too kind to their labyrinthine level design and strict difficulty. Time has been even less kind to this 3D sequel created by a different company, which sees Jim explore large levels for collectibles while engaging armed foes in gunplay. It was released on both N64 and PC, the Steam version of which is presently enjoying a positive review percentage of 44%.
VIS Interactive, or VIS Entertainment, is a British developer (specifically Scottish, just to shift the blame a little further north) that is perhaps best known for State of Emergency (also published by Rockstar) and Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick. As far as the N64 is concerned, they were behind previous inductee The Powerpuff Girls: Chemical X-Traction (Ep. 44) and fellow licensed cartoon arena fighter Tom and Jerry in Fists of Furry, a game I'm very grateful I probably won't ever be forced to play for this feature. They went defunct a little ways into the '00s but re-emerged as 4J Studios, famous for its console ports of Minecraft and the 360 XBLA ports of Rare's Banjo-Kazooie and GoldenEye 007; they're presently (as of writing) chipping away at the colorful survival sim Reforj, evidently putting their Minecraft experience to work. As for the publisher, Rockstar is Rockstar. I hear they have a new crime game coming out soon.
Sigh. Well, I suppose I had this coming. Glover was the first game to emerge out of the random chooser gate for this feature's return, and now the other big punchline in N64 3D platformers is getting its spotlight as we begin this season's second half. As inevitable as the heat death of the universe, Earthworm Jim 3D was a game I crossed my fingers would never come up in the roulette wheel back in previous 64 in 64 seasons but if I'm going to fully document this genre's N64 representation that means covering all its highs and lows alike. But is it really as bad as its reputation suggests? Glover turned out to have some cool ideas behind it, and a few saving graces like its music and environmental puzzles, so it's entirely... wait, I just remembered that Blues Brothers 2000 was absolutely 100% as bad as its reputation suggested (as Jeff Gerstmann discovered recently) so I guess there's no justification for getting my hopes up. Instead, let's just dissect this mudcrawler and then squirm our way out of here as soon as earthwormly possible:
16 Minutes In
Rolling egg grenades, the classic. I will say the platforming controls aren't terrible at least. He even vaults up edges.
OK, well, this isn't as bad as I was dreading. The game's ugly as dirt but that's well within expected parameters for EJ. So far this feels like some strange, low-budget proto-Ratchet and Clank with its use of guns (and many comedic alternatives) in combination with a few platforming tricks like a hover and a SMB2 style crouching high-jump. Your normal raygun fills up with ammo automatically (about which I'm glad, because running out of ammo in the 2D games was always a giant bummer) and you can also use your own face as a short-range whip attack that also activates some parts of the environment, though it's set to C-Down which isn't ideal. The other C-buttons move the camera around which is, well, trying its darndest at least.
The plot of this one is that Jim is in critical condition after the cow landed on him at the end of EJ2 (the one he launched into space earlier in the same game) and has retreated into the depths of his coma-induced mind: all the levels in the game are in different sections of his brain, representing emotions like happiness, fear, and, uh, "fantasy" (I sincerely hope not of the sexual kind). I'm currently trapped in Jim's war flashback of his time fighting in the Barnyard Conflict: "Coop D'Etat" is the first level and our mission here is to retrieve a rooster general's underwear (he was de-briefed, you see) from a battalion of hedgehog mercenaries. I'm a little confused as to why Jim took the side of the chickens against the cows given the diets of those two animals, but I guess what happened in Chicken Nam stays in Chicken Nam.
32 Minutes In
I never did unlock this part of the game before the hour was up. Probably for the best.
Plenty more ups and downs this time, which feels almost redundant to say about a game all about jumping. I was a little too kind to the camera before; it's really dysfunctional here to an extent I rarely see (and indeed I rarely see anything with it). One big issue is that it refuses to go where there's a wall and if you're standing between a wall and, say, a series of platforms hanging over an abyss you're just going to have to wing it with the side view for a while until you get far enough away that the camera feels like accommodating your pedestrian concepts of "forward" and "the direction I'm moving in and would very much like to see please". On the flip side, health drops are generous and you lose so little after getting hit that even if the game has Mario 64/Banjo-Kazooie's system of resetting the secondary collectibles every time you die/leave a stage it'd be hard to actually perish unless the game really ratchets up in difficulty, takes the enemy health drops away, and/or starts penalizing you with heavier hits to your gauge. Falling down a bottomless pit won't insta-kill you either, so it's got that over the two games I mentioned (unless that changes too).
