What I'm Playing (Volume 113): Pokemon: Let's Go, Eevee!

First, a programming note: I'm going to be releasing a new series at some point in the future titled What I'm Replaying. This will allow me to review some games that I've completed before, but have a desire to replay for whatever reason. It feels like this will allow me to contribute more to this blog, specifically during a time in which I am replaying a bunch of old titles. I'm not going to reach into the past for games I've recently beaten again (specifically Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Country 2), but I am going to start from the moment I hit publish on this particular blog post, so keep an eye out for volume 1 of this series coming soon!

Gosh, this is a super tough review for me to write. In my pantheon of beloved retro games that haven't aged terribly well, Pokemon Red is up there. I. Love. That. Game. I spent countless hours playing and replaying the game, finishing the Elite Four, catching Mewtwo, and repeating ad nauseum. I can still remember exactly the procedure to create 128 rare candies. I still remember where the ghost PC is. I still remember where each and every hidden rare candy in the game is located. I know where every Pokemon is located. I know all of the differences between Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue. I can quickly navigate using the portals through the Silph Co. Tower. I probably know more about the substance of Pokemon Red than any other game. But a lot of things about it have aged poorly. Some types, notably dragons, normal, and psychic, are completely overpowered in the game due to a lack of good counters to that type. There's a pretty shallow selection of usable Pokemon in the game, and each Pokemon can only have one type. Each type has only a handful of Pokemon in it. There are some game-warping mechanics like Wrap and Fire Spin that make the game a lot less fun now. Not having online battling and training feels particularly archaic now. It's by far the most poorly balanced Pokemon game released in America, and it bears mentioning that, news to many American fans of the series, Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue are actually revisions to the original Pokemon games in Japan, and those original games are even more poorly balanced than the ones we got! But with all of that said, Pokemania existed for a reason-the game is incredible, and is still incredible today. But modernizing the approach seems completely reasonable, given the flaws, and I think an update of those games makes more sense now.

So I have no opposition to updating these games in the form of Pokemon: Let's Go Eevee! and Pokemon: Let's Go Pikachu!, although they are really the most similar to Pokemon Yellow. And they actually nail a lot of the revisions here, making a more user friendly approach that successfully experiments with a lot of new mechanics, although there are plenty of misses to go around. But reviewing this game makes me feel awfully defensive about my beloved old friend, and this may be unfairly negative towards it, so just keep that in mind.

Substantially, the single biggest revision to the game is that unlike in Pokemon Yellow, you can now get two versions of the game, each with their own special starter Pokemon who can't evolve. I had Eevee! by default, as I borrowed the game from my sister-in-law who got it in a lot of Switch games along with a second hand Switch. I probably would have picked Pikachu! myself, as I'm more fond of Pikachu than Eevee, and I think thematically the idea of Pikachu not evolving makes more sense than Eevee not evolving. Literally the whole point of Eevee is its flexible evolutions, and I think there are plenty of fan favorite Pokemon they could have picked to start with instead of Eevee, or just allowed Eevee to evolve. Like Red and Blue, the games have a subset of Pokemon who are not catchable with either title, necessitating trading Pokemon to fill out your Pokedex. More on this later.

So how, you might ask, are you supposed to tackle the Elite Four with an Eevee, a notoriously basic Pokemon whose entire existence is justified by its multiple evolutions? Well, do the boys at Game Freak have a surprise for you! The first way in which Eevee is able to compete is through a generous dispersion of Eevee Candies, which, when fed to your Eevee, give it +1 in every stat category. You don't need too many of these to balance out your Eevee competitively, and you'll get plenty. Eevee also seems to have unusually high base stats. You'll also have access to some unique moves that pay a nice homage to Eevee's true destiny as a blank slate. There's one special move for each type into which Eevee can theoretically evolve (fire, water, electric, dark, psychic, ice, grass, and fairy *takes gasping breath*), and boy are they absurdly powerful. Each has a power of 90 (think Thunderbolt/Ice Beam levels of power), hits every time, and has some attached effects that are game breaking. I ended with Bouncy Bubble (leeches half of the damage away as health), Glitzy Glow (creates a barrier to reduce damage from special attacks), and Baddy Bad (creates a barrier to reduce damage from physical attacks), along with Double-Edge, which gets a STAB bonus from Eevee's normal typing on top of the ability to leach back the recoil through the judicious use of Bouncy Bubble. My Eevee was a BAD dude, and I didn't even focus on training him all that much.

