The Nintendo 64 was in heavy demand upon its release in 1996. Time Magazine called it “that rare and glorious middle-class Cabbage Patch-doll frenzy.” Nintendo’s third home video game console (nicknamed N64) was launched with two games outside of Japan: Pilotwings 64, and Super Mario 64, arguably one of the greatest video games to date, and …
For the unfamiliar, Did You Know Gaming is a video game–focused blog which features video content focusing on video game related trivia, facts, companies and consoles; and is narrated by popular YouTube hosts. Since the website’s launch, it has been featured on numerous major news and gaming outlets and with good reason – their videos …
Despite the awkward interim development and ugly 3D of its graphics, the N64, with its eerily shaped controller and under-utilized “camera” buttons (hint: that’s what C stood for, on all four of ’em) gave birth to a staggering amount of first and second party classics during its six year run, thanks in no small part to a little studio called Rare.
A world destined for ruin lives out its final days as the face of simultaneous malevolence and indifference plummets from the sky. A lost hero is obligated to save a foreign land based on sheer morality and the will to reunite with a good friend. Three days remain before the end of the world, time and time again.
Nintendo celebrated its 125th Anniversary last year, with the company founded on 23rd September 1889 in Kyoto, where its headquarters remain. The company has had an extraordinary history, originally producing handmade handful playing cards and several small niche businesses (including a cab service and luxury hotels), but since 1977, Nintendo has grown into one of …
While there’s a long and varied laundry list of games that have challenged you to save the world, and more than a few that have challenged you to destroy it, Blast Corps must be the first game to task you with saving the world by destroying it.
The graphics are so awful and the draw distance so shallow, that the perpetually foggy landscape becomes an enemy itself, endangering the player with unseen chasms and veiled ravines. The controls are so clunky when on foot and so floaty when on vehicles, that following the simplest road is a challenge worthy of the Paris-Dakar circuit. Gunfights with gargantuan bugs, which have come to harvest humans on Earth, are so confusing, such a fuzzy tangle of rainbow lasers and gelatinous blobs, occasionally interrupted by the smoky remnant of an explosion, that your Orange Glo soldier becomes lost in the visual chaos. Secrets scattered throughout each level are tucked into such distant valleys and improbable mountain ranges (cubist sculptures that only distantly resemble geological formations), that finding them is almost not worth the effort. Body Harvest has all the makings of a colossal failure, comparable, in its own generation, to Superman 64 and Small Soldiers. And yet, it is known as one of the best titles for the Nintendo 64.
My first outings with videogames were memorable but far from profound. Most Argentine children of my generation grew up with the Family Game, a cheap Nintendo emulator made in China. With it, I jumped through Super Mario Brothers and Antarctic Adventure, which motivated my attachment to the medium but never fascinated me. Even when I graduated to the Super Nintendo, a legal one, I still considered videogames to be one among several fun activities, like sports or trading cards. In 1997, though, one title would teach me that there were unexpected feelings to experience through videogames.
New consoles always come packaged in boxes and dreams, promises of games to come. I can remember my first days with every console. As an adult, I’ve favored computers, so consoles have always been gifts from my parents, evidence of their love for me. I spent my 11th birthday alone in our California apartment. That …