64 in 64: Episode 56—Plats All, Folks! Finale

On this season finale of 64 in 64, we settle the age-old question: Which is better, cats or dogs? What if the cat was a robot from the future and the dog had a stoner diet and a speech impediment? And they were both charged with looking after complete losers? Truly, this feature is nothing if not highly academic in its queries.

Before we say our goodbyes to the Nintendo 64 for a spell, I'll admit that I've been pondering the potential future of this series. Largely because we'll be ending on Episode 56 here and another eight-episode season would put us right at 64: a pretty significant number as I hope you'll agree. A "64 in 64: Episode 64" would seem like the perfect recursive juncture to stop ranking these things for good and just let Gerstmann handle it from then on out. However, I'll want another gimmick similar to this season's to really make it tick, so with that in mind I'm looking at the following options and would appreciate any suggestions or votes (or maybe alternatives?) that you fine readers have to offer.

With all of these avenues I intend to randomize my second selection as per usual—I got off far too easy this season—but as for the pre-selected first game, we could do...

• ...Prototypes? I have exactly eight prototypes left of N64 games that never were, or at least never were finished and released. I could end this series on what could've been rather than the console history we're all (somewhat) familiar with. Potential downsides: These games might not even work properly, or else otherwise lend themselves to very short playthroughs. (Examples include Dragon Sword 64, Robotech: Crystal Dreams, and Toon Panic.)

• ...NSO Homework? When I concluded the previous season I had a "cheat" version of the final ranking that included all the games added to NSO that I could squeeze into my current standings, as I was already familiar enough with them to pass judgement (mostly the big 1st-party tentpoles like Zelda or Star Fox 64). However, there's a few games on NSO that I've never played and thus left out of that cheat list: this last season might offer the chance to fill in some important (at least according to Nintendo) gaps. Potential downsides: These are all known quantities and decent enough, so it might not be as compelling for all you fans of obscurities and/or schadenfreude. (Examples include Sin & Punishment, F-Zero X, and Mario Golf.)

• ...JP Fan Translations? My favorite part of this series has been discovering what was dwelling behind the language barrier, even if there were far fewer JP-only games for N64 compared to SNES or PS1. This selection would cover the remaining few big enough to have received fan translations. It also means I'd be covering games that won't appear on Gerstmann's show, so no double-dipping for that tiny fandom Venn diagram overlap. Potential downsides: The translations might not be so hot and we may well discover the reason why a few of these never got localized in the first place. (Examples include SimCity 64, Wonder Project J2, and Getter Love!!.)

All that's left are the rules—two games, 64 minutes each, bunch of text to explain what the deal is, etc.—and this Giant Bomb list that conveniently contains the full rankings and links to everything in this series. Or will have by the time this goes up anyway.

PAF#15: Doraemon 3: Nobita no Machi SOS!

• A.I. Corp. / Epoch

• 2000-07-28 (JP)

• 332nd N64 Game Released

History: Doraemon 3: Nobita no Machi SOS! is the third and final N64 game to be based on Fujiko F. Fujio's Doraemon manga and anime: a kids' show about a robot cat from the future that is sent back in time to help his owner's distant ancestor, Nobita Nobi, overcome his challenges. With Nobita and his friends in tow, most adventures typically revolve around Doraemon's many futuristic gadgets, especially the Anywhere Door that can transport the group to any place and any moment in time. Each of these 3D Doraemon games have been edging further away from collectathon 3D platformers and towards Zelda-style action-adventure games, where finding/using key items and talking to NPCs are often the means to progress, though as long as they still give me a jump button I'm going to count it as a 3D platformer regardless. The plot of this third game, where the subtitle means "SOS from Nobita's Town", involves a mysterious comet that causes Nobita's friends to vanish and his suburb to fly through space to a hostile alien world. He and Doraemon must first rescue their friends then find a way to teleport the town back home to Japan.