When I said that the biggest revision is the existence of two starter Pokemon, I definitely lied. The biggest revision is the process of catching Pokemon, which is a wild departure from any Pokemon game that has come before. Now, instead of being randomly attacked in the tall grass, Pokemon now just roam in the open, and you can choose whether to initiate an attempt to catch them. This is based largely on the concept of catching from Pokemon GO and the inclusion of the word "go" in the title should suggest that there's more than a little overlap. After bumping into the Pokemon, however, things continue to change from the status quo. Rather than battling the Pokemon to low health and then capturing them, you now have to use motion controls to capture the Pokemon by "throwing" the Poke Balls at them. In handheld mode, you move the system around until the Pokemon is in the center of the screen and then press "A", but in docked mode, you actually mimic a throwing motion with the joycons.

To be clear, I'm not opposed to this kind of idea. I really enjoy Pokemon GO and still play it daily, and find the capture mechanics to be really fun and central to my enjoyment of the game. But the controls in docked mode simply suck, and there are no alternative control schemes short of buying another weird Poke Ball peripheral that I don't have and can't review. But the ball rarely goes where you think it will, and causes all kinds of frustrations that the excellent mechanics on mobile simply don't have. If they were really serious about incorporating the mobile mechanics here, they should have tried to give players the opportunity to use mobile phones as a control interface, which would have allowed the kind of deft controls that hyper sensitive mobile touch screens are geared towards. Other modern game consoles have used mobile phones as controllers, so I don't think it would be much of a technical challenge to do so. It also unlocks certain things that you just can't do with motion controls, like the curveballs that are so fun in GO.

Speaking of questionable controls, what was Nintendo thinking on this one? One of the big promotional deals with the game was that you could now play in coop mode, something that frankly breaks the game, but I guess it's geared towards younger players, which is alright. You don't have to use it if you don't want to, and I didn't. However, the concession they made when they unlocked multiplayer was that you could only play the game with one joycon, or in handheld mode with two. THIS IS SO DUMB, NOT THAT I'M MAD ABOUT IT OR ANYTHING!!!!! This is stupid because you can't even play the joycons in horizontal mode, meaning that you're basically restricted to playing with one hand, which is so unnatural it feels obscene. Just go try it for a bit and see if I'm not right. You can't even use wired or wireless pro controllers or similarly styled controllers either. Here are the rankings of control scheme options available.

1. 2 joycons coop/2 joycons one player/traditional controllers/handheld/mobile phones
2. Atari 5200 controls/handheld
99. 2 joycons coop/1joycons one player/handheld

The controls are the single most frustrating thing about this game. They had such rich opportunities to craft a new and unique Pokemon experience based around fun new control schemes, and totally missed the boat.

Eevee also has a radically different experience mechanism than the traditional games in that experience gained from trainers is very flat. You won't get nearly as much here as you expect, and part of the reason why is that you now automatically share half of your gained experience with your remaining Pokemon on your team. This results in a more egalitarian approach to experience, and also allows them to keep rival trainers' levels roughly equivalent to what they were in the original games. The other part of this is that now a huge chunk of your experience will, like in Pokemon GO, be derived from actually catching Pokemon. I didn't really like this change, as it forced me to catch Pokemon I didn't really care about purely for the sake of training, which doesn't make much thematic sense. The whole notion of Pokemon training is that fighting is practice at battling, and when we practice at things, we get better. Why should my Pokemon all get crazy strong because I caught 1000 huge Caterpie?

Another big disappointment in this game is the frankly dreadful online modes. The 3DS games have robust trading and battling options that allow you access to the general community of Pokemon players, which is particularly useful when filling out your Pokedex or looking for a quick battle. This game, however, takes more of the approach of GO, which is a big mistake. In order to trade or battle, you must first get a code to exchange with a friend, which makes trading extremely inconvenient, and feel much more like the classic games rather than the newer ones. This walling off of the community and focusing primarily on interpersonal interactions seems so modern Nintendo, and really only serves to take some of the sheen off of what is an otherwise polished product.

