Great first post and picture! I wish more people had even that level of skill. The only thing that's happened is that the phosphors have started to dim - it can be tough to get well-lit pictures of CRTs without taking a shot of multiple frames.
Anyhow, here's a big ol' list of stuff - adventures in savestate-bashing my way through a ton of N64 games. General note: Make backup saves and stuff because the emulator is wonky, probably worse than before in some areas, while making small gains in others.
RACERS:
Automobili Lamborghini - By Titus, a bare-bones racer. Very spartan looks, but perhaps just enough to get by with the feeling of being (for example) in a city. Car handling seems reasonable. Little play time, a couple courses. Doesn't do anything particularly badly, but there's no particular reason to play it, either. Not recommended.
Beetle Adventure Racing! vs. San Francisco Rush 2049: This is a tough one. Rush 2049's jumps can be very hard to pull off and you can be penalized greatly for failing - but the same is true of BAR. On top of that, BAR's speed categories scale in a manner similar to
Mario Kart 64's CC engine classes, but handling is
very touchy - the car can swing back and forth even straight off the starting line. I'm only up to the cars available for the Pro circuit. San Francisco Rush 2049 is a nicer challenge in that there's less collecting foolishness than in BAR - although BAR's bonus box collecting is a bit like the coin races in Diddy Kong Racing. Overall, I have to say I prefer Rush 2049, even though it is not the most technically accomplished of these titles, its amazing speed sense and physics jumps set it out there. Rush 2049 has lots of great nighttime scenes and soundtrack to match. Ironically, given its reputation for having lovely and fantastically-themed maps, so far I have been most captivated by the surprisingly detailed city map in Beetle Adventure Racing. A matter of taste. Both recommended for a look for racing, racing jumps, OR exploration fans. If you like all three elements together you should like these much. Rush 2049, of course, is available in generally improved form on multiple other systems, although I enjoy the N64's soundtrack best overall (including the rather silly semi-cover of "New Year's Day" by U2).
Diddy Kong Racing: Another great, this one starts getting ridiculously strict and difficult in a hurry. However, some races that seem impossible at first (i.e. the second race against the red octopus) turn out to be pretty simple if you just are persistent. It has that trademark Rare style that I find fresh only in the Banjo games - unfortunately I'd go ahead and pick Banjo for that reason, and he's the slowest-accelerating character - though he shines in top speed. I don't think Rare makes this evident. Good game, definitely recommended as well. The variety of craft available definitely help this one stay a while.
Cruis'n World, Exotica - Decent enough ports of the arcade originals, but as I recall pretty bare-bones. Not played recently. Recommended for a look, even the original
Cruis'n USA port to the N64 (which is not especially well regarded). However, they're very simple in comparison to the other games, and haven't grown much out of their original quarter-eating incarnations. I don't know why I'm such a sucker for these, even the GBA title(s?) rouse me a little for some totally unfathomable reason.
F1 Racing Championship - I have to say that I like how this one controls, and I like the proportions and details - the stands look like there's tens of thousands of people in them, at a distance; there's skid marks placed on the German track (which is not the first in the game) to show you how you should be approaching the maps. I guess it shows where my mind's been that I found myself meandering into a closed pit (under Arcade behavior, instead of the Simulation) and was almost disappointed to find there wasn't a shortcut. Quite a bit good about this one - but the rush of elements past seems to lack just a little bit of fluidity I'd like. Mostly, it's down to my subpar handling and tendency to try to floor it too long - always a way to end in tears. Strangely, either the AI's handicapping itself by slowly navigating the little bundles of turns scattered throughout the race, where you can just barrel straight through as long as you don't attempt to steer and spin out. I'm not sure what changes in simulation mode. Overall, I think it does a lot well - but given the N64's capabilities, maybe it's demanding a bit much, and some things do suffer - many stretches of the track are essentially featureless corridors to the side, which contrasts starkly against the artistically designed microcosms of tracks in the adventure and exploratory racers listed above. Not a bad game, but probably not anybody's first choice in this day and age. Neat point: The music is great '90s stuff; after a race (at least when you win) I found myself thinking about an intro for a Raiden Fighters game - even some of the sampled effects used are the same!
