Back To The Noughties
It’s September 2002 and Nick is travelling through time to deliver the best retro news
After all of last month’s hullabaloo over a Nintendo press conference, you might have thought that the industry would move on and discuss something else for the month. But if you believed that, you’d be in the running for the presidency of Planet Wrong, as this month saw the speculation over Rare’s fate hit fever pitch. Cube even ran a feature titled “Rare – Where?” consisting mostly of guess work and photos of people messing about near Twycross. The working assumption had been that the developer was to
be purchased by Activision, but on 24 September, Microsoft confirmed its $375 million purchase of the company at the X02 event.
Starfox Adventures was confirmed to still be bound for the Gamecube, as the project was very close to completion and used Nintendo characters. However, Rare had announced plenty of other Gamecube projects including Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Donkey Kong Racing,
as well as the Game Boy Advance game Diddy Kong Pilot. Suddenly, the status of these games was up in the air, with no announcement as to whether they would be moving or cancelled altogether. There was some degree of shock that Nintendo would allow a rival console manufacturer to wrest such a prized developer from its clutches, especially considering the quality and commercial success of Rare’s N64 games, but we’ll have to wait until next month to see what the magazines made of it all.
Thankfully for Gamecube owners, Nintendo did have something positive to offer this month, as Super Mario
Sunshine’s international release prompted a flood (or should that be FLUDD?) of gushing reviews. NGC offered readers a mammoth 12 page review, in which Geraint Evans scored the game 96% and described it as “as essential as air itself”. The game was judged to be both “reassuringly familiar” and inventive, with the reviewer praising the game’s capacity to surprise the player – “just when you least expect it, it throws something unexpected and magnificent into the mix, that’s not only visually impressive but – more importantly – gives you something new to play with”. Cube’s reviewers were similarly impressed, with the game scoring 9.6/10 and being deemed “everything we’d hoped and more”,
though it felt that the level themes “lack that addictive sparkle of earlier tunes”.
Edge was a little more restrained in its praise, though it did score the game 9/10 and proclaim it “the second best platform game of all time”. The magazine praised the “beautiful, inertial control” and the “perfect, brilliant design” of Mario’s new water-shooting backpack, but criticised the game for being more repetitive than Super
Mario 64 and for being simpler, noting that “the search for shines shows no real touches of cunning”.
Other consoles couldn’t offer up anything quite so tantalising, though there were some good efforts out there.
Conflict: Desert Storm arrived just in time to take grisly advantage of current events, but the game itself was a rather good third-person tactical shooter.
Official Playstation 2 Magazine awarded the game 8/10, claiming that “you can’t beat the later missions without pre-planning and a decent multi-soldier strategy” and praising the “common sense” shown by AI soldiers on your side. XBM also awarded the game 8/10, with the reviewer claiming that the game was “hardly a prime example” of the console’s visual capabilities, but praising the game design and the “godsend” co-op mode. Also on the
PS2 this month, TOCA Race Driver scored 8/10 from Official Playstation 2
Magazine, with the reviewer praising Codemasters “for giving the CPU drivers some balls”. Tecmo’s survival horror game Project Zero earned the same score, with reviewer George Walter excited to see “horror imagery on a console usually reserved for the dark realms of underground cinema”.
Thankfully for PC gamers, there was a bit more to be excited about this month – presuming, of course, that you wanted to play strategy games. Blizzard’s Warcraft III: Reign Of Chaos had taken a little time arriving, but it had been well worth the wait. Edge awarded the game 8/10, praising the game’s “elegantly scripted narrative” and noting that while it has “little to do with innovation” and “may not be the revolution in real-time strategy that many had hoped for”, it was “a significant evolution; and one which elevates the genre to previously unattained levels of sophistication”. Edge also awarded 8/10 to The Creative Assembly’s latest effort, Medieval: Total
War. The magazine’s reviewer felt that of all games in the real-time strategy genre, “the Total War games are the only ones which make an attempt at representing an actual conflict. Morale and positioning is what victory rests upon – not a tank rush”.
Rounding out the month, Formula One Arcade gave Playstation owners something to do, and scored 8/10 from Official Playstation 2 Magazine and 75% from Play, which described it as “fast, playable and entertaining”. On the Game Boy Advance, Go! Go! Beckham! Adventure On Soccer Island
drew an 80% score from NGC, which was “very simple” but “so smooth and so much fun”.
Join us again next month, we promise there will be games!