Epoch's kind of like Bandai in that their day job is developing toylines (Epoch's behind the cutesy Sylvanian Families dollhouses and the Barcode Battler handheld where kids compete by cutting up their grocery packaging) but they also branched out into video gaming to create tie-ins for whatever licenses they had available. "Made by AI" is something to be cautious of today but back then it meant it came from a relatively obscure Japanese contract developer who made a bunch of weird stuff, like the GB port of Battle Arena Toshinden (I can only imagine how that plays). They did put out a few notable N64 games though, including past subjects Bomberman Hero and Densha de Go! 64, so their batting average on this series is commendable. So far, at least.

It's time to finally conclude the anime cat trilogy. After the more Zelda-like second game, which had dungeons and everything, I'm not entirely sure what I'm in for here except I saw a screenshot of Doraemon jumping around a 3D world and that's enough for me. There's no RA support or even a fan translation so, even if it does suck, I've no inclination to stick with it beyond the appointed sixty-four minutes. I can hope for something pretty good though, right? This is the third outing for MechaGarfield on this platform—it's one of very few series to have more than two entries on the N64, at least outside of sports franchises—so maybe this is where they finally hit their stride. Some real glass half full shit, I'm aware.

16 Minutes In

There goes the neighborhood.

Yep, this looks like it's closer to Doraemon 2 than Doraemon 1. Which also means an increased amount of complexity that's making the language barrier more of an issue. Most of this segment was watching the story unfold before we eventually got to play as Doraemon and start exploring. Besides hunting for the other members of Nobita's crew one pressing matter seems to be that a purple slime that has covered most of the NPCs in the town (also seems to be a hub of sorts) as well as Doraemon's gadgets and that I need to figure out a way to remove it before any of my tools become usable. Yet it took almost this entire block to figure out that I had to go into Doraemon's inventory and equip his revolver (presently the only gadget of his that hasn't been slimed over) before I could even attack anything, so that doesn't bode well for my gaming instincts.

Besides the town, which is devoid of enemies but a little tricky to navigate owing that it's just a square piece of suburb with no obvious landmarks, I also checked out the first stage which takes place in a forested area. There's a handful of enemies, some items that I think are consumable curatives, a few places where it looks like I need to use an item or gadget I probably don't have yet (which reminds me of the first game), and the Anywhere Door which is how you exit. There's these stumps in front of big trees that look important but perhaps not yet and a little high-tech bunker where the entrance doors won't budge. Mysterious, but the overworld map suggests I can go visit other places as well. Maybe it's just a case of finding the first stop in this breadcrumb trail? Well, now that I have a working gun maybe I can start blasting some fools and get some answers.

32 Minutes In

"Yukifurashiki" doesn't tell me anything about what this gadget might do, except it's possibly related to snow ("yuki"). Maybe a snow producing machine? Either way, I've not found anything particularly hot that needed a wintry wind to cool down. Also, there's two whole screens of these.

Man, I'm a little lost. OK, a lot lost. I found out that the green spraycans I've been picking up are actually slime removers, and I've been working my way through my gadget menu making each of them accessible again. Alas, it's been so long since the first game that I've forgotten what any of these things do (their names are in katakana, which makes them English loanwords, but it's not always clear from the names Doraemon gives them what their function might be) so now I'm just walking around with a whole lot of potentially helpful inventory junk.

What I have deduced is that the means of unlocking these gadgets, the spraycan items, can be endlessly farmed from enemy drops and by revisiting levels; what I think that means is that the gadgets could have some critical purpose that I won't have to suffer without because I prioritized de-sliming some other, theoretically more useful gadget first. One such case involved a conspicuous mound of dirt: I scoured the sealed gadgets I had (there's over 30) and eventually unlocked a gadget that looked like a magic bean and, recalling a giant beanstalk ascending to the heavens from the first game, used that bean on the dirt to create another beanstalk. It only provided a pretty pointless shortcut to further up in the level I was on (what looked like a mountain made of vines) where I could've just walked up instead, but maybe I've chanced upon what will be the key to solving whatever I need to do in these other places. Anyway, I'm not completely stuck yet: the world map has seven locations (including the town) and I've only seen three of them so far.

