N64 Week Day 5: Party Games and More Print Ads

One of the coolest features of the Nintendo 64 when it was shown for the first time (besides the amazing looking 3D graphics) were the four, count 'em four, controller ports featured on the front. The Nintendo 64, with its incredible speed and processing power, promised to take us beyond the two-player realms we were confined to with all gaming consoles previously. The Nintendo 64 would redefine the ideas for "party games" by letting four players play at once instead of your friends passively watching two of you duke it out. Today we're looking at some of my favorite four-player titles to breathe new life into console multiplayer gaming.

Mario Kart 64

While I still think this is a fun game with some good levels, when I look back at the various Mario Kart games that have come out, this is probably my least liked one. But that didn't mean it still wasn't an absolute blast to play with a group of friends. Four player races could get pretty frantic, as anyone who has played Wario Stadium can attest; if you had a lightning bolt, you could use it when a player was going over a super big jump and it would slow them down enough to make them miss the jump and set them back half the course. Then of course there was the battle modes, my favorite of the levels being the block fort. With its multiple levels you could hit someone with a red shell and they'd never know you were there. Early on in the console's life, this was a great reason to own the system, not to mention taking it to friends' houses.

Bomberman 64

Probably the least-known of the games I'll be talking about today, this game actually had a full single player adventure-style game as well as the crazy multiplayer Bomberman action we've come to expect from Hudson. The multiplayer levels were all very unique, featuring various points of advantage, which were usually not in the same place as the appearing item boxes. One of my favorite levels was a giant pyramid. The item boxes were in a small section on the bottom, making it dangerous to go down there, but if you could get a good item, it would give you a huge advantage. Meanwhile, as time goes by, water slowly starts filling in the area, until eventually only the very top is no longer underwater. When the water starts rising, the action got frantic as you're both getting to higher ground while fighting your friends on increasingly smaller platforms. You could even pick them up and toss them off, which I used to love doing, hehehe!

Goldeneye 007

Not sure what can be said about this game that hasn't been said already many times over. The guns and gadgets you could get in the game were fun and original. There was always a great sense of satisfaction to place a mine on a doorway, then wait until someone went through to detonate it. The Facility level got far more play than any other level in the game, there's just something about it that that was simple perfection. Perhaps the fact that the level's different areas all looked different, so it was always easy to know where you were when you spawned and where you needed to get back to. This game always has a special place for me for more sentimental reasons too, as this is the last game I ever played with my best friend Jason before we fell out of communication with each other. We would play this game for hours.

Mario Party

I remember being amazed when I first played this game at a friend's house that Nintendo had made board games fun again. It felt somehow like everything had come full circle, after video games had pretty much destroyed board games here in the US, now they were reinventing them. These titles have held up really well, partly I think because it's only half skill, the other half being the luck of the dice, so while skilled players may have the advantage, there's always a chance that everything could turn around at least minute, and often times that's exactly what happened. It's always a better time when everyone is equally matched. I bought Mario Party 6 for the Gamecube when it came out and was pleased that the games are still entertaining and great games to play in a group.

Super Smash Bros

Man, I think this game caught just about everybody by surprise when it was announced, for two big reasons. The first, obviously, is that while pretty much all Nintendo players had at one time or another thought of how cool it would be to have a Street Fighter game featuring Nintendo characters, we never really thought that would happen. Secondly, Nintendo broke the news of this game a mere two months before it was to be released! That's a pretty nice surprise. The game delivered more than just Street Fighter with Nintendo characters though; it introduced some great interactive levels with nasty traps, areas that seemed huge (Hyrule Castle was one of my favorites), and an alternative to the "hit the person 'till their life meter runs out" gameplay that every other tournament fighter used by instead trying to throw your opponent out of the level. This probably became the ultimate party game for my Nintendo 64 after it came out as there were so many characters and levels that you could just keep playing with a group and not get bored.

So there you have it, my favorite games to play with friends on the Nintendo 64, the console that really changed what multiplayer console gaming was all about. And since I started this week long blog with a look at one of the first Nintendo 64 print ads, I thought it would be fun to end it with a few more. I went routing through my old magazines to find some N64 ads that I thought were really fun. Click on the images to get a larger version. Let's take a look!

The first ad campaign for the N64 always referred to it as The Fun Machine, which I really liked. No need to call it cool, or hip or anything, the Nintendo 64 was all about fun. There's a few variations on this ad, but it's essentially the same. The background color is different depending on the game it's focused on, as well as the image in the back and a bit of the text. Layout is identical, though.

When the Nintendo 64 neared release, they changed the ads from "The Fun Machine" to "Change the System", though the look and feel are similar to the earlier ad.

After the "Change the System" had run its course, they started ads like the ones above and below. Once again, I thought these were really nicely done. All of their early N64 ads focused on the fun, and on the games. No "eXtreme" crap, no "Play it Loud" anymore, just simple ads showing you what you as gamers wanted to see.

And so my week of N64 blogging comes to a close. I really hope everyone enjoyed reading about all this as much as I enjoyed writing about it. Too often these days the gaming industry just wants us to look at what's coming out in the near or distant future and get ready to spend big bucks on it. It's easy to forget all the great games that we've played and might still own. So here we are, September 29, 2006. Ten years to the day that the Nintendo 64 was released in the US. I don't know about you, but I feel like putting a little time into The Fun Machine today.