I consider the N64 to be my main stomping ground, comprising a large portion of my video game library. Although I recognize the considerable drawbacks of both the hardware and the era in which it was spawned, I love it all the same. I suppose the fact that it’s a contrasting mix of good and bad is really the cause of my attraction. The PS1 is too good. The Saturn is too lacking. But the N64 is like fine art played on a vaseline-smeared screen.
It had some great titles, though. While I’m confident in my picks for this list, I’m leaving out a number of titles that I could gush about. That’s sort of why I don’t like lists like this, I’d rather talk in-depth about the merits and problems of each game in their own context, not compare them. However, if someone is going to do it, I’m definitely the most qualified. I’m fairly sure everyone thinks that about themself, but only I am correct in this assessment.
And lucky you, I’ve updated the list from a meager five select choices to a sprawling 20. At that point, we start to get into muddier territory where numerous games could fit the spot. I could keep going, though. One day, I might revisit my list and do just that. Keep me around, and we could reach the whole library one day. But for now, it’s 20.
20. Goldeneye 007
When Goldeneye 007 was released in 1997, it was a phenomenon. I remember that wherever I’d go to rent it, I usually had to put down a reservation on it because it was constantly out of stock. Even at the Blockbuster the next town over, it was elusive. I eventually got my own copy for my birthday.
Nowadays, however; yeesh. I’m someone who doesn’t think that games really age. They can be superseded if a later game takes all the same features and improves them, but what was great then is great now. However, after years of being used to cleaner graphics and reasonable framerates, Goldeneye 007 is rough. The game runs like everyone is wading through pudding, and the framerate drops into slideshow territory whenever the action heats up. It’s also so blurry that, on certain levels, it’s extremely difficult to tell where the enemies are until the autoaim points your gun at them or you see a muzzle flash. Playing the Jungle level was a good way to tell if you needed to dust off your CRT screen.
At its core, it’s still great. It has a unique formula where you need to explore levels to locate and accomplish objectives. You also need to exfiltrate, which is something that FPS games rarely ever had. The successor to Wolfenstein 3D’s key hunt formula for first-person shooters would wind up being Half-Life’s linear narrative, but if you ask me, more games should have copied off of Goldeneye’s sheet.
19. Mario Kart 64
I probably would have put Mario Kart 64 higher on the list, but I think there’s some childhood trauma there. It was a game that my entire family would play back when it was released, and while I was the big gamer in the family, this was one game that my parents and sister could beat me at. I would have been around 10 in those days, so even if I still would play along, my developing ego was fragile.
I think Mario Kart DS was when the series really nailed the series’ feel, but Mario Kart 64 had it where it counts. Maybe the speed wasn’t quite there, and the drifting didn’t feel right, but the tracks are some of the best the series has ever seen. Its battle mode also took what was already great on the SNES and lifted it even higher. There was better verticality, more interesting level design, and, of course, four-player support.
I think what makes Mario Kart 64 still worth playing these days is that it still has a sense of danger. There’s more risk and reward, and it wasn’t afraid to make you freeze or crush you under the wheels of a much bigger car. It is, quite possibly, the meanest Mario Kart.
18. Diddy Kong Racing
If you’re just looking at screenshots, Diddy Kong Racing just looks like a differently-themed version of Mario Kart. In reality, it’s only partially that. Rare went in a bit of a different direction by combining the weapon-laden racing of Mario Kart with a sort of collect-a-thon metagame. Not only can you get balloons for winning racers, but you can also find keys to unlock challenge races, T.T. Tokens for time trials, and more. Plus, there were boss races.
But beyond that, racing isn’t relegated to carts. There are also planes and hovercrafts, and certain side modes challenge your mastery of the vehicles. The races are heavily themed, and while they’re not quite as varied and unique as Mario Kart 64’s, they still give you a lot to chew on.
The best part, however, is that you can play through adventure mode with a coop buddy. You have to unlock this with a code for some reason, but it makes for a fun afternoon.
17. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
Listen, I have opinions about Star Wars, and it’s hard to talk about the games without touching on it. To put it as succinctly as possible, the galaxy far, far away is dead to me. But before the nails started getting pounded into the coffin by the prequel trilogy, we got some of the best games from it. Games like Star Wars: Rogue Squadron.
Rogue Squadron certainly wasn’t the first space combat game based on the series, but while Star Wars: X-Wing went in sort of an (awesome) simulation direction, Rogue Squadron was simpler and more narrative-focused. Well, “narrative-focused” might be stretching it, but it covers the period between Episodes 4 and 5. It still stayed very true to the look of the films, drawing from the extended universe novels, as well. It’s just too bad about the escort missions.
