Math Manet's N64 Anthology

[Reality]

If you are like me, you may have heard about this book  on several Nintendo websites. I succumbed to curiosity and purchased the thing. Most of the interest in seems to be due to a republication in Fall 2016 (A first print run, mostly in French, occured in 2014).

So I guess I'll give a brief review.

The book begins with an adorable foreward in which the author speaks in the "character" of the console itself. It gives a cute living summary of the console's achievements and competition.

Before the book gets to game coverage, the author gives us a 36 page history of the console, including most of its pre-release history, its presence alongside Super Ninetndo at the first game expos, the people and technology behind it relative to the competetion, and changes at Nintendo's coroporate structure happening during the time period. After this is a chapter that lists all of games that saw remakes and reboots, even if they didn't happen on a nintendo console, such as Perfect Dark Zero and Vigilante 8 Arcade. Due to the book's timing, Majora's Mask 3DS is conspicuously absent. The third chapter contains 2 interviews, one with a Goldeneye developer and one with a Eric Caen, a Titus software developer. The Titus interview is strangely the more interesting of the two, although you can almost feel the author straining to be polite about the quality of the games. Very surreally, Eric Caen considers Titus's infamous n64 games to have been succesful, and he reveals that the previous game experience of the company was mostly on the home computer market, so the greater reach of n64 (irregardless of critical reception) was a large leap forward for them. It is almost the opposite of how the superman 64, etc are popularly portrayed. After this is a chapter on Hardware, clearly aimed at collectors. All n64 console colors, controller colors, weird periphials, boxed game/console bundles, and so on appear here. Their is a brief look at the n64 motherboard, and its stats are printed, but this is not explained in depth. The section on he n64 controller is the most interesting part of the chapter, as we get photographs on the internal plastic rings housing the joystick which is explaining as being a (digital) analog stick.  Unlike elsewhere in the book, the author also tones down the sugarcoating and states a lot of the well-known criticism of the controller. There is even a look at the Ique player and a brief history of how Nintendo developed it both to get around a legal loophole and to combat a known piracy problem. The book contains 2 more bonus chapters- one on the 64 disk drive, and the other on cancelled games. The cancelled games section is of course, somewhat depressing, and it is extremely comprehensive, containing confirmed games, and also such things as the June 1997 Konami annucment of Metal Gear Solid's intended consoles, the non-contributions of several memebers of the 1995 "Dream Team", the SIGGRAPH video tech demo of the  Final Fantasy 6 charathers in 3D on Silicon Graphics hardware. Taken together, the "bonus features" of this book may actually be its strongest point.

The majority of the book, as promised, contains information on all 388 officially released N64 cartridges. To fit all this in, most of games are given only half a page and only a about a 140 word review. Extremely minor games and sports games that were released in yearly editions tend to be condensed to 3-4 to a page. A few games are given a full page to themselves, and just 5-6 AAA games (such as ocarina of time and super mario 64) are given double page spreads.  

The outline of these reviews includes the name of the game, a picture of the box art (if applicable),  1-2 screenshots of the game, Publisher, Developer, Genre, Game Pak size (aka save file size), compatible accessories, the launch dates in the three territories, estimated sales, other consoles game was released on, how many players the game is for, a written summary/review of the game, and finally a rating out of 5 stars in both quality and rarity. 

Trends in the reviews- For the most part, the author's ratings are in-line with the consensus on the vast majority of the games. However, he does seem to give higher than average scores to many sports games and educational games (although the written reviews do warn that they won't have much for everyone). He tends to be quite harsh with puzzle games and "vehicle action" games. Also, as is clear from the introduction, he wrote the book because he loved the console, so it is unsurprising that virtually all 1st party and rareware games have 5 stars and somewhat effusive reviews. Parts of the book are also a little awkward, as you might expect, their are many, many bad games, and many of the JPN only shogi/pachinko games get savaged. Due to recent internet reviewer trends, it is hard at first to tell if he is exaggerating or putting on a persona because in book form, you'll have to read many negative reviews in a small time. However when he gets to games he is positive about there is little worry that he is being authentic. I would  some that the main problem with the reviews is inflation and rating games  overly highly, although things like Battletanx and Mischief Makers stand out as games that got lower than typical scores. As can be expected of the hardcore collector, he gives an unusual amount of space for a few JPN exclusive games that use unique peripherals (the fishing rod controller and the train switchboard controller). The reviewer  seems to have hands-on experience with every game and is therefore mostly trustworthy, but there are a couple places where he seems to have relied on hearsay - He calls out Goemon's Great Adventure for showing  1-2 players on the box art because of the hidden 4 player mode, but doesn't point out that said mode requires obtaining  near 100% game completion, making it sound like a simple code or something that can be found in the options menu. In some places the author's European focus appears in the game reviews- some  "availability" ratings for games relatively common in America are set to low, and in the written review of a game like Turok

