Dear Natalya: Nobody Likes You

Seriously, nobody at all. You are not just an encumbrance, you are a hindrance to fun. Obviously, you were a pain in GoldenEye 007 for N64, but you really didn't add much to the movie either. I mean, the movie had so many characters with Trevelyan, Boris, and Xenia, so what did you really add to it? You're just some boring Russian girl, and you weren't actually Russian because you were played by a Polish woman. You're a Bond girl, but you aren't that hot. You are like a frumpier Scully from the X-Files. Maybe you were a good role model to geeky girls that are into computers, which is rare for a Bond film, but you were probably also a role model to bitchy women.

Blast Corps: Not A Crappy Metal Subgenre

It's strange. I had remembered playing Blast Corps back when the N64 was new, but I didn't remember anything about it other than it was about breaking stuff. As it turns out, that was pretty much the whole game. It is one of Rare's earlier N64 titles, and it was mainly made by a small group of young developers in the company. It wasn't a launch title, but it came out early enough in the system's life cycle that it was probably played by most people simple because they were looking for games to play on it. It is a decent game, considering the situation, but it's not a brilliant game either.

I'd Rather Not Go Down To South Park

A lot of times I don't know why I own the games I write about, but I can probably guess accurately as to why I own South Park for the Nintendo 64. Seeing as it was released right around my twelfth birthday, I would say I own it because I was twelve, and obviously that meant I thought South Park was cool because it was a cartoon about kids that used naughty words. The joke was on me though, because Iguana Entertainment, known best for making the Turok series and some terrible WWF games, made this game, and it is basically a Turok game with a South Park skin. I never liked Turok. No, it wasn't just “like Turok,” if Wikipedia is to be believed it actually ran on the same engine as Turok 2, which came out the same month.

Hybrid Heaven: A Perplexing Paradise

I recently purchased Hybrid Heaven from my local used game store because I remember renting the game years ago and thinking it was cool then. Of course, I didn't remember anything about the game itself, and after playing the game again today, I think that was because the game is so goddamn weird. Normally I would write something like “Hybrid Heaven is 1999 *insert genre here* game from Konami,” but I don't know what genre I could put this game into. Wikipedia marks it as an Action RPG, but I don't think that really describes it accurately. The game is just so many different things that I don't know where to begin.