I was also a bit disappointed by the visuals. Having seen what the Switch can do in titles like Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I was hoping these titles would go all out in putting a home console polish on the existing Pokemon art style. It really was indistinguishable in many ways from the most recent 3DS games, to be honest with you, and that level of detail didn't always translate terribly well to my giant HDTV. There are a handful of great new animations (I'm pretty sure these weren't in Sun and Moon) like sleeping animations for all of the Pokemon, but for the most part it felt like more of the same.

Venusaur's model just gives me the creeps. No detail at all on the leaves or the body. Kind of weird.




I was a bit ambivalent about the music. There were many tracks that felt good as fully orchestrated tracks, rather than the original chiptune sounds of Red and Blue, but there were also some in which the orchestration or execution really lost some of the power of the songs. This was particularly true in situations that are supposed to be scary or creepy, such as the caves, Team Rocket HQ, and especially Lavender Town. The eerie chiptune tones put those songs completely over, and their renditions in Eevee!! really couldn't capture that at all.

It may seem like I am trashing this game, and I'm really trying not to do so. There were a ton of things about it that frustrated me, but there were also several fun new additions besides the wild Pokemon visibly roaming. The first is that you can also now encounter more powerful Pokemon earlier in the game, allowing for a more dynamic and interesting early game that doesn't revolve around sticking with your starter or a Nidoking/Nidoqueen to get you to the powerful Pokemon later.

They also added riding Pokemon, which positively delighted my children and even managed to make my stony heart feel something. You can ride on some of the larger Pokemon, including Kangaskahn (Eevee rides in its pouch!!!), Charizard, Onix, Arcanine, and many more. Unlike the riding Pokemon in Pokemon Sun/Pokemon Moon, however, these are mostly just aesthetic/mobility upgrades, rather than replacing HMs. More on HMs later. 

They also changed a huge load of little things from the modern Pokemon titles to this one, and I hated most of them. Here are a few examples:

1. No held items (but they still have Mega Evolutions, weirdly)-bad
2. No Pokemon beyond the original 151-bad
3. No Pokemon abilities or hidden abilities-bad
4. No Pokemon breeding-incomprehensible
5. Changing the names of the HMs to bloodcurdlingly horribly named techniques for Eevee such as Chop Down and Sky Dash-good that you don't need move slots for HMs, but just call them Cut, Flash, Surf, Strength, Fly, and Rock Smash, for heavens sake. I did love Eevee piloting a mass of hot air balloons in lieu of Fly, however
6. You can catch Eevee, Charmander, Bulbasaur, and Squirtle in the wild-incredible

Again, evaluating a treatment of a beloved property is really difficult, and I feel like I could have made this twice as long, although it's my longest review to date, I think. On the whole, Eevee!! captures a great deal of the magic of the original Pokemon games, but somehow manages to flub a lot of the surrounding details that could have made this a truly exemplary remake in the tradition of the superb Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver. My kids all say it's their favorite video game of all time, and it's captured their attention in ways that nothing other than Minecraft has really ever managed to do. This suggests that the mission of Game Freak in making an accessible Pokemon game was achieved, but I still feel that some simple design choices could have made this an all-time classic. I think that this game was made for a few reasons:

1. Give the Switch a Pokemon game until a real one was ready to go
2. Give the team a chance to work on character models and a game engine to be used in Pokemon Sword and Shield
3. Ride the coattails of GO

That may not be the most flattering picture of the game, but if those were the aims, they accomplished them. I just wish that they had brought their typical level of polish to this game that they do with all of their other ones, but also have to confess that I enjoyed exploring Kanto again a great deal, and was charmed by some of the new additions. I'll give it an 8.2/10.

Up next on What I'm Playing is one of my all-time favorite games that stonewalled me in high school. I'm moving a bit slowly through it, but I feel like I'll be able to finish it this time. See below for a teaser...

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 112): Mario Golf: World Tour

Titling this article made me realize that since I started this blog in 2016, I have cleared out well over 100 video games (112 in this series, some of which featured two reviews, and a handful of others in my Pi Reviews series). I'm really grateful to myself for starting this project, because otherwise, a lot of these games would have just sat on the shelf while I burned time in League of Legends, Hearthstone, or some version of MLB: The Show or Madden, occasionally running through some old favorites. I've discovered countless gems sitting previously unenjoyed on my shelf, and gotten better exposure to the history of video games in general. If you find yourself in my shoes with dozens to hundreds (I'm still in the latter case, although my proportion of completed games is much better now than it was 3 years ago) of games in your backlog, maybe try this process of writing up your experiences. I've really enjoyed it, and I feel like I'm a more systematic thinker about video games and a better writer to boot.

