Sneks

Sneks is a homebrew minigame for the Nintendo 64 by Mr_J05H and released on 13 december 2024. You play as one of four snakes trying to feed rats to their mother while avoiding sharks.

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 Sneks

Sneks is a 3D game that takes place on a small beachy archipelago with a central island and four smaller island surrounding it; one on each corner. The central island has the snake mother and an offering plate, while the other four are empty except for a rat that randomly spawns on one of them.

You play as one of the child snakes and have to pick up the rat and bring it back to the central island to gain a point. The player to get the most points within two minutes wins.

There are three sharks swimming through the area which players must avoid. The one holding the rat will not let go of it until they are hit by a shark, so it’s up to the other players to attack the leader by pushing them towards the shark-infested waters. The attack is kind of like a shockwave, it pushes all the nearby players away from the attacker.

That’s all there is to it.

Fun fact: the working name of Sneks was Old Gods, since the premise was to bring offerings to an omnipotent god instead of a mother snake.

Credits

The game was made by Mr_J05H.

Review and conclusion

I do like the premise of Sneks, its simplicity is perfect for a minigame compilation. All you need to do is bring over the rats from the island over to the centre. The big challenge is therefore who of the four can do it the quickest.

I also really like the style. It would fit right in among any of the Mario Party games if you just replaced the snakes’ heads with Mario characters.

I think the big problem with Sneks is the balancing. The game is either too easy or too hard. It’s possible to just camp on the central island and repel the other snakes indefinitely until the timer runs out.

It is extremely difficult to steal a snake. First you need to get close to your opponent and press the attack button to push them towards the edge of the map. Often it’ll repel them at an angle so you have to do it multiple times. Then you have to get lucky and hope that there is a shark swimming by off-screen so that they can get eaten up by them. After all that effort, the rat will respawn on a random island so you still have to compete with the other players for that point.

Then you have the difficulty. On easy difficulty things are quite fair, but once you go up to medium or hard mode, things really get crazy. The AI bots get a speed boost which makes them move 50% faster than players in medium mode, and 100% faster in hard mode. This makes it impossible to get any rats unless you camp on one of the four islands and hope for a lucky spawn.

Here’ some simple things that could make the game more balanced:

• Have multiple rats spawning to give defending players the option to ignore the player holding the rat.
• Let the sharks swim in the main area. I saw them do this a few times, but having it done more often would have been more fun.
• Make the AI difficulty determine something like their reaction time or pathfinding rather than raw speed.
• Make the round shorter (60-90 seconds).
• Add a minimum distance between snakes since they can overlap each other, and the same pathfinding algorithm makes them stay overlapped for a long time.

Overall it feels like a game with potential that’s unfortunately held back by some flaws that make it feel tedious to play.