Ep 1: X-treme Racing (N64)

The podcast "Replay Retro Rank" features the hosts Dan Stanley and Griffin playing and discussing retro games from their childhood. In this episode, they discuss three games: Wave Race 64, 1080 Snowboarding, and Excitebike 64. These games were all released exclusively on the Nintendo 64 and share a similar genre of extreme racing. Dan and Griffin share their personal experiences with the games and discuss their pros and cons. They also talk about the nostalgia they have for these games and how they compare to each other. Overall, the hosts enjoy playing these games and find them enjoyable, especially Wave Race 64, which holds a special place in their childhood memories. ୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧୧ Welcome to Replay Retro Rank, a podcast where myself and a close friend play a few retro games from our childhood. We discuss our personal nostalgia, the pros and cons of each game, and rank them accordingly. I'm your host, Dan Stanley, and joining me for this round is my good friend Griffin. Griffin, what are we ranking today? Today we're ranking three games. Wave Race 64, 1080 Snowboarding, and Excitebike 64. All three of these games were exclusively released on Nintendo 64. Wave Race was released in North America on November 4th, 1996, 1080 on April 1st, 1998, and Excitebike May 2nd, 2000. The reason I chose these games is because they all share a similar genre of extreme racing. Griffin, what do you think? How do you feel about these three games that I chose and their grouping? I think they work well together. I only have experience from my childhood with one of them, but yeah, they're cohesive thematically. They're all kind of extreme sportsy. I don't know, I didn't really know that wave racing was a sport that anyone paid attention to, people racing on wave runners. I guess it makes sense. It seems kind of extreme, especially when you play the game. But yeah, they work well together as a unit of three. I think that they can be compared purposefully. All right. So you say you only played one of them as a kid. So me and my brother had Wave Race 64 as one of the first games that we got for our N64. And I guess the year that we got the N64 would have been, I don't know. What year would that have been? When did that come out? Came out in September of 96. 96. Okay. So I would have been four years, wow, really four years old when 64 came out. So that was in the first collection of games that we got for the 64. And the other ones that we had at the time were Turok and, God, I can't even remember. I think we might have just had, we might have really just had Turok and Wave Racer. This is the only ones I could have ever made up. In a lot of respects, this game couldn't be any more different. I definitely remember being more excited by Turok as a four or five-year-old just because thematically, I don't know, imagine being a four or five-year-old boy looking at the box for Turok and then looking at the box for Wave Racer. One of them is clearly more exciting. But I will say that Wave Racer in the long run, I just said a Wave Racer. God, it's called Wave Racer. I will say Wave Racer 64. Wave Racer 64 in the long run proved to be more enjoyable than I was prepared to give it credit for when I was a kid. It's a surprisingly good game. Very different from Turok, but I don't know, it has its own virtues. Yeah. So me and my family, we're always late for everything. And I think I got the Nintendo 64 Christmas 97, like a year and three months after then 64 was already released. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure that Wave Racer 64... It's called Wave Racer. It's called Wave Racer 64. Wave Racer was a packing game for us. Packing game. I'm not positive about that. What does that mean? Like it came, like we bought a Nintendo 64 and it came... Oh, it came like a game or two? Yeah. Because we didn't have Super Mario 64. Sure. Which was what I think was the natural packing game, especially for September 96. Sure. Which might suggest that the people behind the scenes even thought that Wave Racer was a shit game because they're not going to be able to sell it as a singular purchase. So they have to include it. Well, I'm trying to figure out why me and my brother even had it. I can't figure it out. Well, I thought that you guys grew up on Wave Runner. We did. Yeah, we had it when we were kids and we played the shit out of it. But I don't know why, like we wouldn't have bought, like me and Russ, my brother Russ, would not have gone to the store seeing Wave Racer 64 and been like, this is the game. Yeah. I have no memory of me and my brother running up to my mom excitedly telling her, you have to buy us Wave Racer 64. This is the coolest thing. Right now to be five years old is to just want to race on Wave Runners. Yeah. So I don't, I feel like it had to have been a packing game. Otherwise, I don't know why we would own it. Yeah. But I will say, I also have a lot of nostalgia for 1080. Yeah. Because I remember shortly after we got the N64, which was released in April of 98. Yeah. That's like four months after we had it. I do think that me and Russ would have been into snowboarding. So I think we actually went to the store, saw a 1080, saw that sick cover, which I'm going to show to you right now. Yeah, it's sick. Really, it looks cool. Yeah. They're doing a trick. Yeah. If a snowboarder doing a trick, it's a snowboarder. Yeah. So I think that might have been, you know, one of the first games that we got. I remember playing it a lot as a kid. I think me and Russ had a lot of fun with that one. And as far as Excitebike goes, Excitebike 64, I should say, because there was an Excitebike for Nintendo. Yeah. And a lot of people swear by that game. Okay. You mean Super Nintendo? No, I mean Nintendo Entertainment System. