I haven't been gaming very much recently, life has been busy and what time I do have ends up going to tabletop gaming as I've got a new and growing YouTube channel dedicated to Solo TTRPG Gaming, as well as an ongoing in-person D&D 5e game.
With everything taking my attention, videogames have been taking a back seat but that doesn't take them too far from my mind. I recently got my old laptop up and running so I could download a few games for my son to play and it got me thinking about older games (since it's an older laptop and can't handle new games).
Once I started thinking about older PC games, it wasn't long before my mind took that thread and ran with it, and thus we end up with today's topic: BattleTanx for the Nintendo 64.
Image Source: https://gamecomplaintdepartment.com/review-battletanx-n64/
The premise of the game was utterly ridiculous. It's an apocalyptic version of the world where folks have banded together into rag-tag gangs that drive tanks all over the place trying to capture (and protect) women because the population is so devastated that I guess we needed breedable females.
From the Wiki summary, which is a lot better than my fuzzy memory of the plot:
In 2001, a virus has killed 99% of the female population of Earth. Various countries fight over each other's quarantine zones, and end up engaging in nuclear war, destroying much of civilization. The few remaining women (called Queenlords) are held by gangs who have taken over small pieces of the world. The main character, Griffin Spade, had his fiancée Madison taken away from Queens, New York by the U.S. government. Griffin becomes separated from his fiancée, and New York City is destroyed. He claims a tank for his own and sets out to cross the United States to find her, battling gangs as he reaches his goal. After surviving the ruins of New York City, Griffin heads westward gaining recruits in the countryside, Chicago, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.
Now, while there is a single player story mode, and it was fairly fun, the vast majority of my memories of this game come from the multiplayer split-screen.
Like many games of the era, the multiplayer side basically had you driving through the ruined streets of once-USA shooting other tanks, finding nukes, and effectively playing deathmatches or king-of-the-hill style games.
My cousins and I spent hours playing this!
For all the fun we had then, however, it's definitely a product of the times and I don't know if its got a lot of replay value these days... but dang it sure was fun at the time! A little like quake, Turok, or Twisted Metal... but with nukes and tanks. It was a ton of fun!
World of Longplays (god bless that channel) has a full playthrough of the single-player storyline, which would give you an idea of how this played:
Again, I don't know if it'd hold up now even for me who did enjoy it back in the day, as I think a lot of my nostalgia about it is 100% tied to the memories of the four of us kids sitting on an old shag carpet clustered in front of one of those 90's bricks of a tv drinking pop and eating chips while we whooped and hollered.
We lost something when couch-coop died, and it saddens me a bit that the newer generations of gamers won't have that same experience.
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An underrated classic for sure!
I've never played that game, but I miss the old couch co-op on split screen with corded controllers. On N64, I played mostly Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, but I think the PS1 splitter allowed for Crash Team Racing on 4-player mode, too. And there were plenty of 2-player racing and fighting games on SNES.
We played a TON of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark as well! A couple of years after they released when I was in about grade 10 we convinced the seniors to let us set up an N64 and a tv in their lounge (since only gr.12 kids had lounge access), and as long as they'd let us come in at recess and lunch hour we'd let them keep it in there. It was a fairly small school in the early 00's so not much risk of theft as everyone knew everyone else. They took the deal and we had games in that lounge right until we graduated. I suspect the younger classes kept up the tradition until the school closed a decade or so later. Hell of a lot of fun!
Yeehaw! Your reminisces of BattleTanx bring a twinkle to the eye and a warmth to the heart. Keep hold of those cherished gaming memories like a prized possession.