48 Minutes In

The world map. Bottom left is Nobita's town and the bottom right is some other planet's town that got dropped here. Everywhere else is a dungeon, except for that tower that I can't access right now.

I spent this segment checking out the other three world map places I could visit—the one that looks like a tower was forbidden, probably until I had all the McGuffins needed to enter—and eventually ran out of ideas. The first of these was the cave, which was filled with large mice and these cat-bat things. There were two chests near the entrance, a silver one and a gold one, and I eventually found keys to them both with a little more exploring. Neither held anything useful (just healing items) but I did also find a gold keycard and I'm wondering if that's not one of the McGuffins needed to enter that very sci-fi looking tower. The second spot was the lake, where the game introduced me to swimming controls. I couldn't use my air blaster underwater but I discovered I could unlock other weapons in addition to my gadgets and one of them was the air blaster but in blue: turns out it was an underwater version of the same gun, so with that I could deal with all the fish and crab enemies down there. Unfortunately, the two possible entrances—a deep underwater tunnel and what looked like an underwater base—were inaccessible. Might have to take a gander at my gadgets again for any deep sea exploration gear to pass through the former of those two.

Last place I checked was an alien village of igloos. Many of its denizens, little penguin guys, were frozen in the same slime that entrapped the NPCs back in our town but there was a free one in the elder's house smack dab in the village center, though I couldn't understand what he was saying (literally this time, since it was an alien language represented by grawlixes). I've yet to figure out how to use these spraycans to free any of these people and, for right now, I'm not sure they'd be more useful to me than my gadgets anyway. Cats are nothing if not pragmatic about the well-being of humans. I'll grab a few more spraycans and scan my gadget inventory again for anything that might help with the barriers I've encountered thus far but I suspect the largest of those, the language barrier, may have defeated me once again.

64 Minutes In

A cat, shooting a rat with a gat. No '64 Impala though.

Looking through my gadgets there was an ointment jar with "submarine" written on it and I think I'm just about smart enough to figure out what that one does. Like magic it allowed me to descend into that underwater tunnel and emerge inside the base nearby, which led to an operations center type of area that contained another golden keycard and one of the bigger health curatives. I now suspect I need four of these keycards to access the tower at the end of the game (or 4 of something, at least) and since I've found one in both the cave and the lake, the other two must be on the plant mountain and forest I entered earlier. Sadly, I couldn't figure out what gadgets were necessary in either; there was a bird I fed birdseed to (that's a gadget?) but it just gave me another one of these energy crystals: the only thing enemies drop more often than spraycans and health pick-ups and that I've yet to figure out what they do.

I'll be leaving this game with more questions than answers, pretty much how the previous two went as well, but for as simplistic as its gameplay systems are I think the true core of these games is in knowing how all of Doraemon's gadgets work and how they might be used to solve some straightforward puzzles in much the same way they might in a point-and-click adventure game. I suspect if I could read half of what this game was telling me it'd instantly transform from impenetrable to easy to a fault (it's for kids, after all). Until someone takes the time to fan-translate all three of these games though (and they don't just AI vibecode it, since accurately knowing what's going on seems kinda important) I believe I'm all done here.

How Well Has It Aged?: Feels As Old As Doraemon Sounds. Look, it's probably fine once you have a handle on what it wants and have ideally seen a few episodes of the show to know what Doraemon's gadgets are but without those obstacles to your comprehension it's probably something you could beat in a couple of hours without too much trouble. Health pick-ups are plentiful (and don't immediately activate, so you can stockpile them) and you can unlock any of your twelve(!) guns at any time along with the gadgets you might want just by farming spraycans for a while like you were playing Jet Set Radio. I think it would be a pleasant enough time for younger fans of the show but nothing to challenge the 3D platformer greats for the system.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Nintendo's Not One for Herding Cats. I imagine the licensing rights for Doraemon in his home nation would be astronomical and no-one else (except maybe India) even knows who he is. There's dozens of Doraemon games out there so it seems statistically unlikely this trilogy would even be in one of those retro game compilations either. If they ever did put the Doraemon games on NSO there's no way they'd be available anywhere outside of Japan.