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Very old school. Yes. I don't know if there was an Excitebike on Super Nintendo, but yeah, I have no nostalgia for Excitebike 64. I felt like I was playing it for the first time tonight. Yeah, I think it very well may have been the case that I played Excitebike 64 for the first time tonight. I have no memory of playing it before that. Yeah. 1080 snowboarding, I know that I played at some point many years ago. But if you just tonight threw me in a dark room and said, I'm not going to give you any food or water until you can name 10 N64 games for me, Wave Race 64 would have been one that I could name. But yeah, there's no amount of hours that I could spend in this dark, depraved room before I'd be able to name 1080 snowboarding and Excitebike 64. Excitebike 64, I don't remember really at all. Really at all. 1080 snowboarding for me was one of those games that I played at the houses of friends at least a handful of times. I have some memory of it. I played it tonight with you and it was somewhere in my head, there was a memory of this game and a little bit of it came back to me. Definitely not in terms of the controls. I was just as helpless tonight playing that game as I've been playing virtually any video game for most of my life. But yeah, Excitebike was not on my radar at all. All right, Griffin, do you want to read to us what Wave Race 64 is, what it tells us on the back of the box? Sure. Here's what Wave Race 64 has to say about itself. Wave Race 64 from Kawasaki Jet Ski. Wave Race 64 is sure to provide some of the most exciting racing you've ever experienced. Feel the pounding and crashing of the waves as you accelerate into straightaways. Whip around the marker buoys and go airborne on the jump ramps. Don't race alone. Challenge a friend. Nine challenging courses set in exotic locales. Race conditions change and the wave action responds to the way that you and your opponent race. Take control in three different modes of play. Championship, time trials, and stunt mode. 1080 snowboarding. You're taking a Tahoe 155 snowboard down a steep, bumpy incline at night, and you're about to top off an Indy Nosebone with a 360 air. And you haven't even left your living room. You're playing 1080 snowboarding. A game so intense you'll be brushing off your goggles with five different boarders, more than 25 tricks, a half pipe, and six different courses. That's how that sentence ends. And six different courses. This is as close as you'll get to the real thing without hopping off the next ski lift. Excitebike 64. Experience extreme MX. You grind your way through the hairpin turn, a wall of mud exploding in your wake. Your next jump launches you into the air. You pull out a spectacular double no-footed can-can and can-can? Can-can? And become an instant legend. Become an instant legend in Excitebike 64. You'll find all the high-flying action, heart-stopping stunts, and bone-jarring crashes of the extreme sport of motocross. It'll set the daredevil inside you free. All right, moving on to the pros and cons. We'll start with the pros of each game, okay? What were the pros of Wave Racer 64? Okay, so things that I like about... Did you just say Wave Racer? I did say Wave Racer again. Okay, things I like about Wave Racer 64. I know this is going to be contentious because it's going to come up at other places in our conversation, but the music I actually find enjoyable. It's very relaxing. I mean, it's got a kind of elevator music vibe, but it's nice because it's a pretty stressful game. When you're out there on the waves and you're getting beat up by the water and trying to stay afloat and move, you know, pretty... pretty cleanly between those different buoy markers, having the music be as calming as it is is a bit of an advantage. It's soothing in a way that the other two games don't really give you. For me, I don't know if I would consider that a pro or a con. Yeah, fair enough. I mean, I can only speak subjectively here. It might be a little bit hard for me to disentangle like a really objective perspective on the pros of this game from the nostalgia that it has for me because this was one of the first games that we had. So playing it tonight felt good and fun in a way that only a game like Wave Race could for me. And that might not have so much to do with the fact that it's like a genuinely greatly made game as it does with the fact that I just have these nice memories of it. I mean, I've never really been a very good video game player, and so a lot of my memories of Wave Race are in fact of the character being knocked off of the Wave Runner mid-race. And that happened to me a solid number of times this evening. So that was a bit of its own kind of nostalgic release for me. I think, I don't know, the mechanics of the game are nice. I think that whoever developed this game must have spent a good amount of time on just making the water look as good as it does. This was released... I was going to say, for me, the first pro when I think about this game... Graphics. It has to be the graphics and the water. Yeah. Well, the game is released in 96, which is pretty shortly after 64 is brought to the public in the first place. So for the graphics to have been... I mean, I'm an artist myself. I'm an artist. Rendering water in basically any medium is a bit of a challenge, but I imagine that rendering water with whatever software, development software was available in 1996 was a challenge beyond what we can really appreciate now in 2024. But they were able to do a good job with it. And yes, I don't know. I can appreciate that. The characters bobbing up and down in the waves. There's something surprisingly natural about it, yeah, given how long ago it was released. So I guess I'd count that as a pro. It has to be. It has to be a pro. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm not going to call it a con. No, no. I mean, we're looking back on these games, not so much what we see today. Yeah. But this was a huge step forward in its time. Yeah. And the water is unforgettable in this game. I'm not going to forget it, at least until tomorrow morning. But something that I also want to bring up with Wave Race 64, which I almost consider both a pro and a con, is the handling. So there's four characters you can choose from. You kind of have two generic male characters who are normal weight. And... Careful here. They both handle okay. And then you have a chubby fella that has a frog on his helmet. And his handling is terrible. Yeah. But I think that his top speed is higher. Yeah. And then you have a female chick whose handling is amazing. Yeah. Like you... She's far and away the best character, I think. Well, yeah. Especially because in this game, you have to bob and weave throughout buoys while you're racing. Was that boobies or buoys? Buoys? Yeah, buoys. Buoys. Is there a B in there? Are you saying boobies? Am I the kid from Goonies? Is that what we're... Buoys. Yeah, buoys. Buoys. I have headphones on. Are you saying boobies? You're saying buoys. I'm saying buoys. Yeah, buoys float in the water. Yeah. So you gotta weave in between these boobies. And the chick can do that the best. Yeah, yeah. So that's a pro. The handling that they were able to make on this great graphic water with the chick, it feels great. It feels really good to do. Well, I mean, I'll add to that. I think it's a pro that you have the ability to customize the kind of stat characteristics for your character. So I mean, there's a pretty solid range of different stats for the racers. So handling can either be really great or it can be really bad. But they made the characters such that you can customize it in a pretty in-depth way. So characters like the token chick, very solid handling. Characters like what Dan described as the chubby fella, pretty poor handling. But hopefully he makes up for it in some other regards. I think that he has more of a turbo boost. There are some other attributes that maybe compensate. All right, moving on to 1080. I feel like there's a lot of pros with this one. Give us one. First off, I feel like the graphics are just as good in this game. Maybe not as good, but they're just good enough. Well, I hope that they're better. The game came out later. It did, but I feel like they spent less time on the graphics and making them just good enough where as I'm going down a slope, I feel like everything around me feels like the environment I should be in when I'm snowboarding. They're not quite as good as those Wave Race 64 graphics, but they're good. Yeah, I think you're right. It may well not have been as complicated of a game to make in the graphics rendering. One thing that I can say about pros for 1080, a lot of games of this genre, like racing games, like a game where you're going down a cliff on a snowboard, for example, you want to be able to see what's coming. You want to be able to see what's around the corner. You want to be able to look ahead of you and see where you want to go. A lot of games similar to this, like other racing games, are so disorienting to me in terms of the graphics that I'm constantly running into walls and making all kinds of mistakes because it's just hard for my eyes to focus on what's coming. And I feel like in this game, you actually can successfully kind of look off into the distance and see where you're headed and make a decision. Am I going to go right? Am I going to go left? Because there's, I don't know, the way that the course, like the race course presents to you as you're going down it, I don't know. It's hard to describe without seeing it, but it's clean. I don't know. It's kind of intuitive and it makes sense in a way that actually makes completing the race a lot easier than some other games. The other game that I'm, I mean, I'm thinking of other racing games, like even like Mario Kart doesn't necessarily do a great job at this all the time. Yeah, I would agree with that. Another pro I feel is the controls of this game. They kind of came intuitively compared to, if I had to compare the controls of all three of these games, for 1080, the controls felt like they flowed. They blew. They blew? They blowed? No, I feel like they flowed. Oh, I thought you said they blowed. No. I was about to get into an argument with you about the past tense of blow. No, they flowed. Like I felt like I just picked up the controller and I knew how to play 1080 racing. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with you. It was uncomplicated, but uncomplicated in a way that didn't make it boring. It was still fun. Exactly, but at the same time, even though the controls were easy to figure out, I feel like there was a lot to this game. Yeah. Like we could, I feel personally, like we could have spent the most time on 1080. Yeah, yeah, I think so too. And probably a good portion of the why for that is because there's this whole unexplored realm of tricks, which is not so much an important feature when you're just racing, but there is a way to play the game which is very heavily focused on just maximizing trick points. And it's, to be fair, that's just a solo style of gameplay. But that is an element of the game that you can incorporate into racing, which is, yeah, I mean, you don't need to go deep into it. You can just enjoy the game as a racing game, but it is fun. Yeah. Another pro that I felt was the character stats felt different and it felt like you could feel them. Whereas like Wave Racer, Wave Racer again. Okay, it's just me. I don't care. 1080, it felt like every character was unique. Yeah, totally. I mean, I spent the entire time this evening just playing as a fairly brittle Japanese girl, but I felt like, I don't know, her ethos really connected with me and she was pretty lithe. She was pretty alert. She was pretty, she had good handling. I liked everything she had to say, which was very little. I don't know. It resonated with me. Something about her really, really touched me. All right. Do you have any pros for Excitebike 64? Pros for Excitebike 64? Yeah, definitely. Excitebike 64 stuck out to me. So this is a game that I had never played as a kid, at least not in my memory, but markedly better graphics, which makes sense because it came out later. It felt more, so different from the other two games in the sense that you and I could play together, but with two CP players. So it felt more like a race. It felt like the stakes were higher, at least, maybe I'm wrong about that. I don't think that the other games had that ability, that we could play with each other and play with CPUs at the same time. Maybe I'm wrong. No, you're correct. Okay, so Excitebike is the only one. Yes. Yeah, so that was fun. That was my biggest pro of the game. Yeah, so it felt like the stakes were higher. I don't know. There was more variation on the track. So like, for example, in 1080, it's just two people zooming down a hill on a piece of wood and you encounter some walls. You encounter some trenchy, deep snow. You encounter some ice. But on Excitebike, it's more lots of turns, lots of hills, lots of track elements that you have to navigate. It made it more, I don't know. Ah, if I had to come up with a pro for this game, there wouldn't be one. You really hated Excitebike, didn't you? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what it was about it. I hear everything you're saying. I can't think of a pro for this game. Wow. And it might just be because I have zero nostalgia for it. Yeah, well, so do I. It might be because you beat me 90% of the time of this game. I'm leaning towards that. I don't know what it was. I felt like the handling, well, you know, should we just move into the cons? Yeah, yeah, we can just move into cons and ping pong back to Wayrunner. Okay, well, then if I'm going to start with the cons for Excitebike, it just felt like the controls were off. No matter what character's handling I used, I was running into walls. Okay, well, to be fair, we only used two characters. You used Jim, Jim, with Jim. Jumpin' Jim Rivers. Jumpin' Jim Rivers and Big Bobby Tony. Big Dog Malone. Big Dog Malone, yeah. Yeah, that was primarily the two characters we used. Big Dog Malone was supposed to go fast, and Jumpin' Jim Rivers was supposed to have equal balance handling. Yet, I felt like both were just as fast, and I felt like both ran in walls just as easy, and I had zero fun time controlling either of them. Yeah, see, I'm prepared to say that that was very much a you problem. Jumpin' Jim Rivers was a cakewalk for me. Something about Jumpin' Jim Rivers gave me the confidence that I needed to, I don't know, I had a lot of fun with this game. I'm surprised that you dislike it as much as you do. I thought that the handling was pretty good. I thought that this game was a lot more easy to connect with than 1080 and Wave Race. Wave Race, 64. Yeah, 64. Okay, that's fair. Different opinions. No, I think I'd like to end this podcast with us having the same opinion, so I want to spend the rest of this hour just convincing you that I'm right about this. All right, then tell me more pros. Tell me something else that would be a pro, and then I'll rebuttal it with a con for Excitebike. Why did I feel like I was a Power Ranger? It felt like you were a Power Ranger. Yeah, everything felt choppy. My character, I felt like I was a Power Ranger on a bike that crashed into walls. Well, I will say this. Another thing that 1080 and Wave Race also did not have that Excitebike did have, so in Excitebike, you have to carefully navigate this in-between space where you are going fast, so you're engaging the turbo, but you're not engaging turbo so heavily that you're crossing over into this overheated, slowed down, inhibited space. You know what I mean? You could press turbo too much to the point that you get a little bit screwed over because then you slow down and you can't power through the turns as easily. I like that there's more of a challenge. Moment by moment as you're playing the game, you have to be more aware of how fast you're going, of how fast you're making turns. In Wave Race and in 1080, it's like you're just going. You're just going through the course, and you're pressing one button, and that's it. You hold it down, and you're powering through the entire time. With Excitebike, you had to pay more attention to, I don't know, to the moment, to how fast you're