16. Blast Corps
1997 was kind of a stupid year for Rare. Good stupid. They came swinging onto the N64 with three of the games on this list. But as much as I love Goldeneye and Diddy Kong Racing, Blast Corps is the one that has endured for me. In fact, right now, I’m keeping myself pinned to my chair so I don’t get up and slot it into my N64.
Blast Corps is just lunacy. It tells the story of this truck with nuclear devices on it that gets locked on a completely straight course. Naturally, there are buildings in the way but, somehow, no steep drops, cliffs, or mountains. The only people who can save the day is a hardcore demolition company. Their plan is to just level everything in the path of this carrier, and also everything in the vicinity. If we’re just demolishing everything anyway, I’m not sure why we need to stop a nuke from going off. There was actually a comic about it in Nintendo Power, but it doesn’t actually answer a lot of questions.
So, it makes hilariously little sense, but it lays fine groundwork for a game about knocking down buildings using heavy equipment. And not just, like, a bulldozer. There is a bulldozer, but there are also cartwheeling robots and off-road rocket buggies that ramp into buildings to knock them over. Absolutely incredible.
One of the only reasons I’ve ever been tempted to own a more recent Xbox is because of Rare Replay, and a big part of that is because I want to play HD Blast Corps. I just can’t justify it when I own a PC, but for everyone who owns Rare Replay, I have one question: How awesome is it to be you?
15. Mario Party 2
Mario Party essentially launched the party game genre for a while, even before it exploded during the Wii’s early years. It started off modestly enough, giving people palm blisters with its stick-rotating mini-games, but Mario Party 2 is where it hit its stride. Or possibly its peak, if you ask some people.
While Mario Party 2 adheres well enough to the board game-like formula of the first game, it introduces facets like duel mini-games to keep things more interesting. It’s also home to Horror Land, the creepiest board to ever hit the series with its strange night/day happenings. But, perhaps most importantly, it nixes the stick-rotating games, which may have saved a lot of joysticks and palms.
14. Perfect Dark
If you could withstand Goldeneye’s blurry visuals and nauseating framerate, Perfect Dark has a new challenge for you, since it inherits many of the same problems. However, it also pushes the system much harder and has a level of detail that few games strive for, even today.
It’s a sequel to Goldeneye in everything but name, taking all the standards set by that game and extrapolating on them. It continues the objective-based mission structure, takes it to the near future, and throws in some aliens and presidential clones for good measure. There’s also a greatly expanded multiplayer mode, including many of the same rulesets as Goldeneye, but expanding it with bots, a greater arsenal, and bigger maps. You can even play the standard missions with a second player. It’s rad!
Except, as mentioned, the framerate will drop into the gutter with little provocation. An updated HD version was later released for the Xbox 360 and is still available on Xbox platforms, and simply because the hardware’s horsepower is up to the task, it’s a much better experience. Perfect Dark was always a great game, the N64 just isn’t the best place for it.
13. Paper Mario
Super Mario RPG was among the last big games to hit the SNES before the focus moved to the N64. It was a pretty big deal, featuring a collaboration between Nintendo and Squaresoft and graphics that felt like they pushed the console. So, excitement was pretty high to see a follow-up, and we never quite got one. Paper Mario was originally in development under the name Super Mario RPG 2, but with a different developer, different art style, and different gameplay, the only thing the two games really have in common was the fact that they’re JRPG-lites.
Okay, that’s not the only thing the two games have in common, but Paper Mario is a different beast entirely. It further boils down the RPG side of things while still keeping Mario RPG standards, like its reflex-based button presses to enhance damage or defense during battle. However, it’s quite a bit sillier and, in a lot of ways, helped better define the underlying sense of humor of the Mario series.
12. Star Wars: Episode 1: Racer
You can refer to the entry for Rogue Squadron if you want to hear me circle around my feelings on Star Wars, but to sum it up, I didn’t like the prequels to the point of disillusionment with the franchise in its totality. However, Phantom Menace did lead to some great games, and while Battle For Naboo was an okay follow-up to Rogue Squadron, Episode 1: Racer finds the best home for the movie’s pointlessly ostentatious pod-racing scene.
The result is some of the best high-speed, edge-of control future-racing since, well, F-Zero X, which is further down this list. It also ties in a layer of depth around upgrading and maintaining your machine. The tracks start off as small samplers of what will be sprawling circuits in the later stages of the game. Narrow canyons and track obstructions challenge you to keep your pod in one (three?) piece. It’s only let down by some pretty awful sound design.
11. Pilotwings 64
One of the launch titles for the N64, Pilotwings 64 takes the strangely relaxing flight school aesthetic of the original SNES title and expands it to a celebration of polygonal 3D. It features detailed physics and a massive draw distance that was extremely rare to see in the era.