Anyway, on to the true purpose of this article, a review of yet another golf game. Golf games are my particular sports video game weakness, as the genre has a widely utilized and perfect control mechanism, and a ton of great titles that utilize this system. Mario Golf: World Tour is another game in my favorite golf series, and is on the 3DS.

I'll be honest. I was BEYOND excited to get this game, until I read the reviews of it. No. Story. Mode. Mario Golf: Advance Tour is one of the very best golf games of all time, and one of my favorite GBA games, a system I think is stacked from top to bottom with quality. One of the main reasons why I love it so much is a story mode with RPG elements that just nails all of my particular gaming desires. You can earn experience to make you longer off the tee, more accurate, spin the ball harder, etc. You get to challenge increasingly difficult challenges on your way to teeing off against Mario and his Mushroom Kingdom friends to establish you as the true golf king, and everything just works perfectly. Tack on the fact that there are great single and multiplayer options separate from the story mode, and the game is, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way.

So I was crushed to find out that despite being developed by Camelot, a company that gets pretty close to being on my top 10 list of 3rd party developers (another article for another time), it will miss out on the story mode that has been in the other two handheld Mario Golf games. And I just didn't buy it. It was at the top of my must-buy list before reading the reviews, and it dropped considerably from there. But I eventually broke, because I found a really nice minty in-box offering for cheap, and what did I do? Played it immediately, because I'm a sucker for golf games.

And curse it all if I didn't really enjoy it. To be clear, I still prefer Mario Golf: Advance Tour. The story mode, if you can call it that, cannot even come close to comparing to its predecessor. There is a Castle Club mode that basically involves playing a practice mode on one course, playing a handicap tournament to determine your handicap, playing one non-handicap tournament on three courses, and being declared the champion. I'm dead serious that if you wanted to, you could probably clear the story mode in less than two hours.

But with all of that, the golf physics have never been better, the music is fantastic, the visuals look great, and it has a bevy of online options that earlier games could never have dreamed of. You can play in online tournaments against other players, be put into rounds of golf through matchmaking, and play with friends, all of which would be great if you cared about online stuff (I don't, but I will review the game as though I did). Despite lacking a story mode, there's still plenty of single player objectives, with a robust challenges mode that has you trying to make par while getting giant star coins out of the beaten path, collecting a fixed number of coins through three holes, playing in match play against AI to unlock star characters (just characters that can drive farther than their vanilla version), time attack modes, and more. Playing through all of these challenges will unlock several new creative and enjoyable courses, giving you more than your money's worth. There are also some DLC courses and characters, but I didn't buy them, so I can't review them. Generally, Nintendo gives you your money's worth, and I feel like the cart included more than enough offerings in terms of courses and characters, so DLC here feels like the true purpose of DLC, adding on more than you'd expect for your 39.99.

But it just nags at me that they cut just enough corners here to irritate me. In the Gamecube Mario Golf (and maybe in the N64 as well, but I can't remember), each character has a special animation when they hit a "nice shot". Mario's shot turns into a fireball, while Yoshi's turns into a rainbow, just for a few examples. In this one, every character's nice shot is a rainbow, which is lame, and feels like they could have easily done this if they'd have wanted to. The story mode is just really weak, and I don't think it would have taken that much more effort to do it properly. Pay a writer to write some funny dialogue, your existing castle is perfectly fine, and give me a lengthy campaign with some match play, tournaments, and fun little challenges! It seems like the recent Mario sports games have focused much more on head to head play, and while that's a great focus, the mechanics do that themselves. What's more, we've had those basic mechanics set in stone since NES Open Tournament Golf in 1987! Throw us a little bone here! Each game in this series is basically a graphical update with some new courses, and that's fine. When you have magic, you have magic, and you don't want to break what works. But this felt a little too much like porting Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour (for the Gamecube), stripping out some of the visual effects, making some new characters, and calling it a day. I feel like Camelot, and Nintendo, can do better than they did here.

