One of the most consistent ways to be in awe of a game's visuals is whenever it has fantastic looking water. Wave Race 64 has gorgeous water for 1996, a true testament to it's excellence since I'm generally not a fan of the N64's muddy visuals. If TVs had smell-o-vision you could probably smell the briny sea, that's how realistic it looked back in the day.
In addition to the amazing visuals, the game also features one of my favorite soundtracks on the system. I'm a complete sucker for any OST that has one main theme and proceeds to use variants of it all throughout. It never fails to put me in a relaxing mood, even if I do personally hate the beach.
I'll tell what isn't relaxing though, and that's this game's CPU that begins to get annoying in hard mode and becomes horrendous in expert. I've had a bunch of races where I felt like I raced perfectly as best I could only for the asshole in first to still be at least two seconds ahead of me. I really don't want to get started on how punishing it is to be knocked off your jetski, meanwhile it feels like it takes a freight train to knock off the CPU. There's also a really fucked up difficulty curve in the courses, Marine Fortress and Port Blue are fucking awful to race on when you haven't mastered the game, but the last few tracks like Twilight City and Southern Island are absolute cake in comparison. I guess you could say this is a plus, since you can get those tracks out of the way quicker, but we could be here all day debating about whether hard tracks should be at the end or smack dab in the middle of the season.
You wanna know what else isn't relaxing? When I originally was gonna recommend trying this out on the Switch's N64 app, only to find out it isn't on it! Why is it not there?! This game is like prime launch day material. You can't even tell me it's because of the Kawasaki sponsorship, because they already made a version with that shit edited out in the Wii VC release. I hope you still have your Wii U hooked up maybe and grab it prior to the 2023 shutdown of it's VC, or you're just gonna have to wait for Nintendo to decide to release it on Switch in 2024 to a chorus of boos on Twitter from people who were wanting Banjo-Tooie or something.
8/16 Update: Happy wave racing ya'll!
In addition to the amazing visuals, the game also features one of my favorite soundtracks on the system. I'm a complete sucker for any OST that has one main theme and proceeds to use variants of it all throughout. It never fails to put me in a relaxing mood, even if I do personally hate the beach.
I'll tell what isn't relaxing though, and that's this game's CPU that begins to get annoying in hard mode and becomes horrendous in expert. I've had a bunch of races where I felt like I raced perfectly as best I could only for the asshole in first to still be at least two seconds ahead of me. I really don't want to get started on how punishing it is to be knocked off your jetski, meanwhile it feels like it takes a freight train to knock off the CPU. There's also a really fucked up difficulty curve in the courses, Marine Fortress and Port Blue are fucking awful to race on when you haven't mastered the game, but the last few tracks like Twilight City and Southern Island are absolute cake in comparison. I guess you could say this is a plus, since you can get those tracks out of the way quicker, but we could be here all day debating about whether hard tracks should be at the end or smack dab in the middle of the season.
You wanna know what else isn't relaxing? When I originally was gonna recommend trying this out on the Switch's N64 app, only to find out it isn't on it! Why is it not there?! This game is like prime launch day material. You can't even tell me it's because of the Kawasaki sponsorship, because they already made a version with that shit edited out in the Wii VC release. I hope you still have your Wii U hooked up maybe and grab it prior to the 2023 shutdown of it's VC, or you're just gonna have to wait for Nintendo to decide to release it on Switch in 2024 to a chorus of boos on Twitter from people who were wanting Banjo-Tooie or something.
8/16 Update: Happy wave racing ya'll!
1 Comment
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LarryDavis
2 years ago
You ALMOST had it!!