Retro Achievements Earned: N/A. So far, only the first N64 Doraemon is supported.

PAF#16: Scooby-Doo! Classic Creep Capers

• TerraGlyph Interactive / THQ

• 2000-11-29 (NA), 2001-03-30 (EU)

• 364th N64 Game Released

History: Scooby Dooby Dee, where is he? On the N64, of course. The Hanna-Barbera crimesolving mutt features in this platformer(?)-adventure game in which villains must be trapped, caught, and de-masked in dramatic fashion before everyone can relax with a sandwich both as tall and as godforsaken as the Tower of Babel itself. Scooby-Doo has had plenty of games in the past, most struggling to figure out how its particular formula of spooky comedy and deductive shenanigans would work in a video game: obviously you'd want to go Ace Attorney with it, or a point-and-click adventure with maybe some soft horror failstates, but instead it's mostly just a bunch of Halloween-ass (emphasis on the ass) platformers instead.

The N64 version was developed by TerraGlyph Interactive whom we actually featured in the first episode of this season—they were the developers behind the discontinued French/Irish Carnivale movie tie-in game, Cenzo's Adventure—which makes this the only N64 game they managed to get out of the door. THQ, those recently revived notorious peddlers of junk, were once again the publishers here as they were for sixteen other N64 games (this only being our fifth to be featured, so I can count my lucky stars). Meanwhile, SB!CCC saw only one other port which was released on Game Boy Color by... Digital Eclipse? Is that right? Well, I guess that means we can expect a retro compilation of old, bad licensed games for this franchise too.

I'm both skeptical this is a true 3D platformer as well as skeptical that it'll be any good. Though at the very least I should be able to figure out what the hell I'm doing here: Run away from the ghosts, eat Scooby snacks, and try not to shit on the haunted mansion's rug in case the villain is the old caretaker of the place and that just pisses him off further than whatever bougie gentrification scheme inspired his Spirit Halloween spree in the first place. How many golf courses and condominiums got built because Mystery Inc. assisted in the arrest of the one local environmentalist dissenter trying to scare away the architects?

16 Minutes In

Snagglepuss absolutely would pose for a The Birth of Venus portrait. God, I hope he finds the courage to come out someday.

All right, wow. First off, this definitely isn't a platformer. My bad. It's actually Resident Evil for Dummies: you run around locations looking for items, either because they're clues or you need them for some trap, while avoiding anything that might scare Shaggy and drop his courage meter at the top left of the screen. It does the fixed camera perspective thing that Resident Evil does, complete with the constantly changing angles to disorient you, though in this case it messes with your controls as you're suddenly moving forwards when you were moving sideways just a moment ago. What doesn't help matters is that you're almost always followed around either by Scooby, who does nothing and is instead a detriment because he has collision and will get in your way a lot, or one of the villains who are invariably a little faster than you unless they get hung up on something. It's awesome when, let's say, a set of walking knight armor runs after you down a tight corridor and Scooby's directly between you and the exit and just kind of parked there.

The story so far is that the gang chances upon a spooky museum when driving at night and decide to investigate the mystery behind the aforementioned suit of armor, only to be briefly chastized by the museum owner Mr. Wickles during their discussion who then promptly vanishes and will no doubt have zero relevance to this eerie event and its perpetrator. The museum has four wings and each has both items I could theoretically use (once I've figured out how, or been given instructions) as well as possible jumpscares, including the knight. I got caught in the Egypt wing and I suspect I need to use a disguise item I picked up earlier (an Egyptian headdress) but I've yet to determine how. The museum has a cafeteria I can visit to refuel Shaggy's courage meter (it normally replenishes whenever I eat food off the floor, which honestly feels like the bigger danger to my health than some dude in a costume) so as long as I escape in time we should be golden. Well, except for the part where this game is terrible and I have to spend another 48 minutes with it.

32 Minutes In

Would you have, though?

