I’ve never been a fan of the monster truck concept. Gigantic vehicles with a penchant for destruction? Yeah, not really for me. Not even when I was a kid. So what led me to play Monster Truck Madness 64 you may ask? Call it morbid curiosity if you will. It came out on a platform which was lacking in quality big name racers in a time when 90s attitude was big business. Either way, I saw it for cheap and it sounded like something that would have fun multiplayer. That was par for the course with most Nintendo 64 titles after all. So is Monster Truck Madness 64 worth playing in this day and age? Sadly, no, but really who is surprised by that? Let’s take a look.
Monster Truck Madness 64 is a basic arcade style racing game. The developers were clearly trying to cash in on the popular (at the time) car combat mechanics. Hey, it makes sense considering we’re dealing with monster trucks. Instead of polishing the racing mechanics and physics the developers instead focused on including a ton of different game modes. This is the best part of the game, but I’ll touch on that later. Basic gameplay has you driving a monster truck and racing against either human or computer opponents to reach the end goal. You have various checkpoints along the way which help because the gameplay areas extend beyond the tracks. These are off-road vehicles after all.
The game is fully 3D and rendered entirely in polygons. The first problem I had is with the camera. Controls for managing this are weird. Normally you would assume that the up C and down C would zoom in and out. That’s not the case. I actually stopped messing with these buttons entirely because I couldn’t figure it out. It’s annoying, and I had to restart races whenever I tried to adjust. The second issue we have is with the physics. The other controls work as you would imagine but everything is entirely too floaty. It’s not uncommon to hit a small hill and be stuck flying in the direction you were moving for far too long. Then you’ll generally hit the ground and skid around trying to regain control. This is futile because you slide every which way.
So the controls are awful. Monster Truck Madness 64 is actually painful to play because of them. I thought I would get the hang of things but that never happened, and usually I’m pretty decent at racers. I’m not the only one because you’ll regularly find wrecked CPU opponents that couldn’t figure it out either. The combat aspect is underplayed in my opinion. You can pick up items while driving around (ala Mario Kart 64) and these serve a few different functions. For example you can shoot projectiles and go invisible. I didn’t think this fit particularly well with the themes (I assume if you’re interested in monster trucks you’re probably a purist) but it’s whatever. The most fun I had with this game was shooting opponents.
Well, that’s not entirely true. The racing mechanics are poor, but the developers threw in a ton of different game modes. Monster Truck Madness 64 is unusually packed with options. Not only do you have a number of different vehicles to choose from (I hear they’re licensed, but again, I know nothing about the monster truck scene). In addition, in exhibition mode you can choose the time of day and even weather. That’s actually kind of neat, especially when you choose snow because the landscape actually changes with time. Selecting the night time settings is kind of annoying because you have such a limited view so you’ll probably want to stick to day or dusk. You can also play just about every game mode with one to four players which is awesome. You can even set CPU opponents.
The other modes are actually pretty interesting. On top of the generic race modes you also have things like soccer, and hockey. The two play largely the same where you are trying to push the ball/puck into the other side’s goal. These are only played with human players and if I had to compare it to something I would go with Rocket League. That’s over a decade before Rocket League became a thing, but the floaty physics and slippery controls once again ruin things. The most fun you’ll have here however is the rumble mode. Here there are ramps around a platform in the center of an arena. You win by staying on the platform for the longest, and are encouraged to ram foes off of it. Despite the horrible controls and physics I found this mode mildly entertaining overall. This is short lived because there’s only one stage.
The graphics in Monster Truck Madness 64 are pretty bad. The game suffers from the typical low polygon models and blurry textures that the Nintendo 64 is known for. Unfortunately the Nintendo 64 fog makes it’s not so triumphant return here. You can’t see that far in front of your truck because of it. A map of the course does help with this a little, but it’s still annoying. The weather and time of day only further hinders you. The framerate is okay, but in multiplayer things get worse. The snow effects, as well as the lighting from the police car are the only impressive elements of the graphics engine. The soundtrack is composed of simple midi compositions attempting to emulate hard rock. It’s not offensive, but at the same time ultimately forgettable. There is commentary which plays during your races and these samples are surprisingly clear for the hardware.
