GYSHP is a semi-regular column on a video game from the past that you probably haven’t heard of, but really missed out on.
The video game industry is awful. The sound to noise ratio when it comes to the quality of games is embarrassing, considering how much people will continue to pay for these horrible games. Once in a great while, there comes a gem that stands out from the crap that is actually well worth the purchase.
Today’s gem is Rocket: Robot on Wheels.
Rocket: Robot on Wheels was released on the N64 back in 1999, which was the last year in the golden age of gaming. Since 2000, the industry has been on a downhill trip to hell. (Trivia: In 1999, Ubisoft published 3 games featuring characters with no arms/legs; Rocket: Robot on Wheels, Tonic Trouble, and Rayman 2: The Great Escape.)
Rocket was easily one of the best platformers produced. Ever. Period. Mario is put to shame.
The premise of Rocket: Robot on Wheels is fairly unique. You play as Rocket, a robot with no arms, no mouth, one wheel, and a blue face. Rocket also has a grapple beam attached to the side of his face, used for interacting with everything it the world. This beam is used to pick up items, enemies, and pretty much anything at all that moves, and hurl them away. The beam is also used to grab onto items in the environment, to reach hidden areas.
While this game is awfully similar to a lot of other platformers in its time, the thing that really sets Rocket apart from the pack is that the levels are incredibly dynamic. Instead of having your typical “Normal level”, “Sand level”, “Fire level”, “Water level”, “Spooky level”, and other common themes that have been done to death by other platformer titles, but instead have some of the most unique themes I’ve seen in ages, from a boardwalk to underground mines to ancient Greece… The list goes on and on.
The themes all have a theme park kind of feel to them. Respectably so, given that the game takes place in a massive theme park. I can’t even begin to go into the kind of detail that the levels go into, because most levels will have multiple common themes, and each level has its own vehicle that Rocket can control, each one entirely unique, ranging from a drag racer shaped like a hot dog, a hovercraft that shoots paintballs, a motorcycle that looks like it just lifted itself from the pools of hell, and more.
The levels are also incredibly massive. They’re surprisingly huge, considering that not only is this just a platformer title from 1999 where it was difficult to put that much detail into a game that was going on such a limited format (the N64 game cartridges had a maximum capacity of 64 mb, which is about 10 minutes of YouTube video), but it wasn’t all just empty space. Most of the space was occupied by unique things to do. There is so much to explore in this game, even just prowling around the overworld.
To go into detail, Rocket, the character you play as, is a maintenance bot for a theme park in outer space. Already, you can tell, this is going to get awesome.
However, one of the park’s two mascots gets jealous of the other, and starts ripping ass all across the park, destroying things and generally making life a living hell for a robot whose sole purpose in life is to maintain the park. So you do the only thing that a robot knows how to do, and switch into rock-and-roll mode and go cause bodily harm to a raccoon hellbent on destroying you.
The game also featured a rather impressive physics engine given the age of the game, and is also a critical aspect to much of the game’s objectives. Since Rocket has no arms, most of the time your interaction with any other object is going to be by using your grapple beam to pick up and throw objects, either to knock something down or trigger a switch or some sort. When you throw a rock into a wall, and watch it semi-realistically bounce back and react to the environment around it, it’s pretty breathtaking. If you sit still on a ramp of some sort, Rocket will start to roll downward (as he uses a single wheel to move around, instead of legs). The way your beam kind of stretches about like a rubber band made of lasers when you’re hanging onto some fixture on a wall, or the way an item you’re carrying will bounce around other items… I’d go so far as to say some of the aspects of the physics engine are on par with Half-Life 2, even though it’s using technology from 1999.
The game also featured a rather interesting soundtrack. Most of the time, you didn’t notice it, because it was fairly subtle. Most of the levels had a somewhat lounge theme to them, but they always fit the level perfectly. The sound effects were superb; everything from the slightly gentle way rocks crumbled the the “Bwoop”s and “Woo-hoo!”s from Rocket’s actions was always amusing.
Graphically, this game was pretty spectacular, but there are occasions where you can easily tell some corners were cut. Typical examples would be a larger-than-life statue of one character is just a scaled-up version of the same 3D model file and generally looks like crap. But the graphics are a moot point, because the gameplay and enjoyability of this title make up for that and then some. The biggest problem I had with the game, graphically, was that in some areas, they used some really low-resolution textures. Aside from this minor gripe, however, the game fared pretty well, given the capabilities of the N64.
This game pretty much flew under the radar for most of the world, however. There are no known TV commercials for this game, even though the other two games mentioned earlier, Rayman 2 and Tonic Trouble, each had their own commercials. Rocket: Robot on Wheels hardly had any coverage in magazines, either. EGM barely touched on it, and Nintendo Power featured it two or three times and then pretended that it didn’t exist. Most gamers have never even heard of the game.
Needless to say, Rocket: Robot on Wheels was one of those games that quickly found itself in the bargain bin, since nobody ever heard of the thing.
I picked this game up at Wal-Mart a year after its release for $20.00. Now you can find it on eBay or Craigslist for about $10. If Ubisoft showed this game just the tiniest bit of marketing love (that it really deserved), we’d probably be playing sequels and spinoffs.
If none of this article convinced you to drop all of $10 on this game, the next screenshot definitely should.
That’s right. You play Tic-Tac-Toe with a robot chicken with an attitude. I don’t know of any other games that let you do anything near as awesome.
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Jon says:
Late comment, sorry.
Suckerpunch developed this game before moving on to the Sly Cooper series, led by Dev Madan’s brilliant art direction. When Suckerpunch went the realistic visual design route, Dev and a number of original people went on to form Loose Cannon. We need more games like this.
Griz says:
I remember buying this game because the plastic of the cartridge was red and it was really cheap compared to the other games. Turned out to be a sick game