Volume 126 (November 1999) is all about Donkey Kong 64 in its fancy fold-out cover; there's also stuff on Rocket: Robot on Wheels, Harvest Moon 64, Jet Force Gemini, NBA Courtside 2 featuring Kobe Bryant, Resident Evil 2, Monopoly (N64), Earthworm Jim 3D, BattleTanx Global Assault ("BattleTanx 2"), Mario Golf (GBC), and Survival Kids.

I believe the Power Charts were reader-chosen, but notice that even in late 1999, Super Mario Land was still holding onto #10, spending 94 months (over 7 years) on the chart. Unfortunately, Power Charts was soon to be discontinued (at least in that form) and I'm not even sure Super Mario Land was still available at retail. I don't remember it.

Something like this would be great for Stardew Valley, though Stardew Valley's summer crop list is far more extensive, with nearly a dozen crops and flowers available on year one.

Going into some more detail on some of these, Harvest Moon 64 fits a lot into its 9 pages, including all the holidays, the price per unit/grow time/sell price of the crops, describing the town, the bachlorettes and a general idea of what they like, and so on. Feature and graphic wise, it almost seems to fit directly between the SNES game and the GBA version Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town. (One wonders how much you could fit in about Stardew Valley in nine pages. Probably substantially.)

It's too bad that when they had the Resident Evil 2 remake years later, Claire's face is much worse. Even today, Claire's "classic" outfit remains popular.

Resident Evil 2 was ported to N64 with the "latest video compression techniques" and features FMV despite the original game on PlayStation coming on two CD-ROMs. The strategy section contains maps as well...but by the time this port was released, it was almost two full years after the PlayStation version. Better later than never?

Monopoly has five pages, despite describing the rules that you'd find elsewhere. It does explain that orange, red, and yellow are the most commonly hit groups in the game, which is useful if you're playing against real people. Monopoly was also the theme of that month's contest, with the sweepstakes being a "real sack of money" worth $5000, though could just as easily be a pouch of 50 Benjamins. But $5000 is $5000. (And Monopoly for the N64). The runner-up prize is the game and Monopoly Millennium Edition (the board game).

Another title covered, Survival Kids for the Game Boy never was a huge hit, and its sequel, Survival Kids 2: Dasshutsu! Futago Shima (or rather, "Survival Kids 2: Escape the Twin Islands", as the eventual fan translation was called) but that wasn't released in the West. In 2005, the entry finally received a third entry, Survival Kids: Lost in Blue on the Nintendo DS, which was released in the West as Lost in Blue and despite some middling reviews sold enough copies to get the two DS sequels localized.

Arena, which would disappear after Volume 139 (December 2000) had this ridiculous "challenge" on its page.

The answer to #2 is RAPIDASH but if you take everything literally, RAT becomes RA, PIDGEY became PIDEY, and you correctly interpret that as RED, that's RAPIDEYRED. I'm not going to even bother explaining the others, because it's stupid if you try to explain it. The last one is POKEMON.

This is the first issue that featured Game Boy A-Go-Go, which at the time had mini-strategy sections for recently released Game Boy games, though I believe the section folded a few years later not too long after the Game Boy Advance hit store shelves.

The top game featured in Now Playing is Rocket: Robot on Wheels, which is still referred to in the review as "Sprocket" (changed late in development, the trademark complainant was actually Apple Computer Inc.) and got an 8.4. This was not the highest-rated game in the section, that actually went to Mario Golf (incorrectly written as "Mario Golf 64") with an 8.7. The other games covered in this issue were Harvest Moon 64 and Resident Evil 2 (both with an 8.2), Battletanx Global Assault (7.6), Earthworm Jim 3D (6.8), Monopoly for the N64 (6.3), Survival Kids (7.6), Puzzle Master (6.7), Catwoman for the Game Boy Color (6.6), Earthworm Jim: Menace 2 The Galaxy (6.3), and the mini-reviews all for the Game Boy Color—All-Star Tennis (7.2), Ms. Pac-Man: Special Color Edition (7.2), Ballistic (7.1), Rampage 2 (6.4), and Rugrats Time Travelers (5.8).

It's always fun to look at the upcoming games to see what was expected at the time. Most, if not all, of the fall 1999 games were released on schedule or soon after (yes, Grand Theft Auto, the first one, was ported to the Game Boy Color) but after that things get hazy. 40 Winks was never released on the Nintendo 64 despite a quote from Nintendo Official Magazine on the cover of the game, and the ones for "Future" get even hazier. Eternal Darkness was released as a GameCube game, Super Mario RPG 2 was released as Paper Mario, Twelve Tales: Conker 64 had been delayed for well over a year at this point and was about to be retooled as Conker's Bad Fur Day, Zelda Gaiden became The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and the two Game Boy Color Zelda games were still in their early forms, being a remake of the original The Legend of Zelda and The Legend of Zelda: Fruit of the Mysterious Tree. These two games were both cancelled and turned into the "Oracle series" and even now you can tell how The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons has some elements of the cancelled remake (particularly around the first dungeon). Notice that although they do appear in the game list (used for Power Charts and surveys) later in the magazine, neither EarthBound 64 (Mother 3) or Super Mario 64 2 were listed. Even though Mother 3 hadn't been officially cancelled yet, the delays had gotten so long that Nintendo Power had given up on it, and hope was dimming it would be released on the N64 (if at all).

VARIOUS ADS OF NOTE

2.B.A. Master was a bit cringe looking back today, but I liked it as a kid.


Sadly, Archive.org's version of RayRules.com is broken. (It's an ad for Rayman 2: The Great Escape, obviously).


In 1999, Sears was still a viable place for new video games. A decade later, absolutely not the case. (Unfortunately).


Songbird Ocarina predated Ocarina of Time but after the game's release sales took off. Songbird Ocarina ads would be seen in Nintendo Power magazines for several years.


This is only part of the ad for Battletanx Global Assault (it's a two-page spread). The TV advertisement was a sequel to the original game's advertisement, where the Snuggle bear receives Six Million Dollar Man-style upgrades.


Crave's games were terrible even for licensed titles. Terrible ads, terrible games.


I mean, they're not wrong...

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