going, to how hard you're hitting the jumps, to how quickly you're going through the turns. I don't know. I felt like it was more complex in a way that was enjoyable. Yeah, you're right. There definitely was more complex controls, especially compared to Wave Race. If I were to move into a con of Wave Race, that would be its controls. It was you press A to go, and that was about it. There was very little meat on the bones for that game. I like pressing A as much as the next guy, but it does get old after a while. There are ways to do tricks. I know that there are ways to do tricks. I know that you can hit those jumps and get something cool out of it, but it was not at all obvious how to do so, and there was no ... Just starting the game and making your way through the start screen to the actual race, there is no indication. There's no screen which tells you how to use the controls effectively. There's no way to learn how to actually play the game unless you have, I don't know, fucking the internet probably. You could just look this shit up, but I don't know. We didn't. Yeah. How are you looking it up when you're a kid, though? That's true. Yeah, you have to look in the manual. Kids today that are trying to play Wave Race, they're screwed. Yeah. Now they have the internet. Oh, yeah. That's true. We still have the internet now. When you're a kid, you have the manual, but like we had mentioned earlier in private, you buy an N64 game. You get that cardboard box with the manual. You pull the cartridge out of that box. Then you throw that box in the manual far away from you that you can imagine. Trash now. It's trash. Yeah. Never see it ever again. Yeah. You know what kids have, though? Time. Kids have time. Yeah, yeah, patience. So they learn the controls just by playing. That's how many you learned as kids. Yeah. Yeah, but ultimately, Wave Race 64 lacked controls. There wasn't much there. Yeah. Now, you had mentioned at some point, and this may just be utterly conspiratorial, but it seems like the voice of the announcer for Wave Race 64 was identical to the voice of the announcer for Excitebike. Yes, yes. The same guy. Yeah. That might be the same guy. Maybe it's not. I think it was. It probably is. So in Excitebike, you had Jumpin' Jim Rivers in third place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do they do in Wave Race? Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, equal parts kind of inspiring and congratulatory and also depressing and kind of insulting. Yeah. Yeah, depending on how you're doing. He was a dick, if I'm being honest. You felt condescending. Yeah. Yeah. But both voices had this kind of light reverb, short, small room echo effect. I don't know. I think it was the same guy. I agree with that. I also think it was the same guy, but I felt like I liked him less in Excitebike. I don't know what it was about that game, but his voice bugged me more in Excitebike. Even though Wave Race 64, I'll include that as a con as well, not only did the music feel like elevator music, which I know you liked. I do. Muzak, as it's called. Muzak? Muzak. Oh. Yeah. That guy's voice in both Wave Racer 64 and Excitebike made me want to shoot myself in the head. Jesus Christ. Talk about depressed bike. 1080 didn't have this. If I can jump back to pros. He did say, actually, there was an announcer, but he was so dull that my brain didn't even process him. I don't even remember that 1080 had an announcer. I was too focused on the amount of damage. That's something about 1080 worth mentioning was the damage. It's possible to lose 1080 because you crash into the walls too much. Your character takes too much damage and you have to retire ostensibly because they just get too bruised up and beaten that they can't finish the race because you crashed into one too many cliff sides or trees or whatever. This would be a con for Griffin because I beat him the majority of the time from him getting damaged. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. But see, this might just come down to the fact that North American males can, on average, take more damage than small Japanese women. I don't know. That's not for us to say, maybe. That's funny. Yeah, I think my biggest con for 1080 would be the damage. I don't hate the concept of damage being taken. If you fail to land a jump, you should take damage. If you hit a wall or side, you should take damage. But the issue is that you would often get damaged so much that you couldn't finish the race, at least playing for 45 minutes or an hour, however long we played. Yeah. I'm sure when we were kids and we played this game, after the first hour or so, damage doesn't end the race. Yeah. Here's one thing that might be worth saying about all of these games in aggregate. I'm thinking mostly with just 1080 and Wave Race in mind here. You can play both of those games as two-player, one-versus-one matches where you're going through a course. In 1080, you're either going down some particular hill or in Wave Race, you're going around some particular track. In both of those games, it's possible to execute a number of cool tricks. You can go off jumps. You can do something on your Wave Runner. You can do something on your snowboard. You could do something cool, some kind of trick or series of tricks. In both of those games, it doesn't fucking matter what tricks you're able to pull off when you're playing in race mode. If you're playing in race mode, it just matters how quickly you finish the race. Both of those games have modes where you're only trying to execute cool tricks, but in neither of those games is the trick mode two-player. That's just one player. It would be cool if just one of those games had some sort of two-player mode where it actually matters if you're doing a cool trick while you're making your way through the race. