Hey look! Lavender unwrapped and wearing the dumbest helmet ever. Plus ignore that she's not sitting on anything. Got lazy on that one. I do plan on designing her room and stuff when I get more used to doing these XP

Also note how weird she's holding the N64 controller. I hold it like that irl. Maybe some pics of it later :3

***

Rareware made some memorable titles during the era of the Nintendo 64, almost setting a standard of quality that would last until Microsoft bought them out and transformed their level of amazing quality into unmemorable tat.

Now I'll admit I never got into their popular platformers when they were big. Banjo-Kazooie and Conker's were not my interest range back then. No, then it was the big two shooters that were literally rotting my brain with their amazingness. GoldenEye was my gateway game, and Perfect Dark was the Aipom on my shoulder. Those were the days of hours-long Combat Simulator matches, weapon experimentation, and GameShark-hacking GoldenEye to make the whole experience weirder than all holy Hell.

So I thought it would be a good idea to try one of Rare's more unique titles. Something that appears to be a bridge between the shooters and the adventures. A little bit of platform jumping and a little aim and fire.

Jet Force Gemini is that kind of in-between game. On the surface, the game has that Rare polish that was so epic in 1999. The story is pretty basic: Giant ant aliens subjugate peaceful fuzzy critter aliens to an invasion, and it's up to Juno and his crew of hot babe and hotdog to stop 'em dead. By shooting them.

Graphically, the game has that colorful and texture-heavy Rare feel, somewhat reminiscent of their Perfect Dark style. This appears to correlate with PD's one major flaw which JFG shares: framerate. Wow was the opening cutscene slow. And put more than three characters on the screen at once and the drop in fps is exponential and slightly jarring. I mean I couldn't expect much from the N64, but the fact that Rare made the executive decision not to utilize the Expansion Pack to allow a universal experience for all players is something that may have kept this game from being a classic.

But we all know with Rare that it's all about the gameplay. Sometimes it's about story and memorable characters but we'll forgo that in this case considering I think they intended this game to be more about killing tons of giant ants with zappy guns. However, that's one aspect where this game has a dual personality.

When you're doing well, it's amazing. When you no longer have the advantage over the enemies, it stops being fun and becomes a mess. The devil's in the controls, and boy they are broken. First off, they aren't adjustable. Now I know that pretty much all platformers of that era have locked controls, including pretty much all of the Rare's platforming IP's. But you see, in a shooter it's important to give your players some options on how they want to play. JFG locks you in an inverted aiming setup, and honestly I find it hard to anything precisely. Sure there's some auto-aim, but it doesn't work on the enemies that are higher or lower in plane than yourself, so combat becomes a process of mowing through the ground enemies and then spending 45 minutes on one or two perched enemies that nickel-and-dime your health away while you try to aim at them.

Also, the movement. The analogue stick moves forward and back, and turns the character, while the left and right C-buttons strafe. I don't like this. I know some folks do, I don't. Can't change it. Seriously. Falling off cliffs has been the only way I've died the first hour I played this, and that's been because I've tried to get away from the edge only to find myself walking right over it.

Okay, those were the two issues I had with this game. Granted I've only sat down with it for a short time, and I plan on giving it some more time, especially to see the other characters and enemies. The game has some pretty good aspects. The weapons are useful and ammo's the right balance of plentiful and sparse that creates the right amount of accuracy balance. Kills are satisfying, especially collecting ant heads as an actual quantity in the stats menu. Audio is amazing, and even contains effects used in Goldeneye and PD, almost as an homage and premonition respectively.

Really the problems this title has are shadowed by the amount of fun you can still have. But considering how Rare's more classic titles were intuitive and contained little learning curve, I can see why this one was easily overlooked.