What You Want in The World is Not Enough N64

We love TWINE for the N64, as you know, and more than that we love games with replay value. TWINE has some fairly challenging time cheats you can beat to unlock additonal characters, weapons, maps and modes for multiplayer (w/ bots or without, though we prefer with). I have managed to get through most of them, though there are still a few that have eluded my grasp. If you take a look at GameFAQs portal for TWINE, you'll find a bevvy of tasks that seem nearly impossible to complete. If you want to prioritze them, I suggest tackling the following challenges, all of which will add fantastic maps and a nice weapon set to spice up your multiplayer options:

Unlike Renard here, who obviously feels no pain, beating
 these time cheats requires a high threshold for pain (at least
for emotional pain).

• The Air Raid multiplayer map. This is by far my favorite map in TWINE. A bit small, but totally worth beating the "Masquerade" level on Agent in under 3:05. If you need help in doing this, here's a video to help out:

• There's also the "Wildfire" weapon set, which you earn by beating "City of Walkways II" on Agent in under 3:00. Now, at least this one is on Agent: had it been on double-o, that helicopter at the end would have prevented even the most seasoned agents from earning this unlockable. Take a look at this if you need a spot of help:

• Finally, you can play the excellent Forest multiplayer map by beating "Night Watch on 00 Agent in under 2:20. I know this sounds insane, and for the longest time I believed it to be impossible, but watch this video and it will, at least, seem somewhat possible. I got it eventually, but you have to keep trying because Gabor appears in random places, and usually at the most inappropriate moments. This level is one of the best for Capture the Flag matches, so it's a must-have:

The Winback Diaries, Day 1: "Sarcozia..."

You know how much we love Winback: Covert Operations. If you don’t know how much we love Winback, please, dig in the archives and find out. There’s nothing out there that can match its wall-hugging tactical combat, its love for exploding boxes, and its beautifully awkward voice-overs. But it’s been a while since I played through it, and I can’t really remember if I ever finished the game on its hardest difficulty setting. This is my attempt to document the journey, a true labor of love, a real mission into the heart of man. Join me for a trip back to 2001, when commandos had yet to figure out the advantages of shooting and moving at the same time. I’ll try to introduce you to the story and its characters as best I can, but this mainly going to be a series of reflections on the game as I progress through its box-laden levels and its joyously absurd conversations.

Note: For those of you more familiar with the N64 version, you really missed out on something special. The Ps2 version of Winback has two things going for it: first and foremost, it has some of the best voice-overs in history; and second, PS2 has a vastly improved multiplayer component, specifically BOT mode. If you still have a PS2 hanging around, do yourself a favor and snag a copy of it immediately. I’m sure Amazon can hook you up with a cheap copy.

#Sarcozia

Day 1: "Sarcozia..."

Before you get to the start menu, Winback opens up with a lengthy video to set up the highly emotional plot. It’s a doozy, too: renegades storm a nondescript office complex – which, you’ll notice, is completely box-free (Figure 1) – and exploit the poor or nonexistent perimeter defenses. This is later referred to as the Center for Space Development, a government agency responsible for protecting a satellite weapon. They do an especially poor job at protecting it.

Figure 1: The Center for Space Development, or CSD. As yet no boxes.

As you can see (Figure 2), even in the cinematics security personnel for the CSD, as well as their as-yet-unnamed adversaries, have a hard recognizing the dangers inherent in not moving while being shot at. This will become a common theme throughout the game. Because the nameless ne’er-do-wells have superior numbers, however, they win out. Betrayals also happen, and two nattily-attired fellows, including one clad in a goddamn orange trench coat, step out from inside an army truck.

Figure 2: Perimeter defenses.

Finally, someone speaks, and it’s none other than our boy, Kenny Coleman, leader of the “Crying Lions,” a terrorist organization from the mysterious land of “Sarcozia.” Like any foreign national villain worth his salt, Kenny demands justice for his homeland for some vague atrocities. You won’t believe this, but the Secretary of Defense is upset. Thankfully, however, a bright young man named Advisor arrives to deliver some useful exposition in a voice about as confident as mine was in tenth grade Speech. With the help of his loyal Advisor, the SoD decides that he will not negotiate with terrorists and sends for the S.C.A.T. squad. The real game begins.

Stage 0: Tutorial

Now, for me playing Winback is like riding a bike, but just for fun I decided to give the Tutorial a run through. I’m glad I did. Jean-Luc’s training is conducted by fellow S.C.A.T. squad mate Steve, the first subject in a recurring feature of the Winback Diaries, and it’s called…

Winback's Fashion Faux Pas!: Steve

"That's good, Jean-Luc. You're doing well."