It’s something of an unassuming game, featuring goofy characters and offbeat challenges such as firing them out of a cannon into a giant target. Others have you taking pictures while keeping your hang glider aloft. A couple involve shooting rockets at a giant metal man. It also contains a lot of the tangible optimism of early N64 games, where devs experimented with the over-promised and under-delivered hardware.
Pilotwings 64 is something I return to every so often because, like the original, it’s quiet and relaxing without sacrificing the challenge. I mean, I’ve played it so often that there’s very little challenge left for me, but it’s not like it’s effortless and meaningless.
10. WWF No Mercy
It’s rarely disputed that the best era for wrestling games was exclusive during AKI’s tenure on the N64. And that’s not just because they hit during the Monday Night Wars. They first began with the WCW for a couple of titles before moving on to the WWF. And really, WWF: Wrestlemania 2000 was great in its own right, and WCW/NWO Revenge has “Macho Man” Randy Savage in it. Personal preference might put either of those games here instead. Or even Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 if I was including N64 games.
But, for my money, I’d give it to WWF No Mercy by a healthy margin. The gameplay itself was at its most detailed while it took concepts like backstage brawling in a direction where it’s actually a lot of fun. When AKI moved to WWF, the WCW license moved to EA who made a game based entirely around backstage fighting, and it was complete trash. No Mercy effortlessly makes it worth experiencing.
It also had multiple story modes with branching moments based on how well you do. A person could get lost in the create-a-wrestler mode as they dream up their own wrestling narrative. And as anyone who was into wrestling at the time will tell you (I wasn’t, this is just what I was told), it was hard to beat the four-player modes.
9. Battletanx Global Assault
After the failure of the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, 3DO had to pivot hard to being a software company. And while they’re often associated with the maligned Army Men deluge of games, it’s easy to forget that they had a lot of talented staff on board. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two Battletanx games that hit the system. The original game was already pretty great, but Global Assault took that and expanded on it in every way possible.
Battletanx takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where gangs roam around in surprisingly abundant tanks. You play as Griffin Spade, who leads his army across America and Europe to save his son. The story isn’t all that special, but the tank-on-tank fighting is hard to beat. Levels are almost entirely destructible, and you’re given a tonne of weapons to bring down the house. Nothing can quite beat the nuke, which is quite literally a nuclear bomb that levels most of the map, destroying or badly damaging everyone in the area with an explosion/shockwave combo that is visually impressive for the time.
If it’s not already abundantly clear, it’s not exactly a simulation take on warfare. The tanks run like they are fueled by Pixy Stix, and the main gameplay mode is a variation of Capture the Flag where the flag is a woman. Incredible stuff.
8. Super Mario 64
Super Mario 64 is essentially the basis of how a platformer should work in 3D. The N64’s controller was more-or-less designed around how Shigeru Miyamoto’s vision for how it should be done. The result is something extremely ambitious, very experimental, and damned impressive. Also, it’s a bit unwieldy.
The early 3D days were littered with the bodies of mascots from 2D games that weren’t able to make the transition. It makes sense Nintendo would want to have things perfect for their central character. In a bit of an abstract adventure, Mario jumps through the various paintings in Peach’s castle to collect stars that allow him to advance further. It’s a formula that would be adopted as the standard for collect-a-thon 3D platformers.
It’s a bit divisive nowadays, as later games, especially modern ones, have really ironed out some of the flaws in the game’s movement system and camera. Personally, I get the complaint, but I still find Super Mario 64 to be a lot of fun whenever I pop it in.
7. Beetle Adventure Racing
While you might be tempted to lump Beetle Adventure Racing with any later licensed advergame like, say, Ford Mustang: The Legend Lives, the developers clearly didn’t have hawking wares since the game they came up with is a much more whimsical approach to driving. The fact that the central and only vehicle is a Volkswagen Beetle is completely secondary.
Beetle Adventure Racing is unique in the fact that its tracks are comprised of a circuit of braided shortcuts. Your success isn’t determined entirely by how well you can handle your wheels, but more in how willing you are to explore. A perfect run doesn’t come from perfect cornering but whether or not you can take advantage of each route through the track. Crates are scattered about the track, with nitro boosts to give you a kick of speed and points that can help you out by providing continues or unlocking stuff. In order to get all of them and stay supplied with nitro, you essentially need to follow a different route each time you circle the track.
There really isn’t anything like Beetle Adventure Racing, even today. It’s another demonstration that, in terms of arcade racing games, the N64 really was its own little ecosystem.
6. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
We’ve established that Mario made the transfer to 3D unscathed, so the pressure was on for Zelda. For a long time leading up to its eventual release, Ocarina of Time was shown off as Zelda 64, and it had a very different look and feel. I kind of have to wonder what the early version felt like, but it clearly wasn’t good enough for the developers, so they made some big changes, and what we wound up with was worth it.
