Lucker’s Arena

Lucker’s Arena is a homebrew game for the Nintendo 64 by Ritter7124 released on 13 December 2024 where four players fight each other RPG-style while assisted by a slot machine.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password minigamemadness and the source can be found here. Note that this is the same ROM that includes all the other minigames released for the 2024 N64brew Game Jam competition.

About Lucker’s Arena

The game takes place as a 1v1 RPG fight where two snakes take turns swiping at each other. Every player fights against each other round-robin style, making sure that every combination of players gets a chance.

Unline a normal RPG battle, Lucker’s Arena doesn’t let players take direct control of their character’s moves but rather everyone controls a spinning slot machine that determines their move. Basically, you pick a player to target with L or R, spin the wheel and the outcome of the spin is applied to that player.

After a player loses all their HP, their opponent is declared the winner of the round, and the next pair of players fight each other. Once all player have fought, the one with the most wins is declared the winner.

Skills

There are eight possible outcomes of a spin:

• Sword – Increases damage from 0-3 to 7-10
• Heart – Recover 50 hp
• Bomb – Instakill the opponent and turn them black.
• Swap – Swaps both player’s HP
• Burst – Lower cooldown between attacks to half
• Crit – Increases critical hit chance from 15% to 45%
• Vampirism – Damage done is given to the attacker as healing
• Lightning – Stuns the player
• Evade – Increase evasion chance from 15% to 30%
• Evade remove – Player can no longer evade (0% chance)

Strategy

There are only three things you can do in Lucker’s Arena: Spin for the left player, spin for the right player and don’t spin at all.

Most of these status effects are positive for the player they are cast on, the only exceptions are Evade Remove, Lightning and Swap (which depends on who has more HP).

This means that generally speaking you want to spin for the player you want to win only if they are falling behind since a bad move could swap your high HP with their low HP.

That said, rounds are only about 20 seconds each and spins take 4 seconds so it’s hard to strategise given that the state of the game can change quite a bit in a short period of time.

Point is, don’t get too butthurt if you lose, it’s really a game of chance either way.

Inspiration

This game was inspired by a Warcraft 3 custom map called Uther Party, which is itself a collection of minigames. I wasn’t able to find which minigame Lucker’s Arena is based on in particular since there are hundreds of minigames, but it should be in there somewhere.

Credits

This game was made Ritter7124 aka Tanner Probst. He joined the game jam quite late, so only had a few weeks to complete it.

Review and conclusion

The first impressions on Lucker’s Area are that of pure confusion. I had no idea what was going on, it looked like an RPG but there wasn’t any moves to choose or anything like that. It’s only after a few rounds in that you figure out that you’re not really supposed to select any moves but rather that everyone has a say in how each match takes place.

The concept of the game isn’t something that I find very appealing though. Having something be 90% luck based does seem unfair, and gets quite boring if all you’re doing is rolling dice for two minutes. If it was up to me, here are some things that I would suggest to make it more viable, while still keeping the same spirit of the game:

• Instead of 1v1 battles, have it be a 4-player free-for-all. This would let people choose their target for an attack, and shorten the duration of the minigame.
• Display status effects. It’s hard to tell what each roll is doing and how long it is lasting for.
• Instruction screen. The game’s description says that it’s a remake of a WC3 custom map, but it doesn’t say which one or how to play it. Ritter7124 did mention that he was short on time so it had to be cut out, but it would have been very helpful to know how to play the game without having to look into the source code.

I still do think that it’s impressive that this game was made not only by one person but in just two weeks or so, not to mention it has 3D graphics and everything. That said, even if you know how the game works, the lack of agency does makes the gameplay feel too bland for my tastes. I do look forward to Ritter7124’s future endeavours, this is a promising first step into N64 homebrew.