The Third Arm

The Third Arm is a homebrew game for the Nintendo 64 by Team Riistahillo and released on 13 December 2024. It’s the N64 equivalent of the Twister board (floor?) game, where you have to follow instructions by holding or pressing the buttons you’re told.

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 The Third Arm

The original Twister board game has you (and others) spin a wheel which tells you which extremity to place on which coloured spot on a play mat, contorting your body until someone loses their balance and eventually loses.

The idea behind The Third Arm is that it’s a game of Twister for your Nintendo 64. There is a large 3D N64 controller on screen, and every five seconds a new command appears for each player to follow. If a player fails to perform the command in time, they start bleeding out their HP. The last player standing wins.

There are three commands that can be made:

• Hold button
• Tap button repeatedly
• Release button

There’s about 1 second’s worth of time to let you shift your position, after which you will start to lose HP if you fail. I find that there are a maximum of around 5 buttons you have to tap or hold at a time, after which some commands will be removed.

If there are no human players left, the game goes into turbo mode to let a CPU player win quickly.

Credits

The Third Arm was made by Team Riistahillo, which consists of Samuli Jääskeläinen and Pyry Takkunen.

Review and conclusion

I can say with confidence that The Third Arm is a game that would definitely not be able to exist on any other console than the N64. While you could technically get away with it on a SNES or GameCube, the N64 adds an additional level of challenge by having a three-pronged controller which makes it almost impossible to press any combination of buttons without contorting your hands.

It is a pretty difficult game to play, but that’s kind of the point. It can in theory go on indefinitely like an arcade game but the difficulty makes sure that it ends rather swiftly. Each round lasts about 50-70 seconds depending on the difficulty and RNG, which is ideal for a minigame compilation like this.

The Third Arm is a very simple game so there’s not really much to improve. If anything, I’d say that there should have been some more emphasis on the new button change. There is already a short “pop” sound, but it’s drowned out by the loud music. A visual indicator would also make it much clearer.

Even with that brief nitpick, it’s an overall great unique game that fits in well with the rest of the minigames in the 2024 compilation.