After Shaggy opens the doors to the museum and lets the rest of the gang in through the front door (no clue why they couldn't have used the same ladder me and Scooby did; if a dog can do it, I think a jock, a cheerleader, and a lesbian probably had the physical chops to do so) Velma got kidnapped during a brief power cut so now we're all looking for her. I eventually found her in the prehistoric wing, full of animatronic dinosaurs that are difficult enough to avoid without the constant camera switching, but she's missing her glasses and won't leave without them. Those are in the Egyptian wing, which requires avoiding the black knight who is hiding in a sarcophagus. The key was the headdress, as suspected, but I had to use it in a very specific place to escape the knight and go into the tiny room he popped out of to retrieve Velma's stylish black rims. This all pretty much happened in the previous segment, except for the disguise part.

Once that was done the next half of the chapter involved going back into the prehistoric wing to fetch Velma then concoct a scheme to trap the knight. However, no-one felt like telling Shaggy (i.e. me) what this scheme was so I had to futz around for a bit looking for the necessary items to pull it off. I discovered that you can trigger the security guard on the second floor to slip on a spill and then steal his keys while he's knocked out, which opens storage rooms in the Egyptian wing and the modern art wing. Between those and other random objects I finally had enough for a trap that would freeze the knight in his tracks with a scary shadow puppet show (kudos to the gang for assuming it was a regular guy in there and not a poltergeist; shows they have pattern recognition) and then donk him on the head while he was briefly stunned. One chapter down, though I suspect the others will be longer and more annoying. Oooh, won't it be exciting to find out?

48 Minutes In

Coating themselves in coal dust to blend in with white snowmen and actually have it work was already impressive, but managing to turn themselves 2D in the process took some real physical ingenuity.

The game's second episode is much like its first, in that we're briefly introduced to the owner of a ski lodge who I'm sure won't have anything to do with anything and then we're tasked with figuring out the identity of the snow ghost (it's a yeti, not a ghost) who has been terrorizing any visitors to the lodge for the past few weeks. Naturally, after being sent out to find firewood (don't ski lodges typically provide that so visitors don't freeze to death looking for some themselves?), Shaggy and Scooby are chased by the snow ghost and once they're in the clear it's back to investigating again. The lodge had a few items in its guest rooms as well as a library maze (which is fun when the compass is switched around every few seconds due to the camera changes) containing a sinister Peter Lorre type of character at its end, because every Scooby-Doo episode was written by someone born in the 19th century. After finding enough evidence to placate Fred and co., a new area behind the lodge opened up that included an old (yet operational) sawmill where I had to avoid blades and the like followed by a cave with a wolf guarding it and a ski course that I accidentally activated, which not only almost gave me a game over from hitting every tree on the way down but reset my position to the starting area.

This game is not endearing itself to me as of the present moment. Some part of me does think that this is probably the smartest thing they could've done with the license at the time, given Resident Evil was hot and a kid-friendly version of that for a spooky cartoon tie-in made plenty of sense, but the poor execution and the muddy visuals makes it one of the less palatable games for the system. Not a complete tragedy but well within the low expectations many had for licensed dreck from that period of time. Honestly though? Having said all that it does remind me of Illbleed for Dreamcast a little bit. Not necessarily as entertainingly crazy but as a similarly monstrous mutation of RE's DNA.

64 Minutes In

The point at which I have no idea where I'm supposed to be.

This segment concluded the snow ghost episode, which had Shaggy find a bone in the sawmill (of course) that could be used to satiate the hungry wolf in the cave and the path there ultimately led to an ancient Tibetan temple where the cowering actual owner of the lodge could be found. So we're in Tibet, then? If so, how did we drive all the way here in the Mystery Machine? Pretty sure they have ski lodges in the States if they were that hard up for a sport that frequently kills people. While that mystery is the more compelling one, we're stuck trying to figure out who this yeti is with a trap that eventually requires Shaggy and Scooby to descend that ski slope again, this time with the yeti in hot pursuit (what is this, SkiFree?) so that we can entice it over a makeshift pit and find out who's underneath the mask. Gasp, it was the fake lodge owne- OK, fine, I guess I don't need to say who it was.