Progress-wise, I've completed the first stage (it's pretty long and had some backtracking) so now I'm poised to enter the second and final stage of the "Memory" brain region I'm in, and it looks to involve even more barnyard battles. After that will be my first boss fight, against Psycrow. I recall fighting him in the 2D games involved a difficult tube racing mini-game right out of Sonic 2, so hopefully the fight here will be a bit more conventional.
48 Minutes In
Still not entirely sure why Jim takes damage when fully immersed in mud. Doesn't his species live in the dirt?
The next stage, Barn to Be Wild, has proven significantly tougher in part because of the choice to fill this farm level with quicksand areas (a frequent hazard in Iowa) and implement a sniper mode that took me ages to figure out even with Jim's little mucusoid friend Snott explaining it—it involves holding the R-button and C-Up simultaneously to activate. The former will kill you very quickly if you're caught in it too far from any safe land while the latter is needed to hit various aerial targets. You'll also need the new ammo type introduced in this level: chickens. The eggs these things fire tend to home in on enemies at least but they run out quickly if you're spraying and praying. (Wait, wasn't there some other terrible animal-based shooter with finite ammo for joke weapons I watched someone play lately? Something about an armadillo maybe?)
I don't think I've talked about collectibles yet. It does the Banjo-Kazooie thing of having two separate sets, the golden udders taking the role of the Jiggies and marbles (because I've lost them all after my head injury) representing the notes, and they both gate progress to later levels until you hit a cumulative total. There's 100 marbles per level, many of which are hidden in boxes and other containers, and the number resets if I die or leave the current stage. The game does a cute thing of comparing your total marble count to the IQ of various unintelligent things like waffles, spleens, and "Sher's Plastic Sturgeon" (man, with this spate of drag-friendly icons dying at 80 I'm already concerned enough for her well-being without this game taking cheap shots).
64 Minutes In
The first-person aim is too slow to really use in combat but fortunately this ammo has auto-aim so you don't really need to either. It's just for hitting switches like this.
About what I estimate to be the halfway point in the level, you have to infiltrate the bovine HQ and free the rooster general that was captured after the previous level. This involves fighting through dozens of cow guards with a flying meat cleaver weapon that, to its credit, floats back to you so you can fire it as many times as you want without any need for ammo replenishment. The issue is that none of the cows drop health pick-ups, unlike the hedgehogs, and even if you diligently avoid their fire you'll still get hit occasionally because of how effectively the CPU leads its shots. That health, which seemed generous before, won't last very long here unless you're cracked at third-person shooters and make ample use of the crouch button (which makes you invulnerable). This level is also considerably longer than the previous and even after two segments (and one death) I'm still nowhere near done with it.
Frankly, half an hour ago I was questioning why this game has the reputation it has, but it's getting a little more evident two levels in with how much they ratchet up the difficulty and how much harder that makes getting the full sets of collectibles to unlock new levels. Apparently it's only going to get harder from here, and flaws like the camera and the cracked enemy accuracy that might've been tolerable before will be the nails in the coffin by the game's later stages. It's like one of those The Twilight Zone episodes where it takes a little while (maybe the length of the ep) for the sinner to realize just how cursed their new situation truly is.
How Well Has It Aged?: Like Two Halves of a Very Dead Worm. This wasn't as immediately objectionable as Blues Brothers 2000 but I suspect it'll lead to an equally bad time if someone were to, say, force their work colleagues to play through it all the way to the end for some manner of mean-spirited internet gaming show, were one to exist. For as accommodating as it initially appears the honeymoon period wears off quickly and you're left with what I can only imagine is an increasingly Sisyphean torment. Only with worms that say "groovy!" a lot.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Without Getting Too Annelidical, Not Good. It's available on PC if you really wanted to try it (and reports suggest it actually plays better there; they nerfed how far you can jump in the N64 version, which seems important for a platformer) and I can't imagine Rockstar is in any mood to drop this on NSO when they have huge games to put out and leakers to track down and murder. Besides, they have more appealing NSO aces up their sleeve like Space Station Silicon Valley or Body Harvest (or even Monster Truck Madness 64). Best bet is that Digital Eclipse remasters the full trilogy someday when they're feeling bored enough.
Retro Achievements Earned: 10 (of 72). This is a gruesome undertaking in part because of a "Why 2K?" group of achievements that forces you to complete a level without going past 2,000 registered steps (which the game tracks for some reason). The problem with this isn't that the limit is too strict—you can roll around or use the gliding jump to minimize your step count—but the fact that steps are cumulative across every attempt on a level and that means if you die too often, you can potentially lock yourself out of the achievement/mastery because the game is always auto-saving. There's also the usual no-damage bosses and collectible completionist goals. A horribly conceived set for a horribly conceived game.
