While this is another American football game, I was pleasantly surprised about this one. I still don’t fully understand (or like) the sport, but I managed to have some fun with this.

It felt like I had more control over the players and the game and players didn’t just flop down at the slightest touch, meaning I could actually breakthrough and score a touchdown (although a touchdown always looks anticlimatic, but that’s the sport’s fault).

This seems to have been achieved without sacrificing the realistic nature of the game. There are more tactics than previous games (you choose starting position and then movement) and it’s still all the real teams and stadiums. It also has some nice little touches, like a half time show.

I wasn’t expecting to get enjoyment out of a game like this, so this must be doing something right to be able to do so when I still don’t fully know the rules of the game.

Knife Edge: Nose Gunner (or just “Knife Edge” in Europe) is a lightgun shooter game that doesn’t come with a lightgun – the N64 itself never had a lightgun, either. A large part of the enjoyment of lightgun games is the manual aiming and firing, so this loses a lot from just moving a cursor and holding down fire.

Spectacle is another big part of them, and this also misses there. The locations are rather bland and lifeless, with very little colour. The camera whizzes around the map, jerking around randomly with unnatural movements, and you have very little time to shoot anything.

There are six short levels, although the game does provide replay value by offering you the option to select a different route at the start of each level. The game is so incredibly dull that you’ll have no desire to actually do this, but at least it’s an option.

You’ll encounter some bosses, which do require you aim for certain parts, but this is mainly solved by wiggling the stick wildly while shooting and seeing what part of the boss flashes. That’s as advanced as the tactics get in the game. There is a dodge option, but the camera just slides slightly to the side so you have no idea if it’s actually done anything.

If this was in the arcades with a proper lightgun, it might provide some entertainment, but would still be a very boring lightgun game.

It’s always a shame when you know a game is good quality but you just can’t seem to gel with it. I enjoyed playing F-Zero X for the first time, even though I played F-Zero GX first, so I was hoping the same would be true with Wipeout 64, as I had played Wipeout 2048 on Vita. Sadly, I really could not get the hang of this game at all.

What I think is throwing me off is the camera. It’s not in line with your vehicle, it seems to be instead stuck to the track or something. Your racer is often towards the side of the screen, appearing at an angle. It looks fancy in screenshots, but I think it’s messing with my ability to judge turns. You also seem to “hit” the sides before it seems like you should be doing.

Instead of just having a series of races, there are challenges in multiple categories: racing, time trial and killing enemies. When you’ve completed all these, you then unlock a “super combo” mode where you have to win races while killing enough opponents.

It’s a good idea for extending the singleplayer, especially with only 7 tracks, I just wish I found the gameplay itself to be fun.

As EA’s first basketball game on the N64, this isn’t the disaster that FIFA 64 was, but it also doesn’t come close to FIFA 98, resulting in a game that’s just passable.

The menu for this one is quite odd, starting you off with choosing an exhibition match and the options are off to the side. You can change rules settings (including letting you tackle opponents) and there’s a very limited create a player option.

The game feels very clunky. There’s some interesting ideas with the controls – such as holding R to activate a mode where you can pass to a player of your choice with the C-buttons, but passing and shooting don’t feel smooth. It’s not atrocious, it just doesn’t feel very good.

The graphics are similar. The court itself looks very nice, but the players are hideous with broken-looking limbs and extremely boxy.

With NBA Courtside around, this can just be ignored.

ODT was an action game that released on PlayStation and PC. An N64 version was in development, but was cancelled. N64 gave a little blurb saying that it was due to Psygnosis having financial issues (not long after, they were absorbed into Sony), although N64 magazine stated “Not much of a loss as far as ODT’s concerned. Shame about F1, though”.

When a ROM was eventually found, the most surprising thing was that the N64 version was finished, and there were even specific NTSC and PAL versions of the game. However, the poor reception on PlayStation and PC combined with the cost of making cartridges probably influenced the decision to not release it.

ODT is a game clearly inspired by Tomb Raider, but set in a futuristic Jules Verne sci-fi mashup (your ship is called the Nautiflyus, which is just stupid). However, it completely lacks any charm, clever level design or fun that the Tomb Raider games had. Instead, it settles for clunky, low and tedious.

