Juicin’ 64

Juicin’ 64 (short for ‘juicing’) is a Nintendo 64 homebrew game by Kivan117 released on 13 December 2020. You play as a gym bro trying to get fitter and fitter. This game was made for the 64brew game jam 2020, which was a game dev competition held late last year.

You can download the ROM and source code from the download page for this homebrew game by using the password kivansjuicin or see the source code on Github and download from Drive.

The game can be a bit difficult to set up – its save type must be set to a 4k EEPROM or else it will give you a blue screen of death upon boot. To get it to run on an Everdrive, add this as a new lie at the bottom of the save_db.txt file in your Everdrive OS folder (works for both PAL and NTSC versions of the ROM):

0x414EDF2B=1 (Juicin 64)

Juicin’ 64 style and gameplay

The game is in an 8-bit style with small little sprites that walk around a gym. There is a basic intro and title,making it very reminiscent of a game from the NES era.

The gameplay in Juicin’ 64 itself is pretty straight forward. You’re in a gym where there’s a bunch of clones doing shuttle runs back and forth. You need to avoid the runners and grab the objects dropped throughout the floor.

There are three things you can pick up:

• Barbells – give you points, from 100 to 1,000.
• Orange protein powder tub – Increases your point multiplier by 100 per half tub.
• Blue protein powder tub – Recovers some health

There is up to five barbells on the floor at any one time, and up to five powder tubs. It took me a while to realise that saving up the rarer blue tubs meant that fewer orange tubs would spawn. You’re going to need more orange ones anyway, so take each pickup when you need to.

As you collide with runners, your health starts to go down until you die. Well, you don’t really die, you get angrier and angrier until you punch someone and get kicked out because you’re not allowed to fight. There’s a little sign at the top that says DARE, the anti drug and violence program so it does make sense. It’s kinda funny how you lose when you become violent rather than your opponent.

The music is a 16-bit rendition of Enter Sandman by Metallica. It’s a fairly long song for this type of game, I’ve never survived long enough to reach the end.

‘Size’ Theme

Just like with Castle 64, this game doesn’t put the size theme directly into the gameplay but rather into its meta. The objective of the game is to drink more and lift more to become bigger (from the ‘gains’ in the score panel).

Kivan has stated that the interpretation of the theme was to bridge the gap between arcade players and bodybuilders – Both grind the same thing day in and day out just for the sake of getting a new personal record.

Credits

The game was made by Kivan117 as a single developer, using some modified stock assets.

Conclusion and review

I really like this game. It has a simple 1980’s arcade style and gameplay, but on the Nintendo 64. It sort of reminds me of Food Fight on the Atari 7800 (one of my favourites on the console)

There’s no slowdown and I didn’t encounter any glitches so it’s technically very proficient. If anything, the game is missing post-hit invincibility so it’s easy to lose all your health in just one hit.

There is a way to ‘cheese’ the game though. Collecting barbells give you points and tubs give you extra points, but picking up a barbell decreases your multiplier by just one. So all you need to do is fill up your tub meter to the max, and then alternate between barbells and tubs. This will give you 1,000 points every time to max out your gains ber object picked.

There is no penalty for standing still and runners just move straight so you can time things pretty easily if you just stay put. Kivan117 did put in that there would be different enemy types with different walking patterns but it didn’t make it into the game.

Nevertheless, Juicin’ 64 is still a fun little game to play through for a bit. It can get repetitive but once the gym becomes crowded, pathfinding becomes a whole lot of fun.