S.C.A.T. headquarters must have everything but a mirror. He’s already going grey up there, so why make it worse by dressing in a disastrous grey/navy blue commando gear combo too? Steve, what were you thinking?

The tutorial at S.C.A.T. headquarters is short but effective. You will find out later that the interior decorator for S.C.A.T headquarters also designed the CSD. Steve has an annoying habit of always patting you on the back, whether you managed to silently subdue an enemy from behind or you simply managed to touch you back against the wall. “That’s good Jean-Luc. You’re doing well,” he’ll say. “That’s good Jean-Luc. You’re doing well.” When you get through all the controls and weapons you’ll be using on your mission, Steve challenges you to a boss fight. He’s pretty easy to beat.

[Incidentally, as kids Chicken Man and I wanted to pen a sequel to Winback. It was an alternate universe kind of thing, where Kenny and our hero, Jean-Luc, opened a girlie club called “Honeyz” when Jean-Luc’s career as a stand-up comic had stalled. Kenny loved the ladies and tried to help a down-on-his-luck Jean-Luc figure out what he wanted in life, besides hyphens. I’m not sure it would’ve made for a particularly thrilling game, but neither did anything Winback 2, so who knows, we may have had something brilliant.]

That’s all for this edition of The Winback Diaries. Join us next time to meet the rest of the S.C.A.T. team. Little did they know that someone in their midst had plans to sabotage the mission all along. All he needed was a stick of chewing gum...

Nobody Reviews It Better: GoldenEye (1995)

We now move into the era of Pierce Brosnan, the Bond we grew up watching. As Chicken Man intimates in his review, we came to appreciate Brosnan-Bond in GoldenEye through an inverse method: it was the N64 shooter of the same name that turned us on to the film (and, eventually, all the others in the series). That's probably not an uncommon phenomenon for our generation. Nevertheless, whatever the course of our affective relationships with the multiple texts of GoldenEye, the film is unquestionably one of the finest in the series. Indeed, if the Code Redd Net Awards and its Best Bond Movie prize were the last word on the subject, we'd have to say GoldenEye is tops.

 

 

For myself (and I imagine for a few others) GoldenEye is the movie adaption of a very popular N64 game. Though not saying much, it is probably the best movie adaption of a game ever made. Kidding aside, I find GoldenEye  to be everything a Bond film should be. If we think of James Bond as the man men want to be and women want to be with, Pierce Brosnan plays this part succinctly. I find him to be the most "charming and sophisticated secret agent" of the Bonds, as Valentin Zukovsky suggests. Unlike Moore, he is not upper-crusty, but fits well on the cover of Cigar Aficionado.

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Jean-Claude Van Damme I'm fine!"

 

His enemy well chosen: an MI6 agent, Alec Trevelyan, 006 (Skyfall seems to be trying to replicate this villain device). Trevelyan is also a personal friend; one who grew tired of serving a government that betrayed his family. He wants revenge and thought of asking Bond to join him, but accuses him of having greater loyalty to the mission than to his friends. As I've mentioned before, it interests me when Bond's servitude to the state is put into question. It would have been better had Trevelyan's plan not intended to harm so many innocents, making Bond's decision not so clear cut. Regardless, it is so much more enjoyable when the Bond villain is a respectable adversary. It is somewhat refreshing that he doesn't have some ridiculous scheme involving the destruction of Earth, but an EMP space weapon that seems plausible and reasonable in furthering his objectives. Bond is really being unfair in calling him "nothing more than a common thief."

The surrounding cast is good as well. Female villains are always interesting, especially when they have not-so-subtle names. Xenia Onatopp is one of the most vivacious of Bond chicks, along with May Day, and is as easily remembered. Boris Grishenko is a likable, though arrogant computer programmer who, like Baron Samedi, is "invincible." Quite a team, they are.

A (mostly) required element to a good Bond movie are the gadgets, and Q keeps it pretty simple with a belt containing a rappel cord (I enjoy how Bond asks about a possible contingency, considering my criticism in the past of Q's perfect foresight), a grenade pen, and a watch that can detonate mines and shoot lasers.

The final requisite is the action scenes, and I find GoldenEye to be unsurpassed in this regard. It certainly is more violent (according to my count, Bond shot more people in his escape from the Russian military archives than Connery did in whole movies), enough to make a game out of it, but this isn't what makes it good. It is the frequency and the way in which it is done. During the tank chase scene, the Bond theme music is well incorporated (something noticeably missing in previous films), especially with its dramatic flair in the crescendo with the timpani drums. Fantastic work.

