Junk Runner 64

Can you repair your village back up to scratch? Junk Runner 64 is a homebrew game by Team Ultra Rare where you have to collect various pieces of debris from around the map to repair various mechanical objects in your village. The game was released on 02 Feb 2026 for the 2025 game jam, where it won 1st place. Well done!

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password lodejunker, or from Drive. You can also get the source code from Github.

About Junk Runner 64

Jax’s brother Samson is sick with a deadly illness, and it’s up to him to make him better. Unfortunately, all the machines on site are in dire need for repair so you need to find a way to repair them.

For each broken machine, you need to find at least one scattered part. The first one is close by, but the rest are far far away. The main robot in the central town will give you maps and pointers to where to find them, so you shouldn’t wander around too much.

Once you repair the first object (your hoverbike), you can start exploring the open-world environment. It’s a desolate wasteland with three main areas: A river to the southeast, sand dunes to the north and a deserted city to the southeast. Each area has the parts for one of the repairable machines in it so you don’t have to do too much back tracking. The only exception is the final object, which has its parts placed throughout the world.

Scattered across the courses are racetracks lined with checkpoint gates, where victory demands one to three full laps. Only one holds a vital piece for the final repair; the others offer a modest reward of 20 nuts.

Nuts are the currency for this game. While optional, they can be used to upgrade your bike. They allow you trigger speed boots at will, let your scanner detect nearby nuts and let you teleport to the different corners of the map instantly. You can find nuts naturally on the floor, but you only really need 50 in total to afford all the upgrades.

The map gets revealed as you explore naturally, but you can also find hidden maps that will reveal large chunks at once. The game takes about an hour to beat blind, but once you know where everything is, you can fly through it pretty easily.

Credits

Junk Runner 64 was made by Team Ultra Rare, which consists of:

• James Lambert
• Pyroxene
• SapphireOnze
• Beta_dynast
• Terzdesign
• Kaelin

Review and conclusion

Team Ultra Rare delivers the goods once again, this time with a sprawling open-world adventure game. It’s the first time I see something of this scale on the Nintendo 64, even official retail games from back in the day didn’t have worlds this big.

Driving around the deserted wasteland is an absolute pleasure. Bouncing around the terrain and aiming for the speed boosts is a lot of fun, so you’re unlieky to get bored at all even when you’re just searching for something.

The graphics are amazing, the character models feel like an upgraded version of Megaman 64. While most of the map is empty, at no point does the environment feel too repetitive or dull. There’s always something to look at and the scenery changes enough to keep things interesting.

Despite all this, there is some technical jank. The village area has some noticeable slowdown that affects even the music, which can get pretty distracting. There’s also been a couple of times where I fell through the scenery but there’s a failsafe that pops you back up right after so it’s not too bad. The game did also crash on me once, so be aware that it might happen and you could lose progress.

Junk Runner 64 is yet another leap forward in what is possible with N64 homebrew games. The unique open-world design really makes it stand out, and while there might be a lot of exploring and driving around aimlessly, there is never a dull moment to be found.