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? So then you can combine both functions, both goals, so it's like who can make it through the race, but also don't just merely make it through the race. Make it through the race while you're getting some fucking leaf air, whatever that's called. A little lean air. Lean air, 1080. Yeah. I mean, these games were the stomping grounds, were they not? I mean, not really. You had stuff on NES, Sega, and Super Nintendo. It's all an evolution. If it weren't for 1080, we wouldn't have fucking Halo, you know? Exactly. If it weren't for 1080, we wouldn't have Halo. It was just a part of the evolution, and I feel like these games did well enough, especially in their time. Yeah. All three of these games were popular. I know that. Yeah, well, maybe. I've never heard of Excitebike. Yeah, maybe not Excitebike. But that also came out towards the end of your tenure. Yeah. So Excitebike came out May 2nd, 2000, and I think the PS2 came out October 2000, I want to say. Well, you don't name a game Excitebike unless you're desperate to convince people it's really exciting. Yeah. You have to put it in the name. It's not that exciting. Yeah. Yeah. Because I don't know if we ever mentioned, we're a bad podcast, but I just want to clarify that Wave Race is a wave racer, 1080 is a snowboard, and Excitebike, that's like a motocross dirt bike, right? Yeah. I mean, if you're listening to this, you probably already know this, but maybe not. Probably already know, and now you've been really confused up until this point. Now we just clarified that. But yeah. I mean, there's a decent amount of pros and cons for each one of these games. Do you feel like there's anything else that you want to add in for any three of them? So, what I will say about Wave Race is, though this was the most difficult game for me of the three that we played, and related to that, I think I maybe had the least fun playing Wave Race, even though that's the case, I will say this. I think of those three games, Wave Race has the most room to grow, in a sense, by which I mean, I think if you played Wave Race for a long time, you could really enjoy the process of getting better at it, and learning how to manipulate the controls more effectively, and to become better at the game in a way that would be more rewarding than it would be with 1080 and with Excitebike. I feel like you could play Excitebike in 1080, and within the first hour, you get the hang of it, and you could advance from square one to square ten pretty quickly, and it makes sense, and that's its own thing, and that's kind of nice, and that's kind of rewarding, and that's fun in itself, but also, with Wave Race, you have to be more intentional about the way that you play it, and you have to be more attentive, like, as you're playing the game, you have to try harder, and probably it's the case that the reward, when you're playing Wave Race, the reward of trying harder, and learning how to, you know, use the controls more effectively, and how to navigate the water more effectively, and whatever, integrate tricks if you want to, I feel like getting better at Wave Race is more rewarding than it is to get better at 1080, or to get better at Excitebike, if that makes sense. So, every word you just said, I feel, applies to 1080. Really? Okay. And maybe we didn't spend enough time on these games, we probably only played each game for, what, 45 minutes, an hour? Yeah. But, that's exactly what you just said, is how I felt with 1080. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess I can see that, because, like, in both games, you're going off jumps, right? Like, in both games, you have some amount of air time, where you can do, like, cool tricks and stuff, but in Wave Race, the amount of time that you have in the air is less. Kind of, obviously so, because you're just hitting some waves, or going up some small ramps, or whatever, but in 1080, you're, like, cruising down, like, fucking K2, you know what I mean? You're going, like, massive mountain slopes, and you have these, like, big jumps with lots of air time, and you can really do something with it. So, maybe you're right, in that sense, that, like, in 1080, you can actually, you can do more. You can learn how to make the game more fun by doing more tricks in the air, or whatever, and in Wave Race, there's not as much air time. But, I don't know. I hear you. Did you have any pros or cons regarding course length for any one of these three games? Uh, yeah. So, one thing that I like about 1080, actually, is that the entire course doesn't repeat itself. It's just the top of the mountain to the bottom of the mountain. Whereas, in Excitebike and Wave Race, you're moving through a fairly short track several times. Like, it's a few different laps to get to the end. Yeah, Excitebike, in particular, the laps are pretty short, and the tracks are pretty boring. Wave Race, it's a little bit more variable. There's a little bit more going on in the lap, and, of course, because the medium that you're moving through is water, it's a little bit less predictable. So, maybe there's more fun there, and more, I don't know, it's, I don't know, it's more exciting. It's more, ironically, maybe. But, in 1080, it's just, it's one course, and