 Space Station: Silicon Valley for Nintendo 64
It's sad that the Nintendo 64 has so few great games on it. You look at
the NES, and you have Zelda, Metroid, RBI Baseball, and many others. The SNES
boasts Super Castlevania IV, Super Metroid, and Super Mario Kart, just to name a few.
But what does N64 have? GoldenEye, maybe? I'll add another one to the list: Space
Station: Silicon Valley.
Space Station: Silicon Valley was developed by DMA Design, the brilliant team
responsible for Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, and that brilliance shines through in this game. The intro sets the tone, showing
a romantic scene between a dog and a sheep. Then your ship crashes and kills the
sheep. It is your task as Evo, the computer chip, to go out and possess the robotic
animals on the space station so you can get what you need. You
start out inside said dog, but you progress to possess sheep, rats, gorillas, walruses,
racing turtles, spitting camels, and a host of other creatures.
It is a 3D platform game in the style of Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie,
except there is more focus on puzzle-solving. The station is divided into several
types of zones, such as icy stages, desert stages, grassy stages, and so on. Each
level gives you a mission brief and a set of objectives to complete, which, as you
progress further in the game, get more and more obscure and hilarious. Here's an
example:
"Flupping honk, Evo, what's that stench? Must be coming from down
there … in the sewers. Ugh. It smells worse than your backside."
The graphics aren't spectacular, but they don't take away from the game at all. The music, on the other hand, is utterly marvelous elevator lounge music. It is perfectly fit for each level, and is always in the
background, so it never distracts you from your task. The music, however, isn't
simply playing from nowhere, but comes from speakers placed throughout the level. If
you destroy a speaker, you won't get sound in that area. Hence, if you destroy all of
them, you get no sound on the level.
The little things in the game are what appeal to me most. The animals start out fairly
normal, but as you beat more levels, you can play as weirder animals. You begin by
playing things like sheep, dogs, and mice, and later on you get animals like a dog that
rolls around on squeaky wheels that shoots rockets, a hyena whose attack is
contagious laughter, and a hippo who lays gigantic explosive turds. In fact, a lot of
the game features scatalogical elements. In the sewer level, you are a rat and get
the bonus trophy if you eat all the steaming turds lying around. When you're the king
rat, you expel green gas and make farting noises. And on one jungle
level, you start out on an island in the middle of a fecal swamp. Another enjoyable
moment is getting the bonus trophy on the very first level: you have to kill all the
sheep as the dog, drag their limp bodies to the crashed rocket's engines, then go to
the window and bark at your copilot. He turns on the burners, incinerating the sheep,
and you get the trophy.
This is easily one of the best games I have ever played, and I highly recommend
it to everyone and their deadbeat dads. It can probably be played all the way
through in a 5-day rental, but I would definitely buy this one.
Be mindful, however, that there is a glitch they somehow did not fix before the
game was released, which, believe it or not, prevents you from collecting one of
the trophies in the game. That is an egregious error on DMA's part.
Review by Eggle |
