ONE FUCKING TRIBAL

When talking about awesome boss music with a friend, he brought up the music from the final boss of Jet Force Gemini, an old game for the N64. I loved this game and would have beaten it had ONE TRIBAL not been missing...

You basically need every single tribal in order to reach the area in which to beat the game. This proves difficult when you are standing two feet away from a spot where every FAQ and walkthrough in the universe is saying a tribal should be standing but ISN'T.

As such I was left to repeatedly play the rest of the game as it was, and there's a reason it was one of Rare's more famous games from the old N64 era....well, even if it does have like a 70-something on metacritic.

But let's face it. Halo 3 got a 94. You can't trust anyone now.

The game is played out in a style similar to that of Quake, Shadowgrounds, or any other sort of shoot-anything-that-moves fest. You get a plethora of different weapons that never seem to run out of ammo, ranging from a machine gun to a homing missile launcher (which seems to look more like a pistol somehow...fuck every weapon looks like a pistol...that gun on the right is a sniper rifle)

The way you control your character, though, is a bit unusual from most games. You move around like any Super Mario 64 or Donkey Kong 64 or Conker's BFD or anything like that, but when you hold the R button, the camera pulls in close to your character, you actually get an aiming crosshair, your character goes transparent, and you now have the common FPS-style movement seen today.

I realize this is now kinda common in games like GTA today, but back then I think it was the perfect execution, and the perfect way to get people to transition to that whole WASD thing, and learning that yes, the left and right buttons just make you STRAFE. And, if you didn't like it, you could run around like Mario until you have the need to shoot an enemy that's above you. Boss fights sort of pretended you always had R pressed, and kind of worked well for it because you'd need that camera view anyway.

The boss music wasn't bad, but I think the main reason I loved it back then was because the bosses were so good. The best way to execute a boss fight is to have bullets and attacks flying everywhere, and yet ensure that any half-competent player can follow a certain method to dodge them. Basically, keep em on their toes, but never knock him off them.

You'll also notice in the video I just linked that, among two other characters, you get to play as a dog. Now, this makes about as much sense as the Warcows from Unreal Tournament 1, but it still elicits a fan response just the same. It's nice to have something just as absurd as the game mechanics it's built around, as well as the satisfaction of knowing an entire army was laid to waste by a puppy with a gun taped to his back.

The game also has this whole Sonic & Tails co-op mechanic: Shortly you find a little robot called Floyd. (which, thereafter, confused me whenever anyone referred to Pink Floyd) When you plug in a second controller, another person can control Floyd and shoot stuff with his fairly hard-to-control laser gun (but hey, it gets friends interested in the game) While the game also had a decent multiplayer mode, this was really what we preferred doing.

I've been able to find ROMs of the game in the past, and I'm wondering if any emulators have let it be played with the mouse. If so, I'd certainly pick it up again.

If only to get that ONE...

FUCKING.

TRIBAL.