Generic Game Title 64 (Quest 64 Review)

Every so often, games come along that stick with you for years after playing them.  I still remember stomping and smashing my way through Blast Corps on the Nintendo 64, getting carsick from playing RC Pro AM on the NES in my dad's Suburban, watching my older brother destroy the 49ers in Tecmo Super Bowl.  Those of us in our twenties are the first generation to have grown up with home entertainment consoles.  That's a strange thought that, I believe, is all too often taken for granted.  The gaming industry has grown up with us, from the infantile NES, to the adolescent Nintendo 64, to the gawky, awkward Gamecube, and now the college-aged, sleek, modern Nintendo Wii.  Yep, our generation can be summed up by the Nintendo company.  Each console became a stage in life, and each game a particular memory within that stage.  Some people remember falling off their bikes and breaking their arms in the third grade.  I remember the first time I played Star Fox.  It's about as lame as it sounds, but there you are.  For better or worse, we have a generation of Americans with shared memories.  There.  That makes it sound at least a little cooler.  Like a twisted sci-fi thriller starring Keanu Reeves or... something...  Aaaaaand it's lame again.  Crap.

Not all of those memories were good, mind you, and the Nintendo 64 in particular seemed to excel at creating moments of my life which I'd rather forget.  The N64, mind you, was Nintendo's first major foray into the wide world of 3D.  Super Mario 64 led the charge, which boded well for the system, but things didn't go so smoothly after that.  I mentioned Blast Corps above for a reason.  It looked like fun - I mean, what young boy doesn't want a videogame in which your sole objective is to destroy buildings so that a runaway nuke-carrying truck doesn't run into something and blow up the world? - but it was so utterly pointless.  When you beat the game (on the moon, mind you), the nuke goes off anyway.  You put in all that work just to fail.  Sure, you could argue that at least it didn't blow up on the Earth, but you'd just be kidding yourself.  You failed.  The game-makers are laughing at you.

Similarly, the makers of Superman 64 must be laughing somewhere.  I'd swear there's a special place in Hell just for them.  If you've never played it, and I hope you haven't, then check out SeanBaby's review here.  Be warned: he has a potty mouth, though no amount of foul language can compare to the stink that was that game.

But possibly the most vivid memory I have of checking out a game that utterly sucked was the potentially-awesome Quest 64.  You play as a young mage named Brian with mastery over the four elements - earth, water, wind, fire.  The old master of the magical monestary begins the game by speaking to you about your father's disappearance; so, naturally, you must go out in search of him.  What begins, then, is one of the strangest and most potentially frustrating experiences of your life.

The glimmering metropolis.

To be fair, I can't say that I ever read the instruction booklet.  Only morons did that (side note: nowadays, I always read instruction booklets, at least for interesting things like games).  Regardless, the game offers approximately zero help on how to play, leaving you to devlop your own sense of the combat system... once you spend fifteen to twenty minutes just making your way out of the monestary.  You descend multiple staircases and scamper through countless hallways with equally countless doors - all leading to utterly pointless tiny rooms that 95% of the time don't even have a person inside, let alone a helpful treasure chest - before finally blinding yourself in the afternoon sun.  Then, you spend another fifteen to twenty minutes figuring out how to get down from the hill upon which sits your monestary before running through a town as utterly pointless as all those rooms from before, and then, finally, you are out in the open.  Check out this video of a Speed Demon beginning the game.  Even the fastest player out there still takes a solid four-and-a-half just to get out of town.

UFC totally stole this octagon idea.

Within two seconds, you enter combat with a pair of bunnies.  Combat takes place inside a magical octagon.  Each character - Brian, Bunny 1, Bunny 2 - acts individually within a small circle of available movement.  Each of the N64's yellow C buttons corresponds to one of the four elements of magic, and you can call upon any of them to aid you in battle.  The problem here is that they all start at level 0, and without any kind of guide on how to play the game, and the fact that I could never figure out how to use the stupid things, I took all of this to mean that you did not yet have any of those abilities, so I spent a good three turns just getting my guy close enough to said rabbits to smack them with my feeble cane while they pelted me from afar with wind magic.  By the time I won, I was already half-dead, and these bunnies were the most basic enemies in the game.  I took a few steps in retreat to heal myself at the inn, but before I could even go that far, a trio of wolves found me, and I was dead within a turn.

Welcome to Quest 64.

I recently reacquired this game at the local non-GameStop game store that specializes in games and consoles older than the cast of High School Musical.  I was determined to see if Quest 64 was still as legendarily bad as I recall, or if I was just being a retarded youngster who couldn't even figure out the basics of the game.  Well, I'm pleased to report that it's just about as mystifying as it was back then.  I did discover that you can use your elemental magic from the get-go, but the way you use the magic is anything but intuitive.  And, even when you use said magic, you can miss, or it doesn't do a lot of damage.  I was able to get further down the road this time, but the encounters are so damn frequent that I still had to turn back around and rest at the inn a number of times before I finially made my way to the next spot.

This is one suck game.

I understand that it wasn't poorly received back in the day.  I'll allow that the graphics weren't the worst to escape 1998, but they certainly haven't aged well.  The combat was interesting in theory, but then, so is Communism.  The story is nonexistent, and the setting is so generic that the world's actually called Celtland.  There are probably guys out there who loved this game as a child for whatever mysterious reason, and honestly that's okay.  I myself profess a love of Dynasty Warriors that I cannot sufficiently explain.  But for me, the memory of this game is about as painful as the memory I have of the time I sprained the arches of both of my feet at the same time while leaping into a swimming pool and quite suddenly finding a hidden underwater shelf.  Much like the thought of that ill-fated jump, the idea of this game just makes my muscles tense.  If you find yourself inside a use-game store, as you should if you fancy yourself a true connoisseur of games, avoid this one.  Save yourself the pain.