PAF#10: Banjo-Kazooie
Rare / Nintendo
1998-06-29 (NA), 1998-07-17 (EU), 1998-12-06 (JP)
110th N64 Game Released
History: Banjo-Kazooie is the fifth N64 game released by Rare and the first 3D platformer they ever developed (followed by Donkey Kong 64, Banjo-Tooie, and Conker's Bad Fur Day). It features the return of Banjo, of Diddy Kong Racing fame, and his bird friend Kazooie as they set out to rescue Banjo's sister Tooty from the rhyming witch Gruntilda. Inspired by Super Mario 64, adopting a similar collectible-based progression format, B-K instead opted to dole out its special moves incrementally across levels rather than hand them all to the player at once, these formal introductions allowing them to configure challenges and level design explicitly around them. It was followed by two sequels: Banjo-Tooie, a fellow N64 platformer (and previous inductee), and the engineering-focused Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for Xbox 360.
Rare's very much a known quantity on this feature as well as outside it. Hailing from Leicestershire, which is almost smack dab in the middle of England, Rare's been making games since the C64 era (as Ultimate Play the Game) and continues to exist, for now, as a subsidiary of Xbox Game Studios. Depending on what I do for the final season this may well be the last we'll see of Rare here: despite B-K's popularity, I originally opted to exclude it due to its early inclusion on the NSO service, so only it and GoldenEye 007 of the Rare oeuvre (oeuvrare?) avoided any appraisal during those initial 48 episodes. Turns out I needed a sixteenth game to make this season work though, so... here we are.
Easily the only 3D platformer on the platformer that can give Super Mario 64 a crouching long-jump for its money, Banjo-Kazooie was just the tonic I needed after that whole worm fiasco. It goes without saying it's one of my system favorites and it's quite possible this entire season of 64 in 64 was conceived as an excuse to boot it up and go after its RA set. But you didn't hear that from me.
16 Minutes In
First thing you can do after learning Kazooie's beak buster is destroy this Mesoamerican-coded village. In case you didn't realize this game was made by Europeans.
After a long, unskippable intro full of awkward rhyming exposition we're on our way to Mumbo's Mountain, the first proper level of the game. Bottles teaches three skills here: the ground-pound equivalent, the speedrun-friendly tech of having Kazooie carry Banjo around instead (which also lets you climb slippery slopes), and being able to shoot or drop eggs. Otherwise it's a level with very little peril, given they want to ease you into all this, and each collectible actually talks to you about their role in the game which is both user-friendly and a little disturbing. Half of this shit only exists to be spent or used up, after all. Given the relative lack of challenge I'm already almost done here but I'm still going to savor the appeal of running around collecting junk sitting out in the open. No tag barrels, no elaborate multi-step jiggy solutions, no jokes about feces or suicide or prison showers; just platforming bliss.
I'm going to struggle to find anything original to say about this one. I've played a few B-K hacks in the past near-decade since I last completed the core game on XBLA (and I'm going to have to remember this version doesn't save the notes you've collected, only your "high score") so I've had no issue re-acclimating to the controls. The game's always had this sort of... heaviness to the way Banjo moves and jumps, which I suppose makes sense given he's a grizzly, but your air control comes entirely courtesy of Kazooie's pecking attack which doubles as a sort of glide or flutter jump to help you adjust your landings. Otherwise it's all as buttery smooth as I remember.
32 Minutes In
Brentilda calls herself Grunty's "nicer sister" but all she does is talk shit and gossip. I guess she only meant that comparatively.
I polished off the rest of Mumbo's Mountain's challenges, including a brief stint as a termite, and have now opened the way to the next level: the desert island-themed Treasure Trove Cove. For as confident as I sounded before, I did run into a bit of a roadblock trying to figure out how to gift the ape Chimpy an orange so he'd activate a platform I needed for a couple of Jiggies and the fifth Mumbo Token (eekum bokum!) needed for the termite transformation. What had happened is that I'd recently played DK64 for the RA mastery and you can throw oranges like grenades in that one so I was trying the same button combination to no avail: this orange he wants can be simply procured by climbing the nearby orange tree. After that it was smooth sailing and, fittingly, that's what I hope to get up to here in this piratey level.
Something I like about this game is that it never stops the action to talk to you, unless you explicitly walk up to a NPC and start yapping. If Bottles the mole or Grunty has something to say, they'll do so as you continue to run and platform around. The noises instead of speech never bothered me: I've always appreciated how developers will save memory space in ways that are either meant to be seamless (like crawling through narrow rock openings) or come off like a serendipitous garnish of personality, as is the case here. The more I play B-K, the more it feels likely that Earthworm Jim 3D was instead riffing on this game rather than Super Mario 64. Not that it was anywhere close in quality to either.