F-Zero X: I played some races of this recently. Very simplistic looking, and gets difficult in a hurry. I've only seen the one unchanging goal - get first place. Alright as far as it goes, but I didn't find much compelling about it after having played other racers - even on the same system - which focus on speed in futuristic settings that blaspheme gravity, without being so single-minded and even simplistic. It's rather interesting to reflect that there was a Disk Drive expansion to the game - perhaps there's a great deal more detail in that version, but so far the tracks haven't shown enough individual character that I'd be surprised if they couldn't fit within a 64KB demo project, let alone require a special high density magnetic disk for storage. Personally, a rather forgettable experience.
Penny Racers: I still don't really know what Choro Q is, but when I started playing this one I realized it had to be part of that series. The start of the game throws you in a painfully slow and tiny squarish car with essentially no acceleration, lumps you in with other random cars (that are also incredibly slow, square, and small) and tasks you with sort-of-drifting your way around enemy obstacles (dropped by the AI players - as far as I can tell, you're defenseless) and looking for boost pads. This is what kind of game Penny Racers is: While you watch your car trundle into a cute 90-degree turn at about 20 miles per hour, you can apply a button (handbrake I guess) to try and drift around, but it's just as likely you'll spin perfectly end over end at the same time. Is it bad? Is it good? It's Penny Racers, that's what. Or Choro Q, whatever the hell that is. Suggested? How am I supposed to even know what this is?!
Ridge Racer 64: Seems good, but I'm surprised to note that the race queen herself is driving me nuts. However, the main things that bother me - there's something about the handling, and there's also something about how it deals with details, where there's been more time where I noted a tunnel wall in front of me popping, up to which point I appeared to be driving at a wall. I find the effect unsettling and surprisingly harmful to my enjoyment of the game for some reason. I'm not sure it quite reaches the top tier, but it might be at the top of the second.
Road Rash 64: All the useless bashing implements you remember, and all the ugly 3D models you could want! Impressive amounts of listenable-quality licensed music here - some of it pretty damn great too. The world is rather cheerful and nondescript, mostly a collection of shanties gathered by the roadside, with powerups and weapons hidden so far off to the sides that you typically can't afford to go after them. A shame, because some of the areas are clearly set up to allow some cool jumps - that don't work all the time. Like Roadsters Trophy, putting money into the game is like putting experience into an RPG - but this isn't an RPG, it's a racer, and I don't really want to replay the levels. Anyway, the fighting is stupid (just slash away at anybody to your sides and behind, I think) and the racing isn't much better. Kind of interesting but also kind of a complete wreck.
Rush 2: XTREEEEEM RACINGS: The ugly one which was not proud of San Francisco for some reason. Shame on you, Midway. The ugliest of the three games, but it does play well at times. A lot of blocky and ugly layouts, but it does have some charm. Subway rats! And heck, it's better than perhaps half of the games on this list just because it keeps up the Rush tradition of coin collecting. Kind of suggested.
S.C.A.R.S.: I already completely forgot about this. It has lots of colors and it has cars shaped like animals. It's not very memorable so far.
Star Wars: Episode 1 - Racer: The hunt for more treasure for Lucas: The last console port we put effort into: THE CANYONS SHOT FIRST: There is actually a sequel where you go around and murder people, isn't that great? It looks good but also unplayable on Project64 due to some aspect ratio issues. Also kind of undetailed, but I can't see stuff. I find the minimalistic speeder race level of Shadows of the Empire (which also has CHALLENGE COINS ON DUSTY DESERT SHOP AWNINGS, AW YEA) more inspiring, but I can't count this one out yet - or its sequel. Probably better played on PC. IGN thought the Dreamcast port was uninspired. No rating yet! It will be easy to come by, at least, thanks to the historical Lucas excellence in bringing massive quantities branded petroleum products to video rental and thrift stores near you, and not nearly enough copies of
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.