Ocarina of Time, in some ways, feels a lot like a remake of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Structurally, it’s very similar, with an initial set of intro dungeons before expanding to larger ones. However, its look and feel, as well as a greater focus on narrative, makes for a completely different beast.
Video games were becoming a lot grander at this point in time, and Ocarina of Time is a good example of this. There’s a heavy focus on atmosphere, with it even delving pretty close to horror at times. Its soundtrack had the biggest impact on the series going forward, and it nailed down the last lingering standards of the formula. It was a big deal when it first released and is still worth playing today.
5. Star Fox 64
The on-rails shooter is a sub-genre that remains widely untapped. It’s bizarre to think that the best example of it is still the 1997 classic, Star Fox 64. While largely a re-do of the SNES original, telling the same story but in greater detail, it manages to be a better realization of the concept while still being equally experimental.
Anyone who has played it probably has a bunch of favorite moments from the game. Was it when the train explosion made the rumble pack go ballistic? How about when Star Wolf appeared in their upgraded Wolfens? To top it off, if you had any extended experience with it, I bet there’s a tonne of voice lines burned into your brain that you can repeat pitch perfectly.
Nintendo has never really topped it, and unlike some other series in their pocket, they have tried. It’s pretty sad when it looks like the series barely got off the runway, but maybe we just have to accept that it reached perfection quickly.
4. Ogre Battle 64
Ogre Battle on the SNES was a great game with a lot of problems. Its follow-up, Ogre Battle 64: A Person of Lordly Caliber, solved a lot of those problems, feeling more like a realization of the intended formula. The only problem is that the N64’s horrible gelatin blur makes the whole game look ugly. Not the art style, which is fantastic, it’s mostly just the textures and the filtering over the sprites. Yeesh. If any game needs a remaster, it’s this one.
But it’s 60 hours of troop-upgrading fun and semi-strategic combat. The back of the box says 50 hours, and it’s lying. The narrative is surprisingly deep, combining some groundedness with a healthy dash of whimsy. Building your perfect team of units is extremely engaging, and while the strategy isn’t terribly deep, it’s hard to pull away from.
3. F-Zero X
Have you ever truly appreciated what a fever dream F-Zero X is? The ridiculously fast speed that keeps you on the edge of control, bizarre aliens and robots piloting strange amalgams of metal and glass, foggy tracks hovering in the midst of nowhere. That’s to say nothing of the sound design here, which sounds like the outer limits of a concussion. F-Zero X is a legend. While the console follow-up – F-Zero GX on GameCube – may have tightened up the gameplay, it also added an unhealthy dose of sanity. I prefer my racing games to be nauseatingly abstract.
F-Zero X established the series as one of the best racing games around, and it should be a gem in Nintendo’s st… stable? However, it’s only been recently that they suddenly seem aware that it even exists. Many of the games have made their way to the Nintendo Switch Online retro catalog, with F-Zero X being one of them, and F-Zero 99 is a successful, new-ish entry. It would just be nice if they gave it a proper return.
2. Banjo-Kazooie
The N64 was the best era for Rare, with the developer putting out a number of games that are close runners for this list. I consider Banjo-Kazooie the best for a number of reasons, but mostly because it’s as tight as cling-wrap. The controls are basically stolen wholesale from Super Mario 64 and presented in a less hyperactive manner. The variety is on point, and some fantastic pacing ensures there’s always something cool up ahead. Plus, Gruntilda is a fantastic omnipresent antagonist who taunts you all through her lair.
You may wonder why Banjo-Tooie isn’t here instead (or anywhere on the list) since it did see a major reassessment a few years ago by some fans around the internet. I also reassessed it and found it to be a bloated sack of boredom. The best thing I can say about it is that Banjo makes the best noise when he takes a nap in his backpack. Other than that, it’s a slog.
But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about Banjo-Kazooie, which is platforming perfection. Concise, but winding and varied. Full of personality. Absolutely joyful in every facet. It doesn’t get much better.
1. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
Majora’s Mask is not just my pick for the best game on the N64; it’s one of my favorite titles of all time. While I love the Zelda series in general, Majora’s Mask transcends its kin. While its gameplay sticks largely to the established formula of overworld exploration and dungeon delving, it’s thematically dense. It presents a world gradually coming to terms with its imminent destruction, depicting characters that respond with anger, denial, sorrow, resignation, and even disassociation. Most of the world’s inhabitants don’t have many lines of dialogue, but each one encapsulates so much emotion.
As a person, Majora’s Mask added a dash of whimsy to my perception of death. It covers so many facets of this unifying experience and how we individually approach it. We’re always staring it down, constantly trying to find meaning, yet still, we hold onto our failures.
Hm? The gameplay? Oh, it’s good. I like the mountain area, especially.
Published: Nov 15, 2024 02:38 pm