But I still enjoyed it, against all odds. It's a handheld and faithful adaption of the excellent Gamecube version, the new courses are great, and most things are better than you'd expect from a sports title. But I wanted that Nintendo magic of going above and beyond good, and this felt a little too generic for my expectations. I'll give it an 8.5 out of 10.

I'm still working through clearing out some challenges and unlocking everything in the game, because I'm neurotic. So I don't have any teaser, or any idea of what I'm going to play next, but I'll be back before you know it with a home version of What I'm Playing. I may finish up something this weekend, but we'll see.

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 111): Dragon Warrior II

I was in a bit of a lull in games while I waited for some that I had ordered to show up, so I decided to just attempt to clear out Dragon Warrior II before my new ones showed up, and it turns out that Dragon Warrior II is actually a lot longer and deeper than its predecessor! So I ended up sitting on the new games for a few days while I wrapped this one up, but now I can retire this cart. Like with my review of Dragon Warrior, I played the Game Boy Color remakes of the game.

Dragon Warrior II is known in japan as Dragon Quest II, and is the sequel to the hugely influential Dragon Quest. The game takes the basic mechanics of its predecessor, and adds in a ton of new elements, some good, and some bad. It's still a turn-based RPG with the same basic plot, however, as you control descendants of the legendary warrior Loto (Erdrick in the Japanese version) as they attempt to stop an evil figure from conquering their world.

There's a lot of new stuff here to digest, so I cover these quickly. First, and best, your party now has three predetermined members, each of whom has their own skills and specialties. This, along with the fact that you can now encounter more than one enemy at a time, creates some new strategic decision making in a series that, prior to this, had an extremely limited scope of decisions to make on each turn. It also does away with the old, and dreadful, system in which you needed to buy individual keys which would break after each use, and allows you to grab permanent keys now that will progressively unlock new areas for you to explore. The world is absolutely enormous compared to the first game, and that's wonderful. You also get a world map that helps you to keep track of what part of this world you've been to and where you are currently, and  a ship that will allow you to cross the seas to visit all of the newly unlocked areas. There are also little quality of life upgrades throughout, most notable of which is that you can now at many spots throughout the world, a necessity now that the world is so much more sizeable.

I found that a bigger world would have been completely fine, especially with the new tools given to explore it, if there was a more defined objective for the player at each point in the game. While Dragon Warrior felt like there were a mere handful of things to accomplish, and there was clear communication as to where to go next, Dragon Warrior II felt too wide open, and the clues given to you as to how to find the next objective are sparse and vague, and the landmarks you're looking for are frequently difficult to find, particularly when they're tiny islands in the middle of the ocean. I complained in my review of Phantasy Star that the game felt so difficult to navigate that it was unbeatable without a guide, and this game felt similar, albeit with far less oppression. I think you could beat Dragon Warrior II without a guide, but it legitimately would have taken over 50 hours of exploring the map, writing down clues, and a lot of trial and error to get there. I'm not down for that kind of thing these days, with many children and decreasing amounts of time, but it was at least slightly more manageable than Phantasy Star. But to clear the game, you'll need to find (and this is not an exclusive list, just my best memory) an evil statue, sun crest, water crest, life crest, two other crests I can't remember, a Rubiss charm, a wind cape, and that's to say nothing of the premium gear you'll need to survive the crushing journey to the end boss. There are clues to find each of these, but only a handful are particularly obvious, or have some sort of natural gameplay funnel that help you to continue to progress, rather than to spin in circles.

The visuals were identical to the first. Fine, but nothing special.

I actually had a few chances to listen to the music this time, and thought there were several standout tracks. It's nothing that would stand up to an average Uematsu score, but it was very good.

This game felt a bit like the early Final Fantasy titles-pushing boundaries, possessed of great promise, but ultimately unfulfilled until a later title (Final Fantasy IV). But I know very little about the Dragon Quest series, having played only the first two games in the series, so I'm not sure at what point they'll hit that nice equilibrium, if at all. I definitely preferred the simplicity of the first game, but appreciated the big swings that they took to broaden Dragon Quest into what feels like a tremendously grand epic. I'll give it an 8.5/10.

