Forget about those other flying games. This is the ultimate flight experience! Pilotwings 64 carries you off into a vast three-dimensional environment. Pilot several different vehicles and take in breathtaking sights. Successfully complete flight tests to earn your flight badge. Get a high enough score, and you’ll get a chance at bonus games such as Cannonball and Sky Diving! Soar into a wild blue yonder with Pilotwings 64!
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Pilotwings 64 is.... a charming tech demo.
It is clear that most of its aspect have been built to represent the revolutions of the Nintendo 64, since it was one of the main launch titles.
And despite being a launch titles, it has a lot of charm to it: it introduced its own quirky cast of characters, with different stats, behicle designs and voice lines, and the stages you explore are really cute (the stage with the Mount Rushmore with a Wario face cracks me up).
And there is some variety in the modes: it's weird there are not actual planes, but the different vehicles and the extra modes can be solid experiences: of all of them I feel the Rockets are the most fun, while Glyders and Copters can be a bit of a slug depending on the specific mission.... though Cannonballs, SKy diving and the "Hopping" minigame adds the extra charm that the game needed.
It's a cute game but... honestly nothing to write home about it.
It is clear that most of its aspect have been built to represent the revolutions of the Nintendo 64, since it was one of the main launch titles.
And despite being a launch titles, it has a lot of charm to it: it introduced its own quirky cast of characters, with different stats, behicle designs and voice lines, and the stages you explore are really cute (the stage with the Mount Rushmore with a Wario face cracks me up).
And there is some variety in the modes: it's weird there are not actual planes, but the different vehicles and the extra modes can be solid experiences: of all of them I feel the Rockets are the most fun, while Glyders and Copters can be a bit of a slug depending on the specific mission.... though Cannonballs, SKy diving and the "Hopping" minigame adds the extra charm that the game needed.
It's a cute game but... honestly nothing to write home about it.
Randomly started playing this game. I couldn't get into it as a kid, but I find it enjoyable as an adult.
Pilotwings 64 is a charming and surprisingly relaxing flight simulator. Soaring through the skies, taking on challenges like hang gliding, skydiving, and jetpacking is a blast! The visuals might be blocky by today's standards, but the controls are smooth, and it creates a real sense of freedom. While earning all the medals takes some serious skill, this is a classic N64 experience that's perfect for unwinding with short, enjoyable sessions.
Fun but frustrating, cannon ball game is king.
Meh,existe para enseñar lo que la Nintendo 64 era capaz de hacer
While I’ve played the Mario 64 to all 120 stars some four or five times now, until now I’d never so much as owned, let alone played, Pilotwings 64, the other launch title for the N64. After finding it at Book Off for 100 yen a few days back (and myself having a 100 yen off coupon), I felt it was high time to correct that gap in my play experience. It took me about 7 or 8 hours in total to get gold badges on all of the normal stages sans the last rocket belt one, and I also got silver (and sometimes gold) on all of the extra games as well to unlock all of the content. I did it on the Japanese version of the game, and I played it all on real hardware.
There really isn’t any narrative to speak of in Pilotwings 64. Perhaps there’s some in the manual or something, but there’s certainly none in the game at the very least. Regardless, the premise is perfectly clear without it. You’re here to get your flying certification! Well, certainly not a pilot’s license, as you never actually fly any planes, but something similar no doubt with all of the time in the air you’re doing XD.
You have your choice of six characters (who are only cosmetically different save for some very small exceptions) to go through all four tiers (Beginner, A Class, B Class, and P Class) of three activities: Hangliding, rocket belt-ing, and gyrocoptering (which is like a plane a bit, I suppose). Each class of activity has one to three tasks you need to complete, and each task has a score of 0 to 100 for you to go for, and depending on your total score, you’ll get a badge rank at the end (average of 70 is bronze, 80 is silver, 90 is gold, and all 100’s will get you a perfect score badge). Additionally, getting silver or better in all three activities of a rank will unlock a respective Extra Game activity to try out (which are cannonball, skydiving, and Jumble Hopper). Getting a silver or average in each of the three ranks of a respective activity will even unlock you a free flight mode for one of the game’s four different maps, so you can do victory laps to your heart’s content~ (quite literally).
