The Nintendo 64 didn’t exactly set the sales charts on fire in Japan and Europe. That’s why it’s surprising that some developers released specific games in just those two regions. Airboarder 64 is one of these such titles. I have almost no exposure to it. I think I saw a preview in a gaming magazine back in the day and thought it looked neat. Decades later I managed to snag myself a copy of this now infamously bad Nintendo 64 release. Is it really as horrendous as they say? Well…. not really, but it’s still pretty boring. Let’s take a look!
There’s really not much in terms of story here (as far as I can tell at least). Clearly this game takes place in the future in a hoverboard tournament. Eight different contestants are competing against one another to be the best. Or at least, this is what I’m piecing together so bear with me. You’re thrown right into the action with no exposition. You can run through a tutorial which teaches you the basics. This is highly recommended because Airboarder 64 isn’t exactly pick up and play. Despite this it’s not technical like Tony Hawk Pro Skater but there are so many buttons on the controller you’ll want to figure out what everything does before jumping in.
Airboarder 64 is a 3D behind the character skating game, but in this case it uses hoverboards. This is important because it does have an effect on gameplay. You accelerate by holding down the Z button, and turn with the analog stick. What’s interesting is that, unlike in any skateboarding game, you can travel up the walls by holding forward when you approach them. This sounds neat, and the concept definitely is. Unfortunately the execution is poor. This gameplay element doesn’t add much to the game. As far as I’ve been able to tell there aren’t any tricks specific to this maneuver. The stage designs also don’t take proper advantage of this feature. It’s just… there. The verticality doesn’t add anything to the game.
The trick system just isn’t very deep here. You can perform tricks in the air, on the lip of ramps, and on rails. The problem is that there aren’t enough of these and you’ll find the higher scoring tricks need to be performed in repetition to be successful. They’re context sensitive so if you find something in the environment (like a ramp or cliff) to do them on you’ll have to spam them on it. Honestly, why they even bothered making large environments is beyond me because I spent the majority of my time in each stage in a very small area.
Now let’s take a moment to talk about the stages themselves. These are incredibly boring. They’re just wide open spaces with very specific ramps and drop offs to interact with. It’s really barebones. Sometimes you’ll come across an environmental hazard but these are few and far between, and honestly they’re pretty easy to avoid. Thematically there are some problems as well. You have a grassy city, a snowy area, tropical island, and my least favorite; an enlarged house. The latter of which gave me vibes the likes of Club Drive for the Atari Jaguar. It’s like they ran out of ideas when all they had to do was throw in a neon parking garage or a busy city area. Something. Come on.
I’ll admit that I’m not a huge fan of skateboarding games. Where they grab me is in the customization options. Airboarder 64 is distinctly lacking in these. You can select from up to 8 different boarders but their differences are mostly cosmetic. Some skate goofy style and others standard. Beyond that I didn’t notice a difference in handling. You can also select between a few different boards but they only differ in handling and acceleration. I wish there were significantly more, and that the game had many more categories by which they differentiate themselves. The lack of content really hurts Airboarder 64. I can’t imagine paying full price for a title like this if I’m being perfectly honest. N64 games were expensive and there’s no way this one was worth it.
The graphics are a real mess. Airboarder 64 is pretty ugly considering the year in which it was released. The characters are very jagged with few polygons used to render them. What’s worse is that the developers went with some weird Western anime style that just doesn’t work. That all would be acceptable but the environments look like those in a first generation N64 title. You have the whole blurry texture thing going on along with low distance rendering. They should have used the extra rendering power of the console they clearly didn’t use for the characters on the backgrounds. What’s even uglier is the framerate. The game chugs along at sub 20 frames per second. I understand making cuts to the graphics to ensure a game runs at a decent rate but they just didn’t. It’s lazy and unacceptable.
As far as the music goes don’t get your hopes up. It’s all midi compositions here, and they’re very obviously limited by it. The composer went for a techno rock motif but it falls flat on its face because everything just sounds like bleeps and blips. You would naturally assume that there would be extensive voice acting or other real world samples. If you’ve been holding out to find a category in which the developers cared at all then this isn’t it. There are some samples, and they’re cheesy and overblown (as they should be) but these are far and few between. The audio is very poor.
It’s not the crime I initially assumed it would be that Airboarder 64 wasn’t localized for North American audiences. The game is incredibly uninspired. It’s clear that the developers just wanted to pump out a software release and didn’t care about much. To be fair they didn’t need to because of the droughts the hardware experienced, but that doesn’t mean that Airboarder 64 gets a free pass. This game is unique, but it’s still a real chore to play. With that said people have been overly hard on it, and although I don’t like the game it certainly doesn’t deserve the amount of hate it has received.