The controls would have been bad when it came out (as reviews on other platforms point out), and feel even worse now. Movement has you turning left and right with the analogue stick, holding a c button to slowly sidestep. The camera does not play nice at all, always at an odd angle behind you, to the point where you can’t see holes or gaps with no way to manipulate it. In some rooms, the camera becomes fixes and the movement feels completely wrong.

The shooting is also just bad. Your gun (you do obtain different kinds of ammo that act differently) sort of homes in on enemies, but not very well and the manual aiming is atrocious. The game also starts off with bat-like enemies that are the most difficult to hit.

There is a magic system in the game that does work well – hold R and press a C-button to use the assigned spell. It’s a while before you properly unlock one, so you’re already fed up before you get to use the spell system. You can also level up your characters and guns, but it’s not very interesting when the gameplay isn’t enjoyable.

The level designs also don’t help. They’re maze-like and mostly made up of small box rooms. You wander around, killing enemies, come to a locked door, backtrack, find a key, go back to the locked door and repeat far too many times. It does sometimes mix it up by having a switch instead of a key. While good games lock the entrances to areas, this game just locks the end, letting you progress through multiple long winding paths before letting you know you went the wrong way 20 minutes ago.

The levels also have platforming sections. With the poor camera and the terrible jumping (sometimes your main character jumps too short) they’re bad enough, but the game then adds crumbling platforms and moving platforms, which the controls aren’t equipped to begin with. To make matters worse, you can get through a gruelling platform section only to encounter a locked door, and you need to go all the way back.

ODT certainly had ideas of ambition. There are multiple characters to play as (including unlockable ones), the magic and upgrade systems are potentially good ideas and the world could be interesting if it wasn’t so ugly. They tried to to far too much with the controls that they ended up sacrificing the main movement of the game.

Sadly, ODT is a game with promise that just ended up squandering it inside far too much tedium.

While the name may sound similar to Famicom Detective Club, this isn’t related to it in any way. This is a virtual board game from Imagineer, themed around kids solving a mystery in a spooky mansion. It came out shortly before Mario Party, however it has no minigames.

There are three game types in Detective Club 64: Theft, Lost Item and Bomb Hunt. They all involve searching around a mansion, but are slightly different. In Theft, you have to find three items and get to the front door, bomb hunt you need to disable bombs and hand them in while lost item you need to find items and return them to the correct people.

You take turns rolling the dice and moving. You can chose which direction to go in. The main space you’ll be looking for is the magnifying glass, which lets you pick objects in the room to search. These either contain cards to be used as abilities, or the special objects you need to win the game. Some special objects have duplicates, while one of them will only have one copy.

Other spaces make you gain or lose health and money, buy items and some alter your stats. NPCs will also be walking around, some you can talk to for clues, while others will trigger a battle, as will landing on the same space as another player.

The battle is a kind of “rock, paper, scissors” where certain abilities work against others. The loser is stunned and will miss the next turn. The system isn’t awful but, like with the rest of the game, is entirely down to blind luck.

Other than slightly different modes, the game doesn’t have any variety. Even the different mansions are just made up of the same randomly-selected rooms. It’s a very bare-bones release and isn’t even fun in the first place. The deceit part is just window dressing, with the game being more like a very slow version of Neil Buchanan’s Finders Keepers.

Space Station Silicon Valley is a mission-based puzzle platformer where you reanimate the corpses of dead animals (don’t worry, they’re all robots). It was developed by DMA design (makers of Lemmings, GTA and Body Harvest) and is an immense amount of fun. The game did ship with a bug that meant that you couldn’t pick up one of the collectables, but I played a version that had been patched by fans that fixes the issue.

You play as Evo, a robot that loses its body as he and his hero-for-hire partner crash into a mysterious station that’s on a course for Earth. Evo ends up as just a chip, but discovers that he can take over the bodies of deceased animal robots.

In each level, you must complete multiple objectives, usually done by killing the animals, taking over their bodies and using their various abilities to complete what you need. It all sounds horrific and disturbing when trying to explain it, but the game manages to be incredibly charming throughout this, with happy music that is played through the station speakers (which you can destroy to shut them up).