It’s a very simple game, to be sure, but it’s good fun! Being a launch title, it’s not hard to see that Pilotwings 64 was a game explicitly made to carry on the legacy of the original Pilotwings on the Super Famicom. The N64 version is here to show off not just the console’s 3D capabilities for vast, open spaces, but it’s also here to showcase just what precision you can pull off in a vehicle using the N64’s snazzy new joystick tech. If you’re just here to see the credits, all that takes is getting bronze or better in each class of the main 3 activities. But if you’re like me and really wanted gold ranks, it’s going to take you a fair bit longer, and it’s also likely going to be a fair bit more frustrating to boot XD
The gyrocopter controlled the most intuitively to me, as it’s basically a plane in how it has acceleration and tilt and such. This isn’t anywhere as sim-like as an Ace Combat game, but it’s certainly closer to a flight sim than something like Star Fox 64 is. Hangliding was what I found consistently the hardest, as relying on only thermals to blow you upwards and having no other method of acceleration makes not only the flying challenges difficult, but it also makes landing very difficult to, as you only have one shot to get that approach correctly. Rocket belt missions usually weren’t too hard, but they easily have the hardest final challenges in the P Class rank. Landing will usually be your biggest challenge, as taking off is the easy part, but rejoining with the ground is harder. Landing, after all, isn’t just an important part of flying, but it’s also usually 30 to 40% of your score (both the accuracy of your landing on the bullseye or runway as well as how smooth a landing you did). I wasn’t nearly out of my mind enough to go for perfect scores, but I’m sure someone dedicated enough out there is going to have a whale of a time trying to get Pilotwings 64 completely perfected.
The Extra Game activities very much feel like the extra content that they are. They’re neat ideas using the existing physics and locations in interesting ways, sure, but they’re also pretty much one-trick ponies compared to the main three flying activities. The very oddly named Jumble Hopper is a pair of super jump boots you need to use to jump to the designated space as quickly as you can, but landing in water loses you points, and landing on too hard a slope or hitting an obstacle will send you flying and also lose you a TON of time. Skydiving has you trying to align yourself with your fellow divers five times before making a hangliding-like landing on a target. Cannonball is easily the worst of them for my money, as it has you trying to use angles and an NES Golf-like power meter to hit a distant target. It’s just trial and error, and it’s both the most easily mastered of the activities in this game while also easily being the most frustrating and least fun. Like I said before, they’re a neat distraction, but they’re definitely not worth of main activity status.
The game overall runs just about as well as it needs to. You don’t need to have very well adjusted eyes to see that the framerate is struggling REALLY bad a lot of the time, but the game is thankfully tuned well enough that this shouldn’t usually be a problem. The only place I’d say it’s possibly a problem is in the hit detection, as there were quite a few points where I effectively went through (literally) target rings instead of actually passing through them in a way the game recognized. It is my hypothesis that the really bad framerate was very likely either causing that collision issue, or at the very least it made it harder to judge than it should’ve been where the target I was aiming for actually was. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s just one more frustrating part of an already often frustrating game, and the fact that tasks lack a quick-retry button just makes it all the more of a pain to retry when you mess up (particularly for the four minute+ missions later on in the game).
The presentation is pretty darn good for what it is. The music has a lot of fun tracks that fit the air of chill flying very nicely. It also has some of what I can really only call Banjo Kazooie-style weird tracks that add some strange if not unwelcome levity to their respective missions. The graphics are quite simple of course, as you’d expect for a launch title of this era, but they’re stylized enough that I think they hold up just fine.
Verdict: Recommended. While it’s not an all-timer like Mario 64, that’s some really stiff competition as far as launch titles go. On its own merits, while it may not be the most content-rich game in the world (for those of us who aren’t score attack maniacs), Pilotwings 64 is still a really fun little game. For framerate and ease of access reasons, it may be more appealing to play a more modern port of this game (such as on the N64 Switch Online service), but the N64 version is still plenty fun. Even for someone not super into flying games like me, I had a quite good time with it, and I reckon you probably will too~.
There really isn’t any narrative to speak of in Pilotwings 64. Perhaps there’s some in the manual or something, but there’s certainly none in the game at the very least. Regardless, the premise is perfectly clear without it. You’re here to get your flying certification! Well, certainly not a pilot’s license, as you never actually fly any planes, but something similar no doubt with all of the time in the air you’re doing XD.