nothing repeats. So, you're just going down this mountain, and, I don't know, everything is different. It's not as repetitive in that sense. If I had to give cons, just, I could give a con about all three of these games and their courses. My first con for Excitebike would be that you're just on a dirt road, and you're going down that dirt road three times in a row. Yeah, and all of the courses are pretty similar, honestly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's probably seven courses, I'd say, where you repeat them three times in a row, and they all felt like dirt roads in a circle. With 1080, selecting the courses, you didn't really know what was easy and what was hard. We were able to figure it out just by their names. Yeah, well, Dragon Cave is very likely going to be more difficult than Crystal Lake. Yeah, and Death Valley is going to be harder than Crystal Peak. Yeah. And I get that, but the way they were provided to us, there really was no, okay, this is going to be number one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't give you difficulty level. Yeah. It's presented to you as a blank slate. And kind of in a random order. They weren't exactly left to right. It's a very small con, but it is something, if I were developing that game, I think I would have gone back and just fixed that. Yeah, no, not pretty easy to do. Yeah, it's a very small con, and then a con with Wave Racer's course. Wave Racer. It's a brand new name. Yeah, Wave Racer 64, the courses just felt short. Yeah, they're short. They felt short, and even though they felt a little different, because like we were saying, the waves, and maybe sometimes there'd be a mine there. Yeah, there's a mine, or there's like a crate floating in the water that you can hit. But they felt short. They felt predictable. They felt like I would, if I was a kid playing them, I would remember them without a doubt. Okay, but maybe worth mentioning is that in Wave Racer, you can, if you choose to, play the course in reverse. So, I don't know, in that regard, there's more variability. I mean, you can shake it up. Yeah. You can't ride up the goddamn mountain when you're playing 1080. You can only go down it. Agreed, agreed. All right, so before we rank these games, Griffin, I just wanted to let you know what the prices are today. Today's market, being today is August 3rd, 2024, these change, they do. But Wave Race 64, a loose cart, what do you think that costs? I mean, come on, I already know it's $13. That's right, $13. Closed in box costs $45. $35. 1080, loose, costs $9. In box, $36. Excitebike, loose, costs $14. In box, costs $39. So, all these games, loose, costs relatively the same. And all these games, closed in box, costs relatively the same. Which makes sense, you know, that's why we're reviewing these three games together. They fit a similar genre. And honestly, I think all three of these games are a similar amount of fun. But is there anything that stands out to you as far as these prices? Anything that seems wrong or out of place? Uh, no. I don't know. I don't have, I'm not paying close enough attention to this stuff to really have any intuitions about what a good or bad price would be here. Honestly, so we're both casual gamers. I don't think either of us claim to be experts within modern or retro games. I have long identified as a Wave Race expert, but we don't have to get into that. But I do identify myself as a retro collector. And as somebody that collects games, I try to only collect games complete in box. Complete in box? Yeah. Complete in box? Complete in box, closed in box. Okay, okay. So that CIB is pretty flexible. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, the C could be anything. Yeah. Okay. Whatever you make of it, really. But as a collector who buys these games pretty regularly, um, I think all three of these games, loose if you wanted to play them, they're all really affordable. You can play, you can buy any of these games just to play how they're meant to be played on the N64 pretty easily. They're all affordable. And closed in box, as a collector, all three of these games are pretty decently priced. Wave Race is a little expensive. And I think the only reason for that would be that it's when it came out, you know, it came out really early in the N64's life cycle. So the odds of being able to find that cardboard box still intact, for somebody that bought that in November of 1996, compared to May of 2000, the odds are harder. I think if you want to play them, they're priced pretty reasonably. I think if you want to collect them, complete in box, I think they're pretty good prices, to be honest, all three games. Yeah. Especially considering in the 90s, when you were buying these games, what were they? 60, 70 dollars? Yeah, I think. I mean, yeah, were they? I don't know. When we were that young, getting these games like for Christmas and shit, were they really? I have no idea. They really were like 60 dollars. Okay. Yeah. I believe you. Which in that time is like 100 dollars now. Really? I don't know. Yeah. Is that how inflation works? I don't know. It's a different podcast. But yeah, it is. They were really a whole lot more expensive when we were kids. Yeah. And it's crazy that our parents just blindly bought them for us and all we decided was the back of the box, you know. We'd look at the front and the back, some artwork on the front. We look at the back of the box and say, this looks pretty cool. Yeah. Thanks, mom. I mean, that's why we're doing the podcast, right? Yeah, just to say