Wave Race 64
Nintendo 64
I was 14 years old when Wave Race 64 hit the shelves. I wasn't big on racing games back then, but when my step brother rented this game from Blockbuster it looked way too cool for me to not check out. For its time, the graphics were out of this world. Water had always looked horrible in video games. Wave Race was, for me, the first game to truly get it right. That in itself was enough to really grab my attention.
We played this game off and on the whole weekend he had it. I was never very good at it (again, racing games were not my thing back then), but we had a ton of fun, both with the game's single player mode and its split screen competitive mode. When I found a used copy of Wave Race 64 for under 5 bucks about 10 years later, I decided to relive some old memories and pick it up.
I popped in Wave Race a couple of times after that, but I never really gave it much of a chance. I didn't have anyone to play it with, and the game was painfully short. Mainly it festered on my old game shelf, underplayed and for the most part unloved. Until 2018!
My last 2 reviews have been PlayStation 4 games. I wanted to mix things up and play something short for a system I hadn't hooked up in a long time. In fact, my last review for Nintendo 64 was The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask back in March of 2017. Looking at my list of Nintendo 64 games, Wave Race 64 seemed a likely candidate.
I hooked up my N64 console, threw in the game, and off I went. My first impression was that the game still looks decent for its age. Keep in mind, it is no Uncharted 4. Obviously. But it has bright colors, beautifully designed stages, and of course amazing water effects. The racers themselves are nothing to write home about. And of course when you look closer at a lot of things like the game's textures you are going to see a lot of flaws. This is a Nintendo 64 game after all.
But for its time the game was revolutionary. As I mentioned, water effects in games were almost always terrible. They were either a pixelated mess, a straight line of blue, or cartoonishly exaggerated. You pretty much never saw realistic looking water in video games. Wave Race broke the mold. Not only is the game's water very realistic looking, it acts realistic too. You are racing on the ocean in jet skis. You are going to see unpredictable wave patterns. Some big, some small. You are going to see the surface of the water get choppy when there are other racers around. You see the trails the other racers leave when they zoom by you.
Expect to see a lot of fun little touches too. Dolphins jumping in the water. Whales in the distance. There is a level set on a lake that starts out shrouded in fog, but clears up by the 3rd lap of the race. There is a course set inside a city that has a lot of fun lighting effects. In one of the stages, the tide rises as you play, giving you access to ramps that had previously been elevated too high above the water. You can tell a lot of TLC went into making the game clever and fun to look at.
Not only is it fun to look at, it is fun to play too. The physics of the game are exceptional. You hit a string of big waves, it makes your jet ski harder to control. You want to nose down and kind of knife through the waves. If you pull up or just plow forward the waves will take you and you can end up losing control and getting thrown off course.
This took me a while for me to get used to, but controlling the jet ski around turns is very realistic too. There are no brakes in this game. You want to slow down, you just let off the gas. You can't just simply hold left or right when going around a turn either. Not only is pointing the jet ski left or right important in controlling its direction, the body movements of its driver are as well. Your analog controller controls the motions of the driver on the jet ski. You see a sharp turn, you have to pull back on the analog stick to make the driver lean back and then turn the direction you want to go. Doesn't hurt to let off the gas a little bit too. You will see the racer on the screen mimic what you are doing with the controller with his or her body. Try to turn too sharply and you will go flying off the jet ski. Mastering this technique is essential to doing well in the game. It happened too many times where I was simply holding to one side without pulling back or slowing down and my jet ski wasn't responding as I thought it should. I was still racing well enough to finish first on all the courses for the game's easiest difficulty level, but I was not succeeding on the more challenging ones. Discovering this was very satisfying and rewarding for me.
Music for the game is not too memorable. I like the opening theme and I enjoy the little jingle during the introduction for each race course. But nothing here really stands out to me. There is an announcer that shouts out comments every once in a great while, but I kinda tuned him out. All in all, it has a bit of a cheesy feel like an 80's arcade game with its music. I am not complaining though. In a way it is charming.
Overall that is sort of how the game comes across to me. A fast paced, high octane arcade game. The game is very short and there is not a whole lot of replay value to be found here. There are 3 difficulty levels, and a maximum of 8 courses to discover. You can unlock and see them all in one play through. There are things like Time Trial and a few other methods available, but I didn't bother with those. As mentioned, there is a 2 player mode as well. Sucks that it does not take advantage of the N64's 4 player capability, but I suppose things would have been hard to see split off into 4 little windows on 1990's TV sets. And it is not like I have 3 other people to play with anyway.
When I first started up Wave Race last night, the game didn't impress me too much and I thought I'd be over and done with it in an hour and give it something like a C rating. But the more I played it, the more it impressed me. Not only with its physics but its difficulty level as well. Expert mode is very challenging (equivalent to 150 CCs on Mario Kart) and I just kept grinding and grinding to get through it. This is a very fun game, and not as shallow (pardon the obvious pun) as I initially thought. It is not a classic like Mario Kart, and I still am not that big on racing so it won't go down as an all time N64 great in my books. But it is a fun game and I am glad I own it. It brings some fun memories with it as well.
Overall:
B
If you liked this review, you should check out my reviews for:
Apparently I need to play more racing or water based games!
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