You have your choice of six characters (who are only cosmetically different save for some very small exceptions) to go through all four tiers (Beginner, A Class, B Class, and P Class) of three activities: Hangliding, rocket belt-ing, and gyrocoptering (which is like a plane a bit, I suppose). Each class of activity has one to three tasks you need to complete, and each task has a score of 0 to 100 for you to go for, and depending on your total score, you’ll get a badge rank at the end (average of 70 is bronze, 80 is silver, 90 is gold, and all 100’s will get you a perfect score badge). Additionally, getting silver or better in all three activities of a rank will unlock a respective Extra Game activity to try out (which are cannonball, skydiving, and Jumble Hopper). Getting a silver or average in each of the three ranks of a respective activity will even unlock you a free flight mode for one of the game’s four different maps, so you can do victory laps to your heart’s content~ (quite literally).
It’s a very simple game, to be sure, but it’s good fun! Being a launch title, it’s not hard to see that Pilotwings 64 was a game explicitly made to carry on the legacy of the original Pilotwings on the Super Famicom. The N64 version is here to show off not just the console’s 3D capabilities for vast, open spaces, but it’s also here to showcase just what precision you can pull off in a vehicle using the N64’s snazzy new joystick tech. If you’re just here to see the credits, all that takes is getting bronze or better in each class of the main 3 activities. But if you’re like me and really wanted gold ranks, it’s going to take you a fair bit longer, and it’s also likely going to be a fair bit more frustrating to boot XD
The gyrocopter controlled the most intuitively to me, as it’s basically a plane in how it has acceleration and tilt and such. This isn’t anywhere as sim-like as an Ace Combat game, but it’s certainly closer to a flight sim than something like Star Fox 64 is. Hangliding was what I found consistently the hardest, as relying on only thermals to blow you upwards and having no other method of acceleration makes not only the flying challenges difficult, but it also makes landing very difficult to, as you only have one shot to get that approach correctly. Rocket belt missions usually weren’t too hard, but they easily have the hardest final challenges in the P Class rank. Landing will usually be your biggest challenge, as taking off is the easy part, but rejoining with the ground is harder. Landing, after all, isn’t just an important part of flying, but it’s also usually 30 to 40% of your score (both the accuracy of your landing on the bullseye or runway as well as how smooth a landing you did). I wasn’t nearly out of my mind enough to go for perfect scores, but I’m sure someone dedicated enough out there is going to have a whale of a time trying to get Pilotwings 64 completely perfected.
The Extra Game activities very much feel like the extra content that they are. They’re neat ideas using the existing physics and locations in interesting ways, sure, but they’re also pretty much one-trick ponies compared to the main three flying activities. The very oddly named Jumble Hopper is a pair of super jump boots you need to use to jump to the designated space as quickly as you can, but landing in water loses you points, and landing on too hard a slope or hitting an obstacle will send you flying and also lose you a TON of time. Skydiving has you trying to align yourself with your fellow divers five times before making a hangliding-like landing on a target. Cannonball is easily the worst of them for my money, as it has you trying to use angles and an NES Golf-like power meter to hit a distant target. It’s just trial and error, and it’s both the most easily mastered of the activities in this game while also easily being the most frustrating and least fun. Like I said before, they’re a neat distraction, but they’re definitely not worth of main activity status.
The game overall runs just about as well as it needs to. You don’t need to have very well adjusted eyes to see that the framerate is struggling REALLY bad a lot of the time, but the game is thankfully tuned well enough that this shouldn’t usually be a problem. The only place I’d say it’s possibly a problem is in the hit detection, as there were quite a few points where I effectively went through (literally) target rings instead of actually passing through them in a way the game recognized. It is my hypothesis that the really bad framerate was very likely either causing that collision issue, or at the very least it made it harder to judge than it should’ve been where the target I was aiming for actually was. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s just one more frustrating part of an already often frustrating game, and the fact that tasks lack a quick-retry button just makes it all the more of a pain to retry when you mess up (particularly for the four minute+ missions later on in the game).
The presentation is pretty darn good for what it is. The music has a lot of fun tracks that fit the air of chill flying very nicely. It also has some of what I can really only call Banjo Kazooie-style weird tracks that add some strange if not unwelcome levity to their respective missions. The graphics are quite simple of course, as you’d expect for a launch title of this era, but they’re stylized enough that I think they hold up just fine.
Verdict: Recommended. While it’s not an all-timer like Mario 64, that’s some really stiff competition as far as launch titles go. On its own merits, while it may not be the most content-rich game in the world (for those of us who aren’t score attack maniacs), Pilotwings 64 is still a really fun little game. For framerate and ease of access reasons, it may be more appealing to play a more modern port of this game (such as on the N64 Switch Online service), but the N64 version is still plenty fun. Even for someone not super into flying games like me, I had a quite good time with it, and I reckon you probably will too~.