Rare Replay: Jet Force Gemini
This game is bad. Jet Force Gemini is a massive turd of a game from the N64 era and is just a huge black mark on the Rare Replay library. But it’s still massively entertaining for all the wrong reasons. From the weird art design to the bad controls this game was not good in it’s time however porting it to the latest Microsoft console has led to some terrible decisions. Adapting the bad controls from the N64 controller comes to nightmarish results as the jump button is a flick of a thumb-stick! The strafing doesn’t feel smooth and the aiming has an annoying auto-correct making precise shots impossible. But not to worry! The guns all have a hair trigger machine gun reaction that sprays and prays all over the enemies, so precise aiming is pointless anyway.
The only enjoyment we get out of this is crawling and rolling around. Side-splitting exploitation of silly mechanics is the only thing that give us any form of entertainment in this whole video.
The graphics, of course, don’t hold up as N64 titles look nightmarish in todays standards and porting them to a higher resolution does not do them any favors as it only serves to highlight the bad textures and limit polygons the technology was able to provide. A lot of N64 games can be forgiven for this because of nostalgia, timelessly fun game-play or a stylistic charm. Jet Force Gemini has none of these and the characters look like bizarre rejects from a Gerry Anderson puppet show. They don’t look appealing and of course the framing has the two main strange looking leads staring right at you at all times. Not something that makes me want to keep the TV on. Though I will admit the side art does look more appealing than the in-game models, but not by nearly enough.
All in all Jet Force Gemini is a mess. It was back on N64 and it remains so in this collection. The only marked improvements I can notice is that it looks brighter than the original, but that might just be the TV? Tough call but not exactly something that could make this a better experience. Oh well… we can always crawl around on the floor and murder “Ewoks” to have fun.