48 Minutes In
It's not clear how this useless hippo corsair has all these ingots lying around unless... wait, pirates just stole shit from other people?
The second level is substantially larger than the first, without necessarily having more stuff in it (see below), but I've been making good progress while trying to avoid a very sassy shark who appears whenever you try swimming in the outer waters of this island. Treasure Trove Cove is also where Bottles introduces the two high-flying mechanics: a launch pad that lets you fly, provided you have red feathers to power your wings, and a jump pad that lets you hop real high in a single bound. As such, this level is fairly vertical, with a lighthouse at the very top you can visit for one of the level's many jiggies. This place is also where the cheat sandcastle can be accessed: the game requires you to slowly type out cheats for bonus carrying capacity for items along with other, less serious benefits. There's a well-hidden NPC that tells you these codes, Cheato, but of course you can also look them up. I think, at least; I admit that I usually run out of steam typing each letter out with Kazooie's beak buster.
I'll do a collectible rundown here since I did one with the previous game. Each level has ten jiggies, either earned by doing sidequests or just sitting around in hard-to-reach spots, along with 100 notes that are needed to open doors in Grunty's lair (they also give you a 1Up if you find all of them). Then there's two empty honeycomb pieces in each level, six of which will expand your health gauge, and the five Jinjos which are necessary for one of the level's jiggies. Finally, there's the Mumbo Tokens needed to buy new transformations and there's usually a Grunty switch that'll make a jiggy appear in the main hub area. Plenty to remember, but the in-game tracker does a well-enough job and the total number of things to find is kind of in the Goldilocks zone between DK64's deluge and Conker's dearth.
64 Minutes In
I'm with Grubb, this doesn't really seem like a bad ending at all.
Managed to complete Treasure Trove Cove and, with time to spare, decided to get a little lost in the hub area. It's definitely been a while and this place is full of tunnels to nowhere; you'll also often need to find the painting to fill in with jiggies independent of where the level actually starts, so between that and the note doors it almost feels like the owner of this lair didn't want you accessing all her secrets. Not to say Peach's Castle didn't have obtuse secrets of its own either (I've no idea how anyone found Shifting Sand Land back when the game was new). Next level would've been Clanker's Cavern, if I could find it, but for our purposes here we're going to have to abandon Tooty to her fate this time.
So that's that. Some N64 games you dread going back to because it can't possibly be as good as you remember as a kid (or younger adult, perhaps) but Banjo-Kazooie's managed to hold up superbly, warty witches and all. Ten jiggies per world means you've always plenty to do—though it can be tough tracking down that tenth if you swear you've been everywhere—and the hub is certainly not short of activities either. Kirkhope's Comic Sans of an OST still has a distinct, mucky charm to it and I appreciate the way the game follows Super Mario 64's example in changing the instrumentation or fading to silence depending on which part of the level you're on (the four seasonal variations of Click Clock Wood were as inspired as the level itself).
How Well Has It Aged?: Like a Fine Beary Wine. This has "foregone conclusion" written all over it perhaps, but it was necessary to toss a ringer in here for my own sanity if nothing else. Still one of the top ten games for the system, even if I suspect the eventual sweet science will try to prove otherwise, and there's no way I'm not going to continue playing it after this article is all written up and ready to publish.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Uh, Pretty Good Actually. Why don't I just go ahead and skip this section.
Retro Achievements Earned: 5 (of 60). Missed the 100% level completion goals but for a good reason: one of the few missables of this set is completing the game without ever having upgraded your health, which means you have to leave those hollow honeycombs alone for your first run through if you're looking for the mastery. Other challenges beyond what the game normally asks of you include finding all the 1Ups in every level (typically harder to find/reach than even the jiggies), locate the mysterious Stop'n'Swop items (I think this requires cheats?), and defeat Grunty without getting hurt once which... that's a tall order, given the second half of the fight involves undodgeable homing missiles. I did get the damageless for K.Rool in DK64 though, so maybe I'll have the patience for it. Maybe.
Current Ranking (3D Platformers only)
NEW Banjo-Kazooie (Ep. 53/PAF 5)
Looney Tunes: Duck Dodgers Starring Daffy Duck (Ep. 52/PAF 4)
Looney Tunes: Taz Express (Ep. 51/PAF 3)
NEW Earthworm Jim 3D (Ep. 53/PAF 5)
Carnivale: Cenzo's Adventure (Ep. 49/PAF 1)