Up next on What I'm Playing is a quick jaunt through a newly acquired title that's definitely on brand. Check out a little teaser below...

-TRO

Top Ten N64 Games

The N64 takes a lot of abuse for its shallow library, and a lot of this is deserved. I would never pick the N64 library over the PS1 library, but I do think that the criticism it gets is outsized. First, the hardware involved is absolutely fantastic. Know what I never have to worry about? If an N64 I pick up on the secondary market works. They always work, marvels of technology. The design of the beast is slick and smooth, and very pleasing to the eye. Having a stock option for four players, along with 5-10 killer multiplayer games, unlocked countless hours of fun that EVERYONE has enjoyed at some point or other. It's still the single console I'd bring to a party, were there a party to be had. The controller is, well, flawed. But this mostly comes down to the useless L button and d-pad and fragile control stick, as the button placement is really excellent. But I do think it deserves a lot of credit for being really ergonomic in your hand, and developers mostly worked around the use case of comfort with the controller, so most of its weaknesses don't really show up in gameplay. To boot, it really has a fantastic top ten of games that can hang with most systems, to be honest. It really suffers in the 25-∞ range, where it's definitely extremely shallow. All of these games are either sports or racing games, and there's less reason to get a complete N64 set than there is for most consoles. If you own the Rare and first party titles, you're probably fine. But, let's be honest, most people are not remembering their 30th favorite Sega Genesis game, or Game Boy game, or PS1 game, or SNES game, or insert universally beloved console here. I don't think I could go thirty deep on games I love for any console, ever. SNES is closest. Ten excellent games means you had a reason to exist and be remembered, and the N64 clears that comfortably, with another ten very good games along for the ride (these are conservative estimates).

The 64 was the first console I ever bought with my own money, along with a copy of WCW vs. nWo World Tour. I absolutely adored my 64, and still played it regularly after getting my PS2 a few years later. It holds a nostalgic hold on me in ways other consoles don't, so my rankings will definitely diverge a bit from the "standard" rankings, but it's my list! So, with that homage being delivered, here's my top 10 N64 games!

Caveats-I've never played, or haven't played enough, to fairly evaluate the following games:

Star Fox 64
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
Conker's Bad Fur Day
Banjo Tooie
F-Zero X
Jet Force Gemini
Kirby 64
Star Wars:Shadows of the Empire
Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Calibur (yes, this is the real title)

Honorable Mentions-The following are very good games, or games I personally enjoy:

Beetle Adventure Racing-Don' knock it until you've tried it.
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron-It's X-Wing, only prettier, on a tv, and not as soul-crushingly difficult.
Banjo Kazooie-I enjoy this game, but it's not as good as its cousin later on in this list.
The Mario Party games-I think they could belong on the top 10 list, and I've played them a bit, but I couldn't pick one because I haven't spent enough time with each. There's no bad choice, though.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater-I already gushed about this game in the top 10 PS1 games list, so I feel don't feel bad not including it here. But the N64 port is way better than it has any right to be, and actually is the version I grew up on.
Star Wars Episode I: Racer-This is a really fun game with a nice career mode.
Bomberman Hero-My ultimate hidden gem on the N64. It's completely ignored for the inferior Bomberman 64, and has a wonderful story mode with tons of hidden secrets, along with a top 5 soundtrack on the system. Seriously, go grab a copy.
NBA Jam '99-Sure, it has Keith Van Horn on the cover. But this is actually a really fun, if a bit broken, basketball game that is nothing like NBA Jam in the arcade or on previous generation consoles. Plus, Kevin Harlan slays as the play by play announcer.
All-Star Baseball 2000-This is an excellent, if forgotten, baseball simulator. It also has my beloved John Steiner and Michael Kay on the play by play.
WCW/nWo Revenge-One aspect of the N64 that does get plenty of love are the AKI wrasslin' games. This is the best of the bunch, in my opinion, and has every last WCW wrassler you'd ever want to play, including Goldberg, Sting, DDP and your personal favorite (save for poor Ric Flair).
Mario Tennis-What can I say? The console's pretty deep at the top!

Now, for the actual top 10:

10. Paper Mario

I really enjoy this game, even if it's inferior to Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars on the SNES. It's got an adorable art style, and is a perfect entry point to people interested in getting into RPGs.