It's all here. Bond seems like Bond. The villains are cool and scary. The plot is high stakes yet believable. The gadgets are practical. The action is constant. GoldenEye is what a 007 movie should be.

The World is Not Enough 100%, and more

PS1 TWINE, that is. Sure, it's nowhere near as good as its classic, award-winning N64 cousin, but it still works quite well on its own. As I noted in my review, if nothing else, I love the Russian Roulette stage. Besides, the PS1 version has to be one of the only decent first-person shooters on that system, which wasn't known for producing them beyond the Medal of Honor series. Alas, there's no multiplayer mode, so all that you get for achieving high scores on any particular level are cheats, such as All Weapons, Invisible Bond, and my favorite, Power Goons. Still, though, I have what Chicken Man once called the Curse of Completionism, and so I just had to see this one through. It was far easier than I anticipated. Missions scores are calculated in four ways: Efficiency, Accuracy, Health, and Time. Most levels are short if you know what you're doing, armor is plentiful (even on the hardest difficulty setting, 007), auto-aim makes marksmanship a breeze, and I'm still not totally sure what efficiency is supposed to imply, and I routinely had low scores in that category. If you don't dally around, always use your Wolfram P2K, and keep yourself clothed in armor, piece of cake, you'll have this one 100% in a day or so.

We certainly hope you're enjoying the current deluge of Bond coverage on Code Redd Net. In addition to the ongoing Nobody Reviews It Better series, we have an upcoming podcast on the subject, as well as our continuing interest in the forthcoming Skyfall film and the accompanying 007 Legends game. Stay tuned for more.

Our First Podcast

The Next Generation continues to expand our horizons, so to speak: Code Redd Net finally has a podcast, available through Podbean at http://crnpodcast.podbean.com. Embedded below is our first episode, subtitled Rise and Fall of the AI Bot. Fans of multiplayer shooters should be especially interested. We would love to hear your feedback on this first attempt, as well as suggested topics for future episodes. Soon the CRN Podcast should be available through the iTunes store. Until then, you can subscribe to automatically receive the latest episodes, or you can listen through the dedicated Podbean player at the bottom of this page.

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N64 Review: Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (1998)

Nostalgia is a funny thing. Now that our world is online to such a degree that before we even have time to properly reminisce about some aesthetic object from our idealized childhood (and it's always idealized, that's how nostalgia gets away with a really wonderful lie) we can already have it downloaded or streamed or shipped to us overnight. It has become a phenomenon of access, not memory. Your memories are always available, and now, and entire industries are being built upon them, they are externalizing them. Netflix isn't just a movie/TV streaming service; it's a memory bank, it's comfort in the familiar for $7.99 a month. The comforts of glossy recollections have been monetized, repackaged, and sold back to us, sometimes changed, sometimes not, and sometimes these objects are good enough to overcome their age, at least for a little while, and sometimes these objects taste like garbage, even if trussed up by years.

[Of course, we realize that Code Redd Net itself is an exercise in nostalgia, but we believe that our site goes further. Our retro black and red color scheme, unchanged since 2001, is only a surface. Though we cannot deny that we love to revisit the games and movies we grew up with, our focus continues to be in examining new media.]

I bring all this up because I want you to understand how disappointed I was in replaying Gex 64. I loved that game when I was 10. I'm not 10 anymore, and that's probably a good thing, because even though there are many fine games I loved when I was 10, games that don't seem to have aged a single day since then, this one is lame. I would be an unrepentant romantic if I said I this game had some redeeming value beyond its simple service as a conduit to remembering friends I have not seen in many years. Among its many problems, Gex 64 has some of the worst camera angles I've ever seen. It's often impossible to calculate exactly how far and in what direction to jump because the camera, which you can only modestly control or configure, obstinately refuses to budge from certain angles. Add to this the fact that the controls are sloppy and unresponsive, and you have one of the more frustrating gaming experiences on the N64, and needlessly cheap to boot. Further still, Gex himself has not aged well. His "wise cracks" are roughly as cool or trendy as your grandmother's tweets about playing bridge last weekend. And he keeps on repeating them like your youngest sibling, desperate for any kind of attention. In its favor, I will say that Gex 64 does have some variety in its level designs, some of which are quite clever, but that's all I'm giving this game credit for. It's too bad, really, but I suppose the disappointment was inevitable. Not all N64 games have aged as gracefully as GoldenEye, The World is Not Enough, or even WCW/NWO Revenge. The disappointment I feel is like a child who loses his pet hamster and only finds him later, dead, behind the refrigerator. Should I feel let down by this stupid game?