Roadmasters Trophy: What better game to round off this short selection than one of the better titles on the system - and a break from character by Titus! After the rather simple and lackluster Lamborghini title, this game has lots of character: Goofy and even inappropriate sound bites; very shiny cars modeled on all kinds of famous marques and models; demanding but tight handling and weather conditions; AI that won't be pushed over, continuous seasons and upgrade options (including simple gear ratio - two settings - and suspension tweaks); scenic and imaginative tracks. It's not perfect. IGN strangely criticized the differences in handling going from situation to situation - who would've thought that acceleration and turning would be sluggish in snow, but crisp in sun-drenched island roads? My criticism is that while the tracks have a lot of charcter in a small space, there generally aren't different paths to choose (although if you can hold out without a pit stop using your original gear, you get a few seconds guaranteed over the AI racers who appear to always stop) and the background elements don't interact with the player at all. On top of that, the tracks are kept rather short as you traverse them five times each. I also don't care for the career mode: There are C, B, and A level entries (no license test) and cars, and while you can unlock cars for use in any mode, it's really annoying to repeatedly play the lower circuits to scrape together enough cash to get a better car - and no doubt it's easy to bankrupt yourself by losses or even making sales (which lose you a couple thousand here and there), especially if you buy a car you can't use in the upcoming circuit. Sometimes the game locks you out of buying a car you should be able to, as well. Overall, a pretty game as far as it goes but it won't change your life, and the more animated elements of levels generally outstay their welcome soon. Still worth a look, definitely quite impressive when it unleashes a heavy rainstorm, or when looking at the cars in the showroom. A nice late project from Titus which validates their existence, more or less.
World Driver Championship: Doesn't work in Project64, all the usual glitches and speed indeterminacy rife in the emulator cheerfully on display here.
MISC:
Batman Beyond - Return of the Jocker. Horrible-looking close-in brawler, kind of feels like it wants to be a beltscroller sometimes, without any finesse, and sometimes it wants you to explore, in spite of the engine. Very little play time. HIGHLY Not recommended.
Blues Brothers 2000 - speaking of strange IGN
reviews, player Cory Lewis sounds almost optimistic about the game. Well, here's what I saw: An unlovely set of caricatures - the one spot of detail in the game I saw - dropped into a set of completely random, useless, and paper-thin scenarios. We've got to make people collect things - okay, make characters drop coins and scatter musical notes around the place. Need hints? Step on the golden records found lying everywhere, even inside a supermax prison. Shame, even with the tried and true Rare Style they reportedly didn't manage to stretch the game content by more than a couple hours, if the review is correct - and I thought Hercules was shamelessly undetailed, sparse, and short! Oh, and that prison - this place has me almost nostalgic for gaming sewers. In fact this place has me feeling nostalgic for every aspect of Hercules, and if this game warrants a 5.4, Hercules must be at least an 11. Back to prison: A completely rectangular and undetailed level, it's oppressive just to think about this place. Kind of like a real prison, in fact. Dead to Rights on the GameCube is more detailed than this - and there's no fun minigames to look forward to. Supposedly there's other stuff to do and see later in BB 2000, but the criminally undetailed and stupidly designed - not to mention cruel and unusual in many wrong ways - opening act has me wishing this one had been banned. The only thing I can say for it is that there haven't been any off-color jokes yet; the fighting and damage effects are slapstick - for the kids, you know, the natural allies of the Blues Brothers. VERY NOT RECOMMENDED.
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine: Project64 looks into the snowglobe of its own ambition and falls through the world, probably on a path straight to hell. Seriously, the game starts with what looks like a spherical desert scene in miniature, which rapidly flies away from us, and we try something else with tears in our eyes. The Zeruda-killer app will have to wait for another day. There's always the Game Boy Color version.
Rocket - Robot on Wheels - (one of the) interesting relic(s) from a time when all it took to make an action game was a list of all the batshit insane ideas for minigames you could muster. Who wants to go riding on the world's slowest and most predictable roller coaster in order to find some hidden thingamajigs? Yeah, I didn't think so either. Still, a lot of stuff to do that I haven't even touched yet, and it deserves some recognition for that. Overall, though, this is one of those games that makes me realize "PlayStation owners had the same thing, except much better" - Diddy Kong Racing maybe breaks even with Crash Team Racing, but this isn't quite a poor man's Ape Escape. The minigames are okay so far, but I've got better things to do than play tic-tac toe with robot chickens. (Wait, do I?)