9. Diddy Kong Racing

This is an extremely good racing game on a system jam packed with them, but what makes it stand out is the excellent single player campaign that has yet to be matched in a kart racing game since then. It also has a superb battle mode that will have you cursing out your friends and relatives.

8. Mario Golf

The faithful reader of this blog will note that I write fairly regularly about golf games, and this was my first introduction to my favorite golf game series. It's wonderful, and I just wish I could put it higher!

7. Donkey Kong 64

This one, admittedly, got the biggest nostalgia bump from me. I got this game for Christmas from my aunt, brand new, and she immediately became my favorite aunt. It's like Banjo Kazooie, but with better visuals, bigger levels, more identifiable and beloved properties and characters, and WAY better bosses.

6. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

This is the one that, in my opinion, gets the biggest nostalgia bump from other people. It's really good, and incredibly inventive. It translated the Zelda experience to 3D remarkably well. But they hadn't quite figured out 3D combat yet, and they knew it, shying away from combat for the vast majority of the game, and that drops it a few spots in my rankings. It's still an all-time classic, but it's definitely not the best game of all-time, and it's not even the third best Zelda game of all time. Sorry!

5/4. Goldeneye 007 & Perfect Dark

These are wonderful multiplayer shooters that are still really fun today. They get a big bump due to my nostalgia of playing these with friends and cousins.

3. Super Smash Bros.

Picking between this one and number two really hurts. This is one of my favorite fighting games of all-time, but I can see now how very imbalanced it is compared to the games to come later. It's another multiplayer staple for my friends and I, and it's the combination of the hook (what if Mario could fight Pikachu) and the flawless execution of completely novel mechanics that puts this one over.

2. Super Mario 64

It's the first game that introduced 3D to me, and it's still a tremendous amount of fun today. Sure, the camera is wonky, and there are exploitable bugs all over it. But it's crazy inventive, and much more fun than it has any right to be, given how much genre they had to create in one grand attempt.

1. Mario Kart 64

This was actually a very easy choice for me, as there's no N64 game I played more. I love this game, and playing it with friends gave us many hundreds of hours of fun blasting each other with shells, racing backwards on Toad's Turnpike, and trying to get that stupid shortcut through the waterfall. It's still my favorite Mario Kart game, and I really enjoy all of them. Team Yoshi!

That's my top 10 N64 games, so feel free to leave a comment if you feel that your favorite was snubbed! I think up next in this series will probably be Game Boy or 3DS, but we'll see where the spirit leads.

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 110): Animal Crossing

What a journey. This review was first teased back in June of 2018, so this one has been 10 months or forty-nine other game reviews in the making! I won't say I played this game constantly since that time, but I've definitely been regularly working on it to the point that I can say that I've beaten this unbeatable game.

Frankly, this is one of the hardest reviews I've ever had to do, but that is what makes Animal Crossing such a unique gaming experience. Animal Crossing is what you make it, and that's what makes it special. You begin the game as a nameless and hideous person, on your way to a new town. You are immediately accosted upon departure by Tom Nook, the local shopkeeper who sets you up in a house, in exchange for a mortgage (you have no choice in the matter). You then need to do a bunch of little missions with him, and from that point on, you're free to do as you please! Possible activities include starting a bug farming enterprise, a fishing business, wandering the landscape as a vagrant, performing tasks for your fellow villagers, composing music, attempting to win a house decorating contest, winning a fishing contest, participating in the town's fitness celebration day, observing any manner of holidays...basically anything you could want.

Because of the in-game clock, the world seems real. It advances in real time while you're away, and was the first to popularize a mechanic popularized in mobile games in this century known as fear of missing out. What if the fishing contest is tomorrow? What if the guy from another country who sells rare furniture shows up? What if it's raining and I have a chance of catching that really rare fish? What if my town gets overrun by weeds? What if a villager buries an NES game, and my stupid brother digs it up before I can get to it? But the consequences are ultimately fairly low if you skip a few days, so Animal Crossing definitely tries to get you to want to come back, rather than feeling like a miserable failure if you miss, like if you break your login streak in Candy Crush Saga. It's a fun kind of slavery!