This second episode felt a little less annoying than the first, owing to the fact it only had a couple of unpleasant sequences rather than at least three or four, but now that the hour's up I can't exactly say I'm unhappy to see my time with it end. I had about a minute left when the third episode began and it immediately started with a chase that can lead to a game over if you go the wrong way, which is easy because you have no idea where you are yet or what's happening besides that there's a new Polynesian island setting (and don't get me started on how they drove the Mystery Machine here) and a new villain that is a mysterious tribal-masked man. See, in this case he's not scary because he's a monster but because his culture is unusual and foreign to us. So sad to bow out here, really.

How Well Has It Aged?: More of a Zoinks than a Jinkies. Like, again with that Rugrats game, I admire that the devs found a solution to making a licensed tie-in that felt both distinct and germane to the subject matter rather than something too derivative like a platformer (not to say the turn of the millennium wasn't lousy with RE clones) but the semi-inventive path they took instead still didn't hit, either because the ambition was too great for what they had to work with or they simply didn't have enough time. There was a PlayStation Scooby-Doo game which played like Crash Bandicoot (I think I mistook Classic Creep Capers for that, hence it showing up in this 3D platformer-a-thon) and that felt like a more half-assed conceit, so credit where credit is due. In the end, though, there's only so much creativity can do to absolve a terrible-playing game.

Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: They're About as Low as Shaggy is High. Nobody wants to play this, THQ Nordic probably no longer has the rights, Terraglyph is long dead, and I assure you Nintendo doesn't want to deal with the increasingly monolithic Warner Bros. HBO Discovery CNN Paramount CBS for permission to put this on their service.

Retro Achievements Earned: 11 (of 20). The set is roughly split up between the four episodes of the game. There's at least one each for completing an episode, finding every item (some aren't strictly necessary for completion), using a disguise to fool the bad guy (this one seems unavoidable), and getting through the episode without fully losing your courage meter (harder than it looks, and rarely intentionally so). I also got an achievement for walking down a path with a "Dead End" sign out front (it was a dead end) so that's fun.

Current Ranking (3D Platformers only)

1. Super Mario 64 (Ep. 1)

2. Banjo-Kazooie (Ep. 53/PAF 5)

3. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (Ep. 3)

4. Donkey Kong 64 (Ep. 13)

5. Space Station Silicon Valley (Ep. 17)

6. Bomberman Hero (Ep. 26)

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

8. Banjo-Tooie (Ep. 10)

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

10. Chameleon Twist 2 (Ep. 55/PAF 7)

11. Chameleon Twist (Ep. 52/PAF 4)

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

13. Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers (Ep. 55/PAF 7)

14. Tonic Trouble (Ep. 24)

15. Bomberman 64 (Ep. 8)

16. Jet Force Gemini (Ep. 16)

17. Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (Ep. 50/PAF 2)

18. A Bug's Life (Ep. 54/PAF 6)

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

20. Looney Tunes: Duck Dodgers Starring Daffy Duck (Ep. 52/PAF 4)

21. *NEW* Doraemon 3: Nobita no Machi SOS! (Ep. 56/PAF 8)

22. Doraemon 2: Nobita to Hikari no Shinden (Ep. 51/PAF 3)

23. Doraemon: Nobita to 3 Tsu no Seireiseki (Ep. 50/PAF 2)

24. Glover (Ep. 49/PAF 1)

25. 40 Winks (Ep. 31)

26. Looney Tunes: Taz Express (Ep. 51/PAF 3)

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

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

29. *NEW* Scooby Doo: Classic Creep Capers (Ep. 56/PAF 8)

30. Rugrats in Paris: The Movie (Ep. 54/PAF 6)

31. Earthworm Jim 3D (Ep. 53/PAF 5)

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

33. Carnivale: Cenzo's Adventure (Ep. 49/PAF 1)

34. Blues Brothers 2000 (Ep. 12)