Thrasher Presents: Thrasher's Top Ten Video Games, Part Eight

Here's a look at what's gone down so far in my countdown:

Streets of Rage 2 (Genesis)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (PS1)
Thrasher Presents: Skate and Destroy (PS1)
Everything or Nothing (PS2)
Freedom Fighters (PS2)
Crazy Taxi (PS2)
NHLPA '93 (SNES)


Goldberg! Goldberg! Goldberg!

WCW/NWO Revenge (N64)

This is probably the oddest pick I've made yet. Nevertheless, Revenge represents the pinnacle of my shamefaced, lifelong love for the absurd pseudo-sport of professional wrestling. For many people, wrestling is grotesque and idiotic, but for me, it's high theatre. I find it simultaneously hilarious and intriguing, and in 1998 my fandom reached its apex. Everything coalesced in one summer, and I can still vividly recall the moment when Goldberg defeated World Heavyweight Champion "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan live on TNT. I wasn't even past my tenth birthday when that happened, but watching that video brings all those memories back to me. Revenge is the game that captures all that drama in one cartridge and, if you're like me, all those memories too. For me, there's nothing like seeing Sting rappel down from the rafters to interfere in your contest. To this day, I consider this to be one of the most enjoyable multiplayer ever made. The controls are fluid and easy to learn, and the matches are as entertaining and dramatic as many of the televised bouts. Furthermore, each wrestler feels unique but balanced. Some excel at brawling with stop signs and briefcases, while others prefer to jump from the top rope and perform all kinds of acrobatic maneuvers, but one never becomes dominant over another. In my mind, no other wrestling game can touch this one for depth and accessibility.

N64 Review: Fighting Force 64 (1999)

Regrettably, Fighting Force 64 is essentially it for post-Genesis and SNES beat-'em-ups. For whatever reason, the genre perfected by Streets of Rage 2 never quite made the jump to 3D, so FF64 is as far along as things ever got. And despite its flaws, I think FF64 is an fine, faithful, and absolutely admirable entry in the unfortunately deceased lineage of the mindless brawler. In the tradition of all beat-'em-ups, story means nothing: four renegade police officers set out to take down a gang kingpin named Dr. Zeng. Why? Who cares? is more like it. You start out the game by kicking down his office door and throwing droves of his henchmen around the shiny hallways. Why and how you move on to the other locations (such as a shopping mall, subway station, aircraft carrier) is never explained, and never needs to be. You just jam on the A and B buttons (and, for a little variety, you can add in a running kick by holding down Z or you can try grappling with C-down) until all enemies in the stage have been thoroughly smackdowned. Bonus points are dished out for destroying the stages and, in the grand tradition of Streets of Rage, health is inexplicably replenished by consuming stray subs and sodas found on the ground. Controls can be a bit sluggish at times and the game can get fairly bogged down when too many characters clog up the screen. Furthermore, FF64 is really short; with a bit of diligence, you're likely to knock it out in just under a few hours. But who really wants to play these kind of games for long? FF64 is fun precisely because by the time you start to get sick of it, the credits are rolling and you can move on to something else. But unlike many other games, you can come back to FF64 often, simply to revel in the immense madness, and especially if you have a buddy beside you for some co-op play.

N64 Review: The World is Not Enough (EA, 2000)

Following the disappointing Tomorrow Never Dies game, TWINE for N64 is a true successor to the legendary GoldenEye 007 (though many would likely disagree). Some things are better, some things are not. However, as I try to list in my mind the things that made TWINE better (AI bots in multiplayer) and features GE had that it did not (cheats, extra levels, 007 mode), I find that the list of differences between them is rather small. In both, you play as James Bond in the first person, you wield firearms, you play with gadgets, etc. They share the important things. So why is GE so often touted as the far superior game? This is my theory. At least for myself, and I'm sure for many, GE was the first FPS that I'd ever played and therefore set a standard. Going back to it gives a sense of nostalgia, which can often be powerful in shaping attitudes towards games (objectively, a game like Winback might not impress more modern players; to some of us, it is like a little bit of heaven in a disaster area). Also helping GE to attain legendary status were the crazy glitches, which gave us another reason to keep playing it. But another thing is important as well. I believe that sequence is important. The degree to which we are let down by an inferior sequel is of much greater magnitude than the excitement we would feel with a superior one. For example, I would suggest that if TWINE had been released first and GE after, the feelings of GE superiority would not be to the same degree as the disappointment some feel over TWINE. It seems we have a greater disposition towards negativity than optimism. The point: TWINE for N64 is a fine game and more people would recognize it if it weren't for GoldenEye 007's shadow.