 Alright, here we go. My first video on a Nintendo 64 game, and no, I don't want to talk about Mario Kart, or Ocarina of Time, or Perfect Dark, or Banjo Kazooie, or any of that stuff. Let's talk for a bit about Road Rash 64, one of my favorite games ever, and probably my favorite N64 game, period. Now, there are two things that I personally like in a video game, simplicity and carnage. The Road Rash series has always been a perfect combination of the two. It's simple motorcycle racing where anything goes, and you try and win each race by beating the crap out of anybody that gets in your way using all sorts of weapons, dodging obstacles like oncoming traffic, and road signs along the way. There's four different styles of bikes to choose from, two are built for speed and agility, and two are built for strength and endurance. There's also a huge roster of characters to choose from. I like picking this guy because he looks like Hollywood Hogan. Finish in the top three of a race and you unlock the next one, racking up prize money and combat bonus money as you go, eventually making it to the next set of races where you can upgrade your bike. You get a health meter that allows you to absorb vicious beatings from your opponents until you're knocked out, or until you crash into something like an idiot, like I always do. You can usually withstand between three and six knockouts or crashes per race, depending on which bike you've picked. If you flame out, you gotta pay up to fix your bike. If you don't have enough money, it's game over. Every race takes place on this island. The races start out short and they're easy enough to win, so you can get a bit of money saved up. You're racing through farmland, highways, cities, and neighborhoods, but the further you progress in the game, the races get longer and longer to the point that eventually the goal isn't to win, but just to survive, it's a war of attrition. Eventually cops show up and try and chase you down. If you get knocked out by a cop, you're busted and you have to pay bail to rejoin the race circuit. Okay, so that pretty much describes every road crash game, right? So what makes the N64 version so good? There's two things here that stand out. One is that this game allows for a huge crowd of bikers to coexist on the screen at the same time, and the other is that the camera angle is ever so slightly angled in a way that you can see more of what's around you, so every race is just this huge chaotic mess of nonsense. It's so great. You've got people flying all over, getting bashed into oblivion. Even anonymous cars driving the other way callously plow into a giant group of bikers. I mean, look at this. Now that's funny as hell. I gotta mention the sound design here as well. The grunts and groans and screams here are laugh out loud funny to me, and they're especially funny when you get to the end of the race and you get to see your combat scorecard. The music in Road Rash 64 is also fantastic and fits perfectly, but unfortunately I can't really use it in this video, since it's mostly major label bands like Sugar Ray and CIV, so this video would probably get taken down or something. But yeah, seriously, the more I play Road Rash 64, the less I care about winning the race or advancing. On several occasions I purposely slow down so I can get back into the group so I can beat the ever-loving crap out of people with sledgehammers, pool cues, and get this, they even have stuff like mace and tasers. If you mace an opponent, they'll clutch their eyes, losing control of their bike for a brief period as they helplessly careen forward. The same thing with the taser, only it's like a hundred times funnier since their arms go flying out as they have some kind of epileptic fit. I mean, it's simple. Either you think this is funny as hell, or you don't. As if the regular one-player mode wasn't fun enough, there's also a multiplayer here that's supported up to four players. How can you beat that? There's all sorts of different game modes here as well. A death mode batch where completing a lap earns you a point, but a crash or knockout loses you a point. A mode where you're hunting pedestrians, a tag mode, and of course just a regular race mode. Road Rash 64 is not perfect, obviously. The graphics suffer from the typical N64 bleariness, and that annoying omnipresent gray fog in the distance. Hey, just pretend you're racing in Beijing and the setting suddenly become a lot more realistic. Another con is that since this is an N64 game, that means you are usually stuck wrestling with the bulky, uncomfortable, and unintuitive N64 controller. Okay, that's my own personal hangup. I've always hated that controller, but I managed to play it on the Project 64 emulator and map out my SNES iBuffalo USB controller well enough that I didn't lose any functionality. So even if you hate the N64 controller like I do, there's still ways around that. So yeah, Road Rash 64 is so much fun. It's just pure chaos. There's bikes and bikers flying around in every direction, weapons bouncing off of bodies, people screaming. I'm not sure there's another game out there that's made me laugh harder over the years. Hey, if you like the Genesis or PlayStation or 3DO versions, better good for you. But I like the N64 version the best because of the hilarious sound design, the absurd physics, the four player functionality, and the fact that you can have a veritable mosh pit of bikers on the screen all at the same time with God knows what going on in there. Road Rash 64 is one of the best Nintendo 64 games out there and one of the funniest video games ever made.