Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue (N64)

Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue (N64)
YEEEY!
Genre(s): Action Platform(s): Nintendo 64 Release: NA: September 28, 2000 EU: December 8, 2000 Developer(s): Mass Media Inc. Publisher(s): THQ Country: United States Series: Power Rangers Predecessor: Power Rangers Zeo: Battle Racers (by release date) Successor: Power Rangers: Time Force

""Over here! All right! Over here! All right! Over here! All right! Over here! (Yells) ALL RIGHT!""

— The Angry Video Game Nerd

Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue is a video game based on the 8th season of the TV show of the same name. Four very different games were produced for the Game Boy Color, personal computers with Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems, Nintendo 64, and PlayStation by various developers and publishers. This page will only focus on the Nintendo 64 version.

Gameplay

The Nintendo 64 version features 3D and 2D action-based gameplay of the Rangers, their vehicles, and Mega Zords, with 4 types of gameplay, clean snot, a side-view "save the burning cars" or "clean up the toxic spill" mode, battles with the Mega Zord and flying stages. The game also has a multiplayer mode for 2 players. The game features voice clips by the actual Power Rangers Lightspeed actors and actresses. The game is also compatible with the Nintendo Controller Pak to save games in progress.

Why this game won't make you say "Yay"

1. Quite short, the game can be finished in less than an hour due to having little content, with 27 short stages that last a few minutes.
2. Enemies' AI is silly and often run slowly, besides that they don't do so much damage and are often ineffective when they have to attack a Ranger, so the enemy AI is really useless and has no purpose except to run towards you, also when you're on a platform that's minimally higher than enemies, enemies won't be able to climb even if there are stairs.
3. The control is not tight enough: we can move our Ranger in any direction and fire energy blasts at enemies; A button shoots forward and B shoots backward. But there really isn't much to do except shooting mindlessly and keep walking. No jumping, crawling, kicking, punching, or jumping back and fruity summer jumps, there are not even combinations, you can finish most of the game using only the analog stick and buttons A and B and there is almost no challenge or approach in the controls, in addition, the characters run very slowly and do some more boring missions (most missions by themselves are already too boring).
4. The music is simply a loop that repeats throughout the game and for a moment stops and then is heard again, there is no other song except the menu song that is also repeated in the scenes, so there are only two songs in the game. Doesn't that sound familiar to you?
5. There are battles with the Megazord where you fight with enemies, it's all in the first person, except when you get to be face to face, which is in the third person, but it's hard to stay close to the enemy, therefore changes from camera to camera constantly, which can become annoying.
6. Little variety. It only has four types of levels, snot cleaning, the other three gameplay scenarios are as follows: a side-view "save the burning cars" or "clean up the toxic spill" mode; you basically maneuver through a scrolling 2D-ish environment shooting wrecked vehicles with water, or, in the variation, running into toxic spills with your cleanup truck. Next, you have the mech-like first-person mode; you play as Mega Zord and battle enemies. All you have to do here is press the A button 20 times consecutively to fire off projectiles at your foe and the mode is over. Moving on, we have the flying game; you control a hovering vehicle that has to collect boxes located around a city. And that's it. These same three-level styles are regurgitated through almost 30 stages, usually without any changes in graphic appearance. It's repetitive and extremely uneventful gameplay.
7. In battles with the Megazord, you and your foe have regenerating health, that coupled with the fact that your enemies are weak and dumb as dirt on normal difficulty, means that you can literally put your controller down, leave the room and the enemy will still not be able to kill you.
8. The multiplayer mode, meanwhile, which enables two gamers to battle it out in first-person mech-ready arenas, is exactly the same mode from the single-player game only with split-screen. It's an impressively poor single-player experience somehow made even worse as a multiplayer one.
9. Annoying and repetitive dialogue, especially in the driving stages, the Rangers shout "Over here!", "Yeah!" and "Alright!" over and over again.
10. Awful and terrible sound effects.
    • The laser sounds are too loud.
    • The infamous "YAAAY!" when you complete any mission.
11. The top-down view/walking stages are extremely large and bland, there's nothing much to interact with but a boring empty space.
12. Bad and outdated graphics for an N64 game released in 2000.
13. The cutscenes are very lazily done, the characters and sprites look like stock images and the whole cutscenes look more like an amateur Adobe Flash animation on Newgrounds.
14. Very poor framerate in the flying stages that just gets worse if there are more than five enemies on the screen.
15. The controls in the driving stages are terrible, the vehicle steers very slowly and drives very quickly, as this can be really hard and painful to shoot down enemies or put down fires with water due to its difficult and sometimes clunky aiming and you don't have enough time to rescue a person because of the vehicle's high speed, you will every time get hit by a car or truck in this state.
16. The flying stages that you ride on a hovering vehicle uses tank controls, and the controls are very stiff and confusing.
17. The projectiles have a very short distance, especially in the flying stages.
18. When you enter a cave in the flying stages, the camera angle pans above you, making it very hard to see what lies ahead.

Redeeming Qualities

1. It's ironically fun to play because of how terrible it is.
2. At least it's pretty simple for any child with little video game experience to enjoy for a while.
3. Character models are passable (depending on the point of view).

Reception

"What were they thinking?" The Shit Scale Games that are debatably bad High level of shit contamination The very high category The severe zone Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Major code red 👆 This game/console belongs to the "Very High Category" category of the AVGN's Shit Scale.

The N64 version received very negative reception from critics and has a 3/10 (Horrible) on IGN, it also has a 25 Metascore and a 3.6 user score in Metacritic, it is considered one of the worst games on the Nintendo 64 and one of the worst games in history. It was one of the games reviewed by the Angry Video Game Nerd during his "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" review. After playing it, he describes it as "bad, but in a boring way."

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