Discovering how each animal moves and how to use them is one of the main things I love about Space Station Silicon Valley. They all have different kinds of movement – some are like a typical platformer, others are like cars and some can only move when jumping – and the powers have various uses that aren’t just needed to solve the puzzles of the level, but to find all the collectables. This concept was also a large part of Super Mario Odyssey, so my like for this is probably why I loved that, too.

Each level has 15 power cells hidden in it to find, some are in plain view, others are hidden extremely well. A few of them can be quite frustrating to get to, such as some high up ones requiring using a vulture’s awful flight to get there. The game’s dreadful camera also doesn’t help matters, as you can never get a good look around and the cameral often likes looking downwards.

The other kind of collectable is a hidden trophy in each level, which is found by doing a secret objective. Sometimes these are obvious, such as the second level having a racetrack, and often killing everything will yield results, while others are very tricky, such as listing to penguins make sound and recreating it on a keyboard (being tone-deaf, I looked that one up).

Still, even with these annoying ones, it was a joy to collect everything. I’m not 100% completing every N64 game, but this one was one where I wanted to do so.

At the end of each of the four regions, you’ll encounter a level where you find a piece of Evo’s original body. These are quite different to the main gameplay, featuring different events. For example the second area ends with a Jetski-like race called Walrace 64 where you have to win a race as a robotic walrus boat.

Once all these are done, the final mission is defending Earth against invading robots, but unfortunately is probably the weakest level of the game. Still, that slight downer is just the end of a wonderful experience.

While the difficulty is more of a rollercoaster than a curve, you do get used to some of the techniques the game uses, and the wild and wacky robot animals are always an absolute joy to discover – each time you see a new one, you’re eager to kill it and give it a spin.

Space Space Station Silicon valley is a wonderful platformer and one I think more people should try out.

The first tennis game on N64, and one that never came out in America. It’s a fairly simple tennis game, but is unfortunately plagued with control issues – the depth perception on the ball during service (you throw the ball far too high in the air) is poor and it’s extremely difficult to aim where you can hit.

The game has a create-a-player mode (which lacks options like hair colour) and the “challenge” mode works alongside this as you challenge the pre-made characters to matches, betting your equipment and clothing (so a kind of strip tennis). This is how you unlock more customisation options, which is a really nice touch – just a shame that the head/hair options are so limited.

If it wasn’t for the control issues, this would be a decent little game, but there will be better tennis games later on in the system’s life.

While we got plenty of versions of EA’s other sports on N64, but for hockey, this was the only one. EA’s NHL games on the Mega Drive were quite legendary, but for N64 it’s just another ice hockey game. This doesn’t feel particularly broken, but it also doesn’t do anything interesting or special.

One issue with NHL 99 is the passing and the AI of your team – they’re awful at getting into positions, and passing can sometimes send the ball where you don’t intend, meaning the main tactic is to never pass and run at the goal when someone gets the puck.

Wayne Gretzky remains the NHL champion.

Body Harvest was originally going to be a large collaboration between DMA Design and Nintendo, but Nintendo ended up pulling out, leaving DMA to work it all out on their own. Despite this, DMA turned out something impressive in size and scope.

This game was the birth of the current open world modern-day open world games – many people associate it with GTA 3 on PS2, but many aspects of that can be found in Body Harvest. Of course, both were made by DMA Design (now known as Rockstar North), but it’s amazing how much of what they did started on the N64.

Alien bugs keep harvesting humans and, as humanity are on their last legs, the hero Adam and his assistants (a woman in a skimpy outfit and a robot) are sent back in time to stop multiple invasions to save humanity.

Roaming out of your time ship, the game feels like a 3rd person shooter – the controls are pretty good for the time, with a big help from autoaim. However, before you encounter your first enemies, you’ll come across a car, that you can hop in.

The vehicles are very odd to control by today’s standards, but you can get used to them. There are a massive amount of vehicles in the game – and not just cars, but tanks, planes, boats, helicopters and more. Some have their own weapons and special abilities, while all essentially act as armour for you – you don’t lose your health while in a vehicle, becoming vulnerable once they blow up.

The vehicles aren’t just for getting to places, ether, they’re all part of the “puzzle” of each area. The open world isn’t just a backdrop for the game, but is integral to the design of the game. You’ll encounter many roadblock and will need to figure out how to get past. It’s something that I feel a lot of open world games lack and you’re constantly thinking about how to get about the landscape.

