Mallard

Mallard is a homebrew minigame for the Nintendo 64 by Josh Kautz and released on 13 December 2024. It’s a game where four ducks (mallards) run around a field slapping snowmen to delay winter.

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 Mallard

Mallard is one of the simpler minigames in this game jam. Each player plays as a different kind of mallard:

• Player 1 is a male mallard
• Player 2 is a female mallard
• Player 3 is a young Pekin duck
• Player 4 is an adult Pekin duck

The story behind the game is “Don’t migrate – fight off winter!” which sums things up quite nicely. Snowmen appear throughout the stage and it’s up to you to destroy as many as possible before the timer runs out.

Each snowman takes a few hits to kill, and killing it grants one point. You can also make your opponents lose points by slapping them for -0.1 points per slap.

That’s really about it. As the time limit approaches, there are more snowmen that spawn which allows you to get some double-kills but that’s as complex as it goes.

Credits

Mallard was made by Josh Kautz as his first game.

Review and conclusion

The impression I (and others) got when playing Mallard is that I had no idea which player I was. In the game jam’s guidelines it said that each player had to be identifiable by colour or at the very least with a text bubble or something. This makes it very confusing since at the beginning of the stage all the players (and bots) are rushing to the same snowman. Josh did say that adding player markers to the characters was next on his list of things to developed but unfortunately ran out of time.

Once you get your bearings though, the game is quite intuitive and easy to play. All you need to do is move around and slap things to your heart’s content. If I really had to complain about something, it’s that you can only slap sideways and you can get a bit ‘stuck’ on the top/lower edges of a snowman. Fixing this requires stepping back a bit which grants your opponents time to steal your rightful kill.

While Mallard could use a few more bells and whistles like character labels, different snowmen or alternative attacks, its simplicity also means that it gets very little wrong. It’s a fun little game that works just right.