SUGGOH
SUGGOH (aka Someone2639’s Ultra Galactic Game of Horse) is a homebrew game for the Nintendo 64 by Someone2639 released on 9 Dec 2021. In it, you play a game of HORSE with drawings. It was developed to participate in the 2021 64brew game jam.
You can download the ROM from the download page for this homebrew game by using the password galactichorses
or see the source code on Github and download from Drive.
SUGGOH style and gameplay
Style
SUGGOH has a fairly minimalistic style. The game consists of two drawing boards with triangles and dots and a control panel in the foreground with three buttons.
Gameplay
The gameplay is a bit more difficult to comprehend since there aren’t really any instructions in-game besides the control scheme being displayed on the side. The game follows the rules of the basketball game HORSE where you basically need to mimic the previous player’s shots to win.
In SUGGOH, the first player starts by drawing something on the drawing board by using the control stick and A button, and then the 2nd player needs to replicate that drawing by controlling the triangle pointer using tank controls.
‘Control’ theme
This is fairly straightforward – the idea is that two people have to complete the same task (drawing the picture) by using two different control schemes.
Credits
SUGGOH was (as the full name implies) made by Someone 2639 who did everything in the game. He’s primarily a Super Mario 64 hacker and works on a lot of decompilation of N64 games.
Conclusion and review
First off, I’d like to say that I had trouble running this game. The footage recorded came from N64 hardware and it has this flashing solid strip along the bottom half of the screen. It didn’t work on Project 64 either. The creator said to use Mupen 64 and that didn’t work with default settings. So I tried Parallel, but that seemed to be too much of a pain to install so I skipped it. Other people have played the game without these problems, so it might just be my setup.
That said, the biggest problem I had made the game unplayable. Basically, you’re supposed to copy over the drawing as the 2nd player using tank controls rather than the joystick but the tank controls just don’t work. The cursor can move in a straight line, but every turn rotates the triangle normally but makes you move in a random direction. It’s practically impossible to go where you want to go because it is so unpredictable. Not to mention the almost-equilateral triangle makes it hard to see where it might be pointing towards.
The creator has said that the project was mainly to test out a microcode called Turbo3D for clout, so the bulk of this effort involved was mostly for the technical innovation and novelty. For that, I must admit that it does deserve some recognition. I just think that it might have been better if that one glitch was fixed or if it was done as a demo instead of an interactive game.