So how did I play the game? Speaking of Nook, you're talking about a fiendish raccoon that's in the pantheon of greatest video game villains of all time, along with my Kefka, The Illusive Man, Sephiroth, Bowser, and Ganon. His tale is the classic tale of the slumlord ushering the immigrant to their new home upon leaving the ship. Thinking that they're going to America, where the streets are paved with gold, and finding instead a dump at extraordinary prices, our poor villagers have found themselves awash in a sea of debt, hopeless flailing to keep their heads above water. But. I. Beat. Him. My eternal quest was to finally get to the point in the game that I was able to pay off all of my debt, living in my extravagant mansion alone, laughing through my lonely tears that Tom Nook no longer controlled my destiny in a sterile, weedless wasteland of my own making. How did I do all of this? I found several fossils each day (your island is a potent archaeological site) and fished. Oh boy, did I fish. I fished and fossiled my way to the 1,413,600 bells to pay off the savage Shylock ensconced in his shop for eternity, apparently. I did this by setting a personal goal of farming 30,000 bells a day, which took roughly 45 minutes every day (I did not do this every day, and sometimes I played at other tasks beyond simply farming bells). Using this metric, I had to perform this duty more than 47 days at this rate, which I did not always accomplish. The bulk of my earnings came from a fish called a Red Snapper, which fetches 3000 bells per fish. Measuring my herculean task this way shows that I needed to catch roughly 471 Red Snapper to pay off my debts, and while I certainly made up some of the money through fossils, the occasional and rare Barred Knifejaw (5000 bells!), fruits, buried bags of 1000 bells (why?), and bugs, I'd estimate I caught at least 300 of the Red Snapper devils. Sure, you pull up about 5 Sea Bass at a measly 120 bells (see, bass?) for every Red Snapper, but I can stand on the other side saying it was worth it. Because I set a goal, and achieved it. And they also built a statue of me for knocking Tom Nook off his ungodly throne, much like George Bailey did to Mr. Potter.

All of this is to say that you write your own story, and that's the charm. My kids love to just go fishing, and don't every pay off their debts, comfortable with their lack of equity in their home. My wife prefers to write little ditties in the game, and to decorate her house in a cute fashion. I think there's something to do for everyone in this game, if you have the creativity to manage it. But it's also a blank slate, and really won't give you more than you bring in to it, establishing why it's so difficult to review.

Graphically speaking, I don't really care for it. It's kind of cute, but also hideous.

The music is soothing and relaxing, and the different variations on the theme for time of day and season will creep into my brain without warning.

There are a bunch of NES games that you can get in the game, but after playing for hours and hours, the only ones I could find were Excitebike and Donkey Kong Jr. Math. Ick, and icker. But you can get titles as wonderful as Punch-Out, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Balloon Fight, and I'm sure that if I gamed the system and just set the date and time for the fishing contest every day, I'd have a complete set in no time.

I enjoyed my time in my little island, and also see just how much better this game would be in the internet era. Visiting other people's island's by bringing your memory card over to someone else' house is cool, but the internet would have made it way better. The in-game clock is easily manipulated by those weaker of character than I, and having a stable clock would enable community-based events more easily.

I don't usually care for games like this. The Sims is the pits. But this feels a bit more like Harvest Moon, which I do enjoy and think of as a bit of a forerunner to this game. But it should be noted that not only have I never played another Animal Crossing game, I don't even own one. Part of this is that these games rarely show up on the secondary marketplace for reasonable prices. People who buy Animal Crossing know what they're getting, and don't want to give up their hard-fought communities.

All of this is to say that Animal Crossing is simultaneously a game that is for everyone, and not for everyone. I think if you're willing to give it a chance, anyone can find something fun to do in this wild and wonderful world. But the hook takes time, and I think more impatient modern gamers, or more objective-focused classic gamers, may find it difficult to sink the time in here that you need to make this game your own. I'll give it a 9.0/10.

I have not cleared out a home console game since February, largely since I've been very busy at home, been keeping my word to complete this game, and also been replaying some old favorites. But I'm in the midst of a playthrough that finds me confused, and not exactly sure how my final review will pan out. I'd guess I'll probably be wrapping that one up in the next two weeks or so, and will also be continuing to make a lot of progress on handheld stuff, which has been the bulk of my work thus far this year. Below is a teaser for what's coming next...

-TRO