Jet Force Gemini
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 An interstellar adventure from Rare!
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Jet Force Gemini is a third-person shooter game developed and published by Rare for the Nintendo 64 video game console. It was first released in North America on October 11, 1999 and in Europe on November 2, 1999.
It was included in the Rare Replay compilation for Xbox One on 2015.
Plot
Evil insect tyrant Mizar has invaded the planet Goldwood and enslaved its natives, the Tribals. The Jet Force Gemini squad, consisting of twins Juno & Vela and their dog Lupus, receive an S.O.S. from the Tribals, but before they can do anything their ship is attacked by Mizar's ant drones. While rushing to the escape pods Juno is attacked and forced to stay behind while Vela and Lupus escape. Juno manages to escape as well but the team is separated during the attack.
Juno reaches Goldwood where he meets Tribal King Jeff who explains what happened. With the group separated, each member of Jet Force Gemini travel various planets to fight Mizar's forces and rescue as many Tribals as possible while searching for the rest of the team. During his quest Juno meets a robot named Floyd who decides to join the team. Eventually the team reunites at Mizar's palace and defeat him, but Mizar flees and hijacks an asteroid to set it into a collision course with earth.
Gemini's ships are unable to catch up to the asteroid, but Jeff reveals that he has an ancient space ship that could reach the asteroid, but 12 parts of the ship are missing. The team receives armor upgrades and searches the missing parts through out the galaxy, they also must find rescue all the Tribals so Jeff can give them the final piece of the ship.
With the ship repaired Gemini goes to the asteroid for a final battle against Mizar. Juno finally defeats Mizar for good, but when he does it is revealed that Mizar is a robot controlled by Jeff's jealous brother Barry. Mizar is defeated, however it's too late to stop the asteroid now, but Floyd volunteers to take a bomb to the core of the asteroid to destroy it while everyone else escapes. Floyd destroys the asteroid but dies in the process.
In the ending, Jet Force Gemini is awarded for their work and the team celebrates their victory by disco dancing.
Why It Rocks
- High intensity action shooting and some platforming.
- Challenging difficulty. The enemy AI doesn't just shoot you carelessly and often runs into cover and uses flanking maneuvers.
- Fantastic soundtrack
- Three different playable characters each with their own unique abilities:
- Juno: He can walk on lava (somehow?) without taking damage.
- Vela: She can dive underwater without running out of oxygen.
- Lupus the Dog: He has thruster boots that let him hover after jumping.
- When you reach the second half of the game all characters get a Jet Pack upgrade allowing you to reach previously inaccessible areas.
- The title screen changes as you progress through the main campaign, adding new characters as you unlock them and reflects when those characters receive upgrades.
- Large worlds to explore with many collectibles and secrets to find. Many levels have secret areas and hidden exits that unlock new levels.
- When you headshot enemies you can collect their heads to unlock cheats.
- Pretty good graphics for the time.
- No reloading!
- Lots of weapons to unlock, and you can carry all of them at once. You can also map 4 weapons to the D-Pad so you can switch to them quickly.
- The developers added fish food as a joke weapon.
- Ammo is frequent and when facing an enemy that can only be killed with a specific weapon, you'll often find infinitely respawning ammo crates for that weapon.
- Co-op mode where the second player controls Floyd and can shot enemies.
- Your character becomes translucent during combat so they don't block your view.
- Several unlockable minigames.
- Hilarious ending credits that feature Juno disco dancing much to the embarrassment of the rest of the team..
Bad Qualities
- Awkward control layout that takes some time to get used to. The port included in Rare Replay improved the control layout though.
- The second half of the game requires a large amount of backtracking to find Spaceship parts and Tribals.
- You need to rescue EVERY SINGLE TRIBAL to reach the final level of the game, which will often require replaying the stages multiple times. Tribals respawn when you return to a level so if you missed a few you have to collect all of them again not just the ones you missed. There are 282 Tribals in the game!
- Tribals can be killed by enemies or even the player so if you're not careful you'll accidentally kill a tribal. If even one tribal dies, you'll have to replay the level again!
- Framerate can drop significantly at times. This is because the developers decided not to include Expansion Pak support so the game can really push the N64's limits at times and cause slowdown.
- There is only one boss theme in the whole game, even for the final boss.
Reception
Jet Force Gemini received generally positive reviews from critics, praising it's visuals and soundtrack. It's difficulty and controls were criticized, however. Despite the positive reception and relatively good sales of the game, Jet Force Gemini never received a sequel. A Game Boy Color game was planned but it was cancelled.
The characters of Jet Force Gemini made a few cameos in other Rare games and were available as a character skin for Minecraft: Xbox 360 edition.
Game Tips
- Always prioritize saving Tribals over fighting enemies, as they could accidentally get killed in the middle of a gunfire and remember you need to save every single Tribal to reach the final boss. You might take a few hits doing this but it's important to not let the Tribals die and health pickups are usually plentiful.
- There's one very important exception to the previous tip; If you see a brownish Ant-Soldier, KILL. IT. IMMEDIATELY!! Their AI is programmed to ignore the player and hunt down the Tribals. If the brown ant kills even 1 Tribal, you're replaying the whole level again!
- Enemies are programmed to take cover whenever possible and explosive barrels happen to also count as cover (likely because the AI can't tell it's a hazardous items). When you see explosive barrels wait for enemies to hide behind them and shot them for an easy kill, and often multiple enemies will try to hide behind the same barrel.
- When enemies die they often drop their guns, if you pick them up you get a few ammo for either the Pistol, Machine Gun, or Shotgun depending on which you're holding. Take advantage of this to keep your ammo count for those weapons high.
- Health and Ammo pickups respawn when you leave the room where you found them and return to it. If you're low on either you can backtrack a few rooms until you find pickups, get them, leave and reenter the room, and get them again until you're restocked. It's tedious true but it's more tedious to run out of lives and restart the whole level.
- When fighting a boss don't just shoot at it recklessly. Whenever a boss launches an attack a part of it's body flashes for a second, that's where you have to shoot. Keep in mind that you only get a few seconds to damage the boss when this happens though. The only exception is the final boss, who instead reveals it's weak point for a few seconds after a certain round of attacks.
- If you use the Sniper Rifle's zoom function, Floyd's aim reticle also takes advantage of the zoom when playing in co-op.
- Juno NEEDS lots, LOTS of Homing Missiles for the final boss. Make sure you give him as many Homing Missile upgrades as possible (at least 45-50 recommended), even if it means not upgrading Vela and Lupus' own Homing Missiles. Without that many Homing Missiles, the final boss can be ridiculously hard to defeat because the fight is very long, the boss has a lot of health, and his weak point is too difficult to hit with other weapons.