1080 Avalanche is my favorite snowboard game.
The problem with this game is the main mode, Match Race, wish allows you to finish it without having learned how to play correctly and so without being able to appreciate its qualities (the three first series of races can be completed in one hour by somebody discovering the game, the fourth series of races is more difficult but is just a shameful mirror mode).
There’s a slalom mode to begin with, it’s fun and learns you one of the many roads of each course.
Then by collecting the five medals on each track in Time Trial, we continue to explore the tracks.
Then the TT mode itself is the heart of the game, cause there is the big quality of Avalanche : it’s a good racing game, wich means great mecanics and good feeling and progress when understood.
The big idea here is that the snowboarder run faster in the air. Combined with the great level design of the twelve tracks, it opens many strategies and chalenges to link the good jumps (and good landing), fasting the pace of the run.
The original 1080 is more focus on the handling (famous for that), good style but limited in all of the other departments. Avalanche is a more complete game, greatly well done, except the main mode… They should have set a difficulty selection like in Mario Kart or F-Zero.
By the way my top 3D racing Nintendo games:
1 - F-Zero X
2 - Wave Race 64 and Mariokart 64
3 - 1080 Avalanche
4 - 1080, F-Zero GX and Mario Kart Double Dash
5 - Wave Race Blue Storm (good concept but it lacks polish).
Yeah, Time Trial mode is brilliant, I remember staying up many late nights glued to the game because of it. I haven’t played it in about 15 years, really feel like revisiting it now!
From what I remember Time Trial mode is a bit like the Silver Coin challenges in Diddy Kong Racing, you have to collect coins on your way to the goal, which, best times aside, makes you approach each course in a different way.
Also the game does a really good job at communicating speed to the player via screen shaking. Hard to explain in words but it’s pretty convincing, and it’s also used to great effect during the avalanche sequences.
It’s awful on Dolphin? I played it on Dolphin and it played very well for me with some performance dips here and there but still fully playable.
Now for a game that plays awful on Dolphin, that’s easily Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3 Rebel Strike, that game never runs great because it’s too hard to emulate.
Dips just happen due to the nature of emulation, though if the PC isn’t strong enough that causes more dips. As for crashing, well, the game didn’t crash on me yet and I been playing it a lot recently.
I’m on integrated Intel graphics, already using Asynchronous Uber (and all other defaults, tooltip recommended settings) but am yet to try DX11. Will report back.
Finally beat this boss on my Normal playthrough, you have to be pretty observant at locating the weak blob, which when destroyed, causes a chain reaction that destroys neighbouring blobs. Otherwise it keeps regenerating health faster than you can destroy its individual parts.
Finished the game! The final act was really inventive, loved some of the smaller boss fights. The air carrier section in the middle of the game is probably my least favourite part but the whole thing is just the perfect length such that I’m happy to keep replaying it. As clever and slick as its sequel is it could have done with some editing, it’s just too long to demand constant replays of anything but individual stages.
Treasure nailed the continues system in this game as well. Having to earn extra credits by staying alive long enough to chain together enough hits is a great idea that rewards progression while simultaneously giving you enough attempts at boss fights. One day I’ll 1’cc the whole thing.
Speaking of N64 music that stands out, I spent most of a rainy Sunday playing Mystical Ninja 2 Starring Goemon and I managed to get past where I was stuck on my PAL copy. The soundtrack in general still floors me though, there’s one particular town’s music that I really like…I’ll post it in the soundtrack thread though.
I played Elmo’s Letter Adventure with my 2yo boy today and that sparked his excitement for a good 5 minutes lol. I’d maneuver around with one hand and he’d push the button whenever we found the right letter. Pretty fun actually while he was interested. I beat the game about ten minutes later. So hey, if you’re looking for a short game…very rewarding (not) haha.
And for some reason, Grover’s outer-space level has a reasonably solid FPS while Big Bird’s farm and Bert’s underwater levels are super unstable and crawl along at times for no discernable reason.
Then I popped in Robotron 64 and got to level 69 before my attention was needed elsewhere. Awesome game.
Ooh Bangai-O! Looking forward to reading your impressions of it. I loved the DS game, the XBLA one not so much, but an N64 cart goes for a lot nowadays. If it’s really good I’ll take the plunge when funds permit - I’m also interested in just seeing the game in action on real hardware.
I finally got round to trying composite. I tried my PAL N64 with the official Nintendo composite cable and was quite impressed by the overall image, I think the PAL console is outputting a higher number of horizontal lines (288p) because the image is a lot softer.
However, when I tried my NTSC-J console I was even more blown away - the image was often indistinguishable from my Hori S-Video cable, I put it up there with my PC Engine.
I’ll need to post some proper shots but does anyone know why this is? Is it PAL vs NTSC lines output (i.e. 240p matches the rendering resolution, 288p doesn’t?) or did some N64s have better composite video output than others? Or both?
Some quick shots from my NTSC-J console via composite:
