Although BattleTanx for the Nintendo 64 earned average to mediocre scores from the video game media, the game earned its rightful place alongside Goldeneye, Mario Kart 64, Super Smash Bros, and San Francisco Rush in the Nintendo 64 owners multiplayer wall of fame. If you think that’s good company, you’d be right.

Why We Loved It:
With a storyline where a terrible virus kills off almost the entire female population on Earth and the remaining ladies are gathered by marauding gangs, there is very little NOT to love about Battletanx. The game supports four players simultaneously, a staple of the best Nintendo 64 multiplayer games. Multiplayer modes include: deathmatch, family mode, battlelord mode (capture the flag), and annihilation mode where the player left standing wins. Of those games, the most popular amongst my group of friends was Battlelord Mode. Each player has a base with powered-up defenses (which you can control) that made capturing the queen difficult. However, the task was never impossible since you can destroy the other player’s defenses.

This is all accomplished with honest to goodness great controls (a staple of the N64 games) and at the time blow-your-freaking-mind weapons like The Nuke. This single weapon (very rare) causes damage to a great percentage of the buildings in the level and at the same