At one point a friend gave me a Nvidia Shield which is like an Xbox controller with a screen and it can play emulators and stuff. I got so excited, there were so many games I hadn’t played on N64 that I really wanted to try!
So I set it up and got Ocarina of Time, Banjo Kazooie, Pokémon Snap, Kirby. Then I tried to play them. Zelda seemed to play at first but then a single pixel would snag and drag across the screen one by one until it was just an abstract terrifying mess. I tried other ROMs, other emulators. No luck.
Oh well, I thought. I’ll try Banjo Kazooie.
That one played with what I can only describe as snaps where everything would judder and leap around, dumping me amidst enemies and cutting off cut scenes. It wasn’t playable.
I tried the hardest to get Pokémon Snap to work.
At first I couldn’t move the camera, I could only snap pictures of what was in view. After laborious troubleshooting I got the camera to move, but all my pictures came out black and wouldn’t let me progress. I could do an infinite loop of the tutorial level but no farther.
But Kirby and the Crystal Shard worked.
After all the others it behaved extraordinarily well. There was only one tiny glitch that was so mild it didn’t affect gameplay. It did change the tone of the game slightly, I must admit. Because it was a bit jarring when the pink blob just opened in inescapable void to suck down any in his path.
The glitch: Kirby didn’t have a face.
