This is a productive post.
Since I have a week off after finals and before my co-op starts back up again, I decided to pull my N64 out of storage and play a few old games in my collection. One of them is a game called Crusin USA.
Some background about this game:
This game is a basic (yet heavily censored) port to the N64 of the arcade game Crusin USA, although some of the graphics don't quite match up with the console version (Understandable though as the N64 only had like a 4kB texture cache to work with, and that would be halved if some "features" of the console were turned on). This game basically is a racing game that starts in San Fransico and goes all the way to Washington, D.C. where the game ends and you see a crummy ending with your car on the roof of the White house with a bunch of secret service guys protecting it (seems a little odd).

For screenshots, I'm using the European edition of the game, ran in the Project 64 emulator. Only difference between the North American edition and the European edition is they changed the units by default to metric. In the US edition, the top speeds of the cars in the car choice screen were actually in km/h (with the case of mine) but the speedometer was measuring in mph. I kinda assume that they were expecting the US to have metric highways by 2000 but that's another story.

Skipping ahead, you start the race off with some bitmapped girl in a pink bikini for every level waving a checkered flag telling you to go.

Music for some levels is kinda annoying, with the case of the level shown above, there's a girl going "ooh aah" most of the time, kinda like in a badly scripted porno.

Winning the race gives you this little animation:

Obviously this game was catered to guys

The game keeps track of high scores, like most games of it's time.


One gripe with this game is that the collision physics... SUCK.
Here's an example.

I struck that car head on at 100mph (160 km/h) and what happened was the car flew up in the air, spun 360 degrees and lands back on the road with a speed of 30 mph. Brilliant collision physics there. Also, on the city levels, your car can fly off the map, though the programmers were good enough to put you back on the road if you were mere pixels off the track.

Also crossing the finish line makes your car stop in mid air whatever it's doing, including crashing.

Get a look at that finish line too, bunch of chicks in bikinis, and also two shirtless guys with mullets looking like they're wasted at a St. Patty's day party.


That's kinda unsafe to have in a highway...

The game is enjoyable, more so with 2 players, as what my friends and I used to do when this game first came out for this console. The physics of the game make it more hilarious too... not to mention the geography lessons these morons should have taken when designing this game.

That's the grand canyon level below...

Why is fucking Mt. Rushmore in Arizona?! The level said "Grand Canyon"!

That lone star in the middle of the US is where the location for the level "Grand Canyon" is, which does have the Grand Canyon in it... and Mt. Rushmore. Why is the Grand Canyon in between Iowa, South Dakota and Nebraska?!

Why is the Gateway Arch in Iowa? It's supposed to be south in Missouri.

I've been to DC several times, and never seen this tunnel before.

Why is there a toll road on a country road in rural Indiana?

Playing this game over made me assume that the people who designed it never traveled to the United States, with exception of the west coast. Here's a map at the end of the game showing all the places you raced at. Move that star up there in the middle of the map down to the lower left with the others.

Over half the tracks are in California/Arizona. Also the way they portrayed Los Angles (which is a shithole btw for those who have never gone there) as this clean beautiful place with no crime, meanwhile, look at some of the pictures for the "Chicago" level:

Yes that's a burning car in the road.

Pollution and destroyed roads. (your car wrecks if you drive into any of those holes)

For one of the first games for the N64, the graphics were pretty good overall.

Except for some perspective issues.


Anyways, I shouldn't put this game down that much, This was a pretty enjoyable game when I first bought it years ago. Now if you want crappy games, there's Cadillacs and Dinosaurs for the Sega CD that just involved you driving around for 1 hour on each level shooting obstacles, however dying was more entertaining.

Haha, that game was AMAZING back in the day. I remember playing it as a kid all of the time.

How the hell did I pass geography after playing this game so much? >.<

Another great game on that system was Beetle Adventure Racing. Really pushed the boundaries of the system.

haha, I have an N64 in a box somewhere and that's the only game I have for it. Used to play it with my cousin years ago, then somehow I wound up with the N64 and only that one game. All the good ones were left with their family.

Favorite game from the N64 of all time was Goldeneye 007. It was also the only game that was stolen from my collection when our house was robbed years ago. They left the n64 but stole the game and the dvd player. Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

I guess they already had the system, they just wanted the game. >.<

Goldeneye for N64 was quite awesome, I'd played it forever ago but never owned it - great game from what I remember

God damn I remember when we called those graphics 'good'...

I know right? Even looking at some of the later games from the same era, from around 1999 or 2000, you can see so much improvement, it's mind blowing.

Hell I'm surprised when the Dreamcast came out, it didn't pummel the systems of it's era. Just look at the graphics upgrade that provided.

I guess people didn't really care as much about graphics then.. or they did, but the whole 3D gimmick kinda sold them, and they didn't really think it could get any better if it were already 3D. I can only IMAGINE how it was in the days before I was born, when Virtua Racing and the first Virtua Fighter came out.

There were consoles well before the dreamcast with superior capabilities to the mainstream consoles that also failed -- the systems were just too damn annoying to programme for.

One of them was by Apple.

Before putting an Apple badge on shit instantly turned it into a money printer.



(Looking back, 16MB of RAM, 117MHz processor, and decent graphics support.. it's surprising that the Pippin didn't go anywhere. Like you said, hard to program for)

Atari Jaguar. Supposedly a 64 bit console during the Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis/3DO Era. The hardware was so messed up that nobody could program them, including atari. If you have ever seen a game for the Jaguar, it looks more like a game from the 80s than one of that time.

Jaguar actually had two 32-bit processors on a 64-bit bus. Atari tried to pass it off like it was really 64-bit, but just looking at the graphics, and trying to code for it, proved that false.

Also, Atari, being a stereotypical American company, tried to use their past to sell consoles, and relied on business techniques that they used in the 80's (which just happened to crash the game market back then). They failed to update their business model, and failed to attract third party developers (Even ones who'd previously worked on their excellent Lynx handheld, which certainly would've excelled if it hadn't been marketed by Atari) to code for the Jaguar, then flopped. Which is a shame, but certainly well deserved.

Used to play that alot on N64