Hi Hi
So! This will be the first of many I hope; Nostalgia Quest!!! For now I will be sporadically positing about something that brings me that oh so good feeling of nostalgia and sharing it with you, maybe it’ll bring you some of those warm fuzzies too. Today is Jet Force Gemini. Jet Force Gemini was an original concept 3rd person shooter developed by Rare for the Nintendo 64. The game launch October 11, 1999. The main reason I thought about this particular game was because my birthday recently passed, May 24! Well back in 1999 I asked my mother to get this game for me on a whim…that whim being the word Gemini in the title. Being born May 24th makes to a Gemini 😀 and I thought that was reason enough to get the game. I may have seen something about it in one of my fave gaming magazines but I know I had no idea what the game is about save the title matching my zodiac sign! Either way I got the game and it was one of the best games I played on the N64 and definitely one of Rare’s best games!
JFG is about twin intergalactic policing agents Juno and Vela and their K9 companion Lupus! War has gripped the galaxy and Juno, Vela, and Lupus are thrust into fighting against this evil ANT EMPIRE led by the tyrant Mizar!!! Again I had no idea what the game was about before I got and thus the amazingness begins. Mizar is sending his Drones to destory the tribal race…called the Tribals led by their King Jeff! What also made me fall in love with the game is that the Tribals closely resembled Ewoks!! They were just friggin adorable. The game was uber cinematic with real time cut scenes, you also had full control of the camera. The game opens beautifully, trio escaping the destruction of the Jet Force Police Fleet by Mizar and then orbiting the planet Goldwood. Goldwood is then attacked by Mizar and the carnage is REAL is this game. You land on the planet where Mizar’s Drones have decimated several villages, I mean these ants have tortured and blown these little guys to bits.
As I note before this is a 3rd person shooter and the controlls from how I remembered were pretty spot on. Sure back in 1999 I wasn’t meticulous in my break down of game play mechanics but it definitely didn’t leave any scares in my mind. So since the game was a shooter there was an array of weapons to choose from as well as other combat items. There was the classic pistol, a machine gun, a tri rockets launcher (which was friggin awesome!), a plasma shotgun, a shocker that shot lightning bolts, cluster bombs, grenades, homing missiles, and shurikens!!! All of them did crazy damage effect to your ant enemies. You could shot of limbs, blow of their heads, and even just blow them to bits. The AI of the Drones was also pretty darn smart, they didn’t risk getting shot, always using cover and their shields never just running out at you…the Drones could even SURRENDER if they thought they had no chance!
You could also play any of the Jet Force Trio, each of them had unique abilities Juno could walk through magma, Vela could swim underwater indefinitely and Lupus could hover for short periods of time. Along with the excellent single player campaign JFG also had some amazing multiplayer, there was a two to four person death match as well as a racing mini game that my sister and I played all the time because we were both really into racing game at that time too and there was also a firing range!
The game was just chalked full of little goodies with 15 nonlinear worlds which you could freely explore and usually had some little secret you could unlock. To this day JFG remains one of my all-time favorite games on the N64. I hope someday to recover my N64 from my mother’s house and revisit JFG! Have any of you heard of or played JFG? Let me know how you liked it and it was as wonderful for you as it was for me!
Luvusagi OUT!
Thanks very interesting blog!