Yoshi's Story: Hi, I'm an elephant. It's my job to be an
asshole and block your progress for some goal I refuse to explain! Isn't this useless screen border cute? You even get a button to turn it on and off! (Yeah, I know there's a reason for the border. Ugh, singing Yoshi. Yuck, yuck, yuck.)
You know, I'd be rather shocked if
Superman 64 actually turns out worse than this and even Batman Beyond - if I know anything about Superman on N64, there should be rings and undetailed metropolises to fly through. That's gotta beat stomping on switches to watch electrons painfully crawl over to a plate so you can get launched up to the higher levels of boredom in Blues Brothers 2000.
Pilotwings 64: Looks great, crashed. Gotta see if it's salvageable.
Quake II: One game that has benefited tremendously from Project64 2.1, I think, or at least the newest (and probably last) version of Jabo's renderer. Still, parts of enemies show through themselves, and there's an effect (I guess you'd call it a wallhack) on all the time that allows most enemies and items to be seen through walls from a great distance. I don't really mind it, though...fun game as it goes. Despite having years using the traditional Xbox/PlayStation style movement control scheme, and years using a mouse with the left hand and arrow keys for FPSes, this game did my head in for a few minutes when I tried using its default scheme, because I discovered that precise aiming using the C-buttons (even when mapped to a real analog stick) is impossible. I'm getting the hang of it, although I still sometimes pull back or push up at the wrong time. Oh, what about the game? Quake II world theme rendered into cute bite-sized portions. Small maps, generally around 30 enemies and 3 secrets each. A bit of interesting mapping here, but for the most part nothing astonishing, and probably not up to the level of the iD originals or the expansions. Still, quite playable in single player.
Duck Dodgers Starring Daffy Duck (in the 24th-and-1/2 century!) - game starts off very promisingly, although the quality level meanders here and there. Some areas (like the opening) are very carefully designed, while others are pretty primitive (the "Guard Robot Room," which I SWORE said "Guard Robot Doom," level from the Yosemite Sam level is embarrassingly underdetailed). The play system is exceptionally streamlined - something of a letdown to fans of games like Mischief Makers or Castlevania, really - but the simple system does help you spend more time focusing on the platforming while not worrying so much about collecting (pretty quickly I had racked up the hundreds of blue star things to get 9 reserve lives, not that I needed anything with a savestate; the blue things also refill health, quite conveniently). Cute if simple story that has some neat outgrowths; it's nice to see how Infrogrames has managed to showcase a lot of well-known and many lesser-known characters from the Warner Brothers vault (not the water tower, definitely; it's all classic-era stuff) here. The first couple planets are of very good quality looks-wise, and I liked how the cartoon style complemented many areas like the metropolitan hub for Rocky's world. The third place has some neat stuff of its own, but looks embarrassingly rushed and sparse in comparison to the others. Boss battles so far have been complete jokes. Definitely an interesting game for the N64 but I'm not sure it's something that really warrants a recommendation, especially in light of all the mediocre bits. The highs of this game are generally stylistic; gameplay itself isn't much to write home about. Man, and people complain about Dead to Rights Redemption or even Red Dead Redemption!
Final game to mention:
Donkey Kong 64 - when I first played this, I thought it was pretty neat. Replaying that first hour or so (up to the first boss battle, most of which progress I lost due to one of Project64's famous failures) this time, I'm considerably less enthusiastic about the rather slapdash moves and other gameplay variants (FPS weapons...ugh...although prettier to look at than the FPS blaster mode in Duck Dodgers) and especially about the large amount of time needed to run back and forth. The matching warp pads - up to five in each area! - seem like Rare's recognition that the game was getting pretty bananas. Still, there's a few good points here, although I still can't get used to Funky Kong (and probably much less those who remember him in his mid-'90s SNES-era look, he seems to have gone full survivalist here).
More on the plate for later.
...I hate nu metal. 