Their are several translation quirks in the book. The one that bothered me the most is that whenever the author talks about a game in a series, such as mario kart or donkey kong country. He uses the term "episode". An example: "Two episodes on the Super Nintendo were neough to make the name a sign of a quality game series." In the US the only video games the term is associated with are early First Person Shooters to describe a level set (such as in Doom or Quake).  It is more typical for video games released as part of a series to be referred to as "titles" or else prequel/sequel with reference to its position in the series, or even simply, first game, second game, nth game, and so on. This quirk drove me nuts in the book. The book is also punctuation heavy- around 40 of the reviews end in ellipses, and just as many end in exclamation points. Whatever process was used to handle text-wrapping for the pictures in the book seems to have been problematic- Whenever the text wrapping left only one word on a line, it would be exploded so that there was a space between every letter. This is pretty ugly and noticeable in places, such as the Mischief Makers review. "T e c h n i c a l l y". The translation also has a few serious errors: there are quite a few sentence fragments and sometimes the first half of a sentence is printed while the second half is omitted altogether. Luckily this does not have very frequently, perhaps 6 times throughout the entire 360 page book.

While the book's audience is stated to be for n64 enthusiasts worldwide, the reviewer tends to emphasize the PAL market. Some of his reviews remark on how "at the time of this game's release there was a drought of game's of this genre, so it's a shame it didn't come out earlier" in places that make no sense from an American perspective, and he also publicly puts exclamations of... jealousy? when talking about games with extremely large gaps in distribution. Finally he gives his native France special treatment in one place by explaining the side story that caused France to get the n64 months after most of the rest of Europe, and some of his major influences and sources include French gaming publications.

Research Errors and omissions- Math Mannet's research in most areas is through. However, the book contains a few errors, and some sections present pseudo theories and the subjective feelings of the author in the same tone as the sections intended to be purely factual. One of the most obvious  of these is with Rareware's composers. Robin Beanland is attributed with the success of both the Donkey Kong Country and Banjo Kazooie soundtracks. While Beanland is one of Rareware's most talented composers, almost every other source attributes David Wise and Grant Kirkhope respectively, as the leads on the two games. The author points  out that several multiplayer n64 games are labeled as singleplayer on their box art, and he tries to catch all of these instances, but he misses several of them. The book is not particularly technical when describing the n64 hardware, which is fine, but some sections of the book, such as the page where Pal's 50hz signal is brought up, leave out user-end observations, such as how a typical PAL game will run slower than its NTSC counterpart as a result of this. 

The end of the book even contains several checklists and boxs for you to mark off pokemon style, if you are interested in comparing your own progress with collecting n64 games. The index is surprisingly thoughtful, providing both an alphabetical index, and a by-genre index. I turned out to own 179 games but I'm not sure the section would have much interest for most people.

Overall, it is a rather entertaining book. The history sections of the book are very well done, and it does a good job reminding us of the gaming world between 1995-2002. Speculation is kept to a minimum (although there is still some). The reviews of the 388 games are not very in depth, but I think they would do a fairly good job of steering someone newer to the console or "retro gaming" towards the best stuff. For someone already familiar with the console, the JPN exclusives will be the point of interest, although, as expected, there really aren't that many good ones beyond the obvious suspects (custom robo, animal forest, sin and punishment, bangai-O, shiren the wanderer etc). However it is still fun to see the representation of genres that did not do well in the West, the two pokemon-style RPGS,  board party games other than mario party (although they stick closer to a simple goose). Although it is probbably not healthy, I will admit to really enjoying some of the negative reviews- kind of like watching people stream troll games, their is a certain entertainment to see him gamely slog through them all. The review section is the weakest section of the book for someone already heavily invested into the console, as they will not learn too much new here. Even for someone looking for good n64 games, I think I would recommend Richie or even the old IGN reviews before it. However, for an accessible look at the consoles history, I cannot think of too much better than this book. 

[Zapp Branniglenn]

I've heard of this book recently through this N64 documentary. Sounds like a good read.