The first area itself is impressive in size and scope, and that’s just one of the maps. There are four main areas – Greece 1916, Java 1941, America 1966, Siberia 1991 – that have unique looks and vehicles, all with its own puzzle to figure out. There’s also a final mission that takes place on the alien comet, but it’s a more straightforward combat mission.

I did find some parts of Java and America a bit too difficult to navigate, and sometimes a harvest will happen in an inconvenient location – as humans are eaten by the large harvester bugs (one of many different types of bug aliens), a bar will go up and losing too many humans will result in failure -and every so often a mutant will be created to hunt you down.

The difficulty of the game is very unfair, especially due to how the game saves. Each location has 3 or 4 alien processors and you can only save at beacons placed after these have been destroyed. This means that there can be a very long time between saves and messing up a fight can cost you hours of time.

On top of that, the game unfortunately has technical issues. Vehicles can sometimes get stuck, and some are required for progressing. Making a wrong turn when exploring can also lead you to a place where you can’t return, meaning you have to reset. These issues make it a pain to play the original version of it, so I highly encourage playing in a way that utilises save states.

While it certainly shows its age, Body Harvest is a phenomenal game. It’s simple, yet expansive at the same time, and the open world is designed around the gameplay. This game gets overlooked a lot, yet it was definitely an important step in the evolution of video games.

I also do wonder how different Rockstar would have been if Nintendo properly supported this project – would GTA3 had become a GameCube exclusive?

Buck Bumble is a insect-based flying shoot-’em-up. It’s set in a small area of a rural English down, where the land has been polluted, creating the rise of evil robotic super wasps poised to take over the insect kingdom. The game really surprised me when the main theme kicked in – a garage song about the biggity Buck Bumble. The developers, Argonaut, are particularly notable for creating the Super FX chip and Star Fox for the SNES.

My biggest complaint with Buck Bumble is the level design and graphics – its supposed to be set in the garden, but other than the very occasional sight – like a bench – it doesn’t really feel like you’re a small creature, and you just get to see lots of ugly browns and greens and there’s an immense amount of fog due to the poor draw distance.

The gameplay, however, is a lot of fun, with an impressive amount of different enemies getting a wasp-like makeover that you’ll need to content with. The controls are smooth and flying around is a lot of fun. The difficulty ramps up very quickly, though, and when you die you start the mission from scratch (the lives are for the pointless score system). You will find different weapons throughout the game, offering you lots of ways to dispatch your foes.

The game offers 19 levels. Most involving killing all enemies in an area, activating a switch for a door, while others have you transporting nuclear bombs. The levels do blend together a lot, though, with the game also throwing more and more enemies at you.

That said, Buck Bumble is an enjoyable game.

A yearly update of a sports title I didn’t really understand. One of the biggest changes is that this version of Madden has the official NFL license and teams in the game, and has also had a bit of a graphical update.

The gameplay itself doesn’t seem that much different, although it does feel much more like your players are being properly tackled and not falling down with the slightest touch. Other than that, it’s still very stop and start and you have to watch the referee fetch the ball every time.

Another American Football game, but this is a much more arcade style instead of the very slow tactical game of the previous games. While this was also out in arcades, it wasn’t quite as arcadey as something like NBA Hangtime, but instead feels more on the level of FIFA.

It’s much faster paced than other American Football games, and also felt easier to understand. There’s very little waiting around, although you still select tactics. I still don’t quite fully understand American Football, but I had fun with this.

NASCAR is about a large amount of cars doing a ton of races around a track a massive amount of games. NASCAR ’99 lets you do that in the comfort of you own home. The game features a lot of cars (which have a ton of advertisements on them) and quite a lot of different tracks (even though most feel the same).

The game functions just fine and there’s nothing terribly broken about it, but it’s just really boring. The handling isn’t enjoyable and the tracks are incredibly dull – I can’t see anyone managing 200+ laps. The opponents also just drive along the racing line as though you don’t exist. I have heard that people enjoy NASCAR for the potential crashes, so I figured I’d test that out.

Going backwards along the track at full pelt, I was able to be a mild inconvenience at most to other cars. They don’t really react to you and once they wiggle past you, they carry on as though nothing happened.

This is just a fairly boring game.