With the release of the M64, most hobbyists concern themselves with the technical aspects of the machine. How does it compare to the Analogue 3D, or original Nintendo 64 hardware? Worthwhile questions to be sure, but I prefer to try and evaluate the console on its games and how they play. To start out, let’s take a look at Xeno Crisis, one of ModRetro’s four inaugural launch titles for the console. As is the case with the Chromatic, ModRetro isn’t just releasing hardware, they’re also publishing physical software that we can buy in cartridge form and own forever, instead of being tied to an online account.
Xeno Crisis is on-brand for ModRetro in that Xeno Crisis is a retro throwback title made by an Indie developer, Bitmap Bureau. But it’s off-brand for the M64 in that Xeno Crisis isn’t a throwback to the crude 3d modeling that defined the fifth generation of console gaming. Xeno Crisis is a top-down room-to-room shooter game with arcade sensibilities much closer to the fourth generation. Designed for the Sega Mega Drive (Bitmap Bureau is an English company after all), Xeno Crisis looks fantastic in the 16-bit style. But it doesn’t exactly push the limits of 64-bit hardware.
And to be entirely frank, Xeno Crisis warrants a bit of a re-evaluation at this point. Coming out in 2019, it’s nearly old enough to be a retro game in its own right now. With new games on older platforms being less of a novelty now, its flaws are that much more glaring. The lack of native save files, for example, particularly rankles as one of the Nintendo 64’s few advantages over its CD based competitors was save batteries. Even if you argue that the difficulty curve of Xeno Crisis, and the whole gameplay tradition it represents, should eschew the very concept of save files, I can think of no good reason why this version of the game doesn’t at least save the high score. There’s almost certainly a save battery on the cartridge that just isn’t being used.
On the topic of difficulty too, Xeno Crisis is too tough for its own good. The problem is less that the game is particularly unfair so much as the enemies are unreasonably tanky. Xeno Crisis is borderline unplayable unless you make a point of getting the weapon power up upgrades as quickly as possible. If you don’t, even on the second level, every room becomes a marathon because it just takes too long to kill anything such that soon there are a dozen enemies breathing down your neck. With the ones that have projectile moves, the game feels less like an action shooter and more like a bullet hell, which isn’t the best genre to play with friends.
For what it’s worth, Xeno Crisis does play better with a friend, as the added firepower goes a long way to preventing enemies from quickly amassing an outrageous numerical advantage on the field. The revival mechanic is also much appreciated as a way to keep less skilled friends in the game when they keep dying. Annoyingly, this mechanic doesn’t function in the boss rooms. It would be no more overpowered there than it is anywhere else and serves little purpose except to force your teammate to watch as you struggle to survive the boss’s attack pattern long enough to achieve marginal damage against its huge health bar.
Cheat codes might have helped, but I couldn’t get the Nintendo 64 ones I found online to work. Incidentally, they really should have been in the manual anyway, and that’s such an obvious asset to having a physical edition I’m honestly surprised they weren’t in there. While there is an easy mode accessible from the options menu, it doesn’t help as much as you’d think either, because the creators of Xeno Crisis don’t seem to quite understand why the game is hard. An extra hit point and slightly less spread on certain attack patterns doesn’t help that much with overwhelming numbers of tanky enemies. Xeno Crisis badly needs to even the scales with more firepower. Despite featuring a bevy of special weapons that do just that, the drop rates for them are quite low. Annoyingly, the game will often provide useless medpacs or grenades.
It also rather awkwardly forces the player to empty their guns at the end of a room instead of giving them a free reload, or else they run the risk of running out of ammo at the beginning of the next room with the ammo pack more likely than not spawning in a place overrun by enemies that can’t be killed owing to the lack of bullets. This isn’t even a critique of the difficulty, it’s just a basic quality of life improvement. A similar one would be displaying the bullets, grenades, and hit points of the space marines when the game is paused, instead of making this yet more information that’s all too easy to lose track of in the ongoing chaos.
From what I can tell, despite Xeno Crisis being a ModRetro branded rerelease, this is just the 2019 version of the game that Bitmap Bureau themselves released on Nintendo 64 cartridges a few years back. It’s possible that there’s a contractual reason why ModRetro wasn’t allowed to modify Xeno Crisis, although it’s disappointing in any case because it would only take very few tweaks to significantly improve this title to a genuine party game. Even something as mildly ambitious as upping the coop play cap from two players to four players would upgrade Xeno Crisis from a mere gimmicky rerelease to a genuinely impressive update that warrants the fifty-dollar price tag. The Mega Drive might not have been able to handle that much action, but the M64 certainly could, and again, one of the central features of the Nintendo 64 was making a big bet on four player couch co-op play being the future of gaming.
This particular version of Xeno Crisis is one of the better ones, incidentally, if only because it takes advantage of the goofy yellow C buttons to allow players to easily shoot in a different direction than the one they’re facing. Despite eight direction movement being standard, I often found myself wishing Xeno Crisis only had four directional movement since the roll move, essential for getting out of danger, almost always defaults to diagonal movement even when using the control pad. This might just be an issue of the M64 Pro Controller being too sensitive for its own good. Whatever the cause, more controller customization options would have gone a long way to improving Xeno Crisis, a game that’s good for what it is, but could have been genuinely great with just a bit more polish.
You must be logged in to post a comment.