thanks to mom. Thanks to our parents. Yeah. You're the best, mom. I love you, dad. Thanks for Waybrain64. So, Griffin, how do you feel these games hold up? Do you think they're still playable today? I don't know. Define playable. I mean, we just played them. They're playable. Games that I think can still be enjoyed and hold a candle to what we have today in 2024. I mean, in a sense, none of them hold a candle to what we have today in 2024. The one that I had the most fun playing was probably Excitebike, but that's just, I mean, a lot of that just has to do with the fact that I beat you, you know, better than average. So, I don't know. I don't know how reliable my opinion is here. What do you think? Before I answer that, I'll ask you, would you recommend these games to your peers, our friends, or would you recommend these games to kids today? Does that make a difference to you? Yeah. I mean, I can hardly imagine the circumstances in which I would find myself recommending that one of my peers would play these games. I can hardly imagine the circumstances in which I would find myself recommending that one of my friends play an 80s Excitebike or Wave Race 64, but do you feel compelled to go out and buy any of these games? Like, would you want to have, besides me, another friend play these games? Like, do you want to go to the store, you want to buy one of these and play them with another friend? Uh, no. No, I don't. But that's probably because that's just not the world that I live in. I mean, I can maybe, if I were a slightly different person and the people that I spent time with, I don't know, I can imagine just a very slightly alternate universe in which I would want to play 1080 again. Excitebike, maybe. Wave Race 64, probably not, because it just doesn't seem worth the frustration of getting better to me. I mean, it's a more uphill battle with Wave Race 64. 1080 and Excitebike are more just sit down and have fun kind of games to me. So maybe for both of those two, and probably between those two, more 1080 than Excitebike. But yeah, I don't know. Does that answer the question? I think so. And how would you feel about, like, recommending them to kids today? Hey, kids, do you want a piece of 1080? I mean, for real, do you think it's something kids could figure out? Do you think it's something kids would enjoy? Or are they so far into Minecraft that this is just ancient blah blah to them? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Wave Race would probably be the least desirable to today's youths. You know, I don't know. Maybe 1080 could have some kind of weird revolution with boys under 10 today. I have no idea. I don't know. Is motocross still cool? Snowboarding and motocross are more likely to be cool today than wave running, honestly. But I mean, was wave running cool when we were kids? Oh, wave running was the coolest. Wave running was all we talked about when we were 10. All right, all right, okay, before I definitively have you rank these games, I'm going to ask you how you would rank the music of each game. Yeah, okay, so I would put 1080 last, honestly. That, it was just, uh, no way. Yeah, no way. It was egregiously, it was just, it was loud, it was indecipherable, it was abrasive, just kind of shit metal music. I, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't relate to it at all. It just stressed me out. It's a shame if snowboarding culture really embraces that music, like the game suggests it does. Wave Race 64 was much more my speed. You know, I don't consider myself a loser. I think I'm pretty cool. I think Wave Race 64 had pretty cool music. Excitebike was my number two. Excitebike was kind of, it was rock and roll, which, you know, I've never been a stranger to rock and roll, but it wasn't as, it wasn't as pounding as Wave Race 64. It wasn't as, um, it wasn't as pounding and painful as 1080 if, you know, and, you know, maybe that's not even rock and roll. It depends who you talk to, I suppose. Okay, so if I were to rank the music, I would do it quite differently. My number one would be 1080. Wow. I felt like those metal riffs were sick. No. Yeah, they, they, they fucking reached my soul and I liked every second of that 8-bit metal music. Yeah. And that 8-bit, what's N64's music? It's 10-bit. It's 10-bit? I don't know. It's shit-bit. Shit-bit? Yeah. Then I would say Wave Race 64. Yeah, fuck yeah. Just because their music felt like I was in an elevator. And it was cozy. Yeah, it was cozy. It was very cozy. And then last I would say Excitebike because it just felt like... Generic, maybe? Yeah, like the music you hear in the background of a commercial for kids. Yeah, well this game was... Made for kids. Yeah, yeah. They all were. Yeah. But it felt like... They weren't even trying to hide it. You said the words perfectly. They weren't even trying to hide it. Hey kids, do you like soft rocks? And hard dirt mounds? All right, so let's officially rank these games. I feel like ranking the music kind of gives it away. But Griffin... Honestly, our entire review gives our ranking away. Yeah. But Griffin, definitively, tell me what number one, number two, and number three is. You know, I don't know if it's actually going to be that obvious. I'm going to say number one... Yeah, maybe it is. Number one, Excitebike. Number two, 1080. Number three, Wave Race 64. Okay. And if I were to definitively rank them, I would say 1080, number one. Wave Race 64, number two. And Excitebike 64, number three. Griffin just farted into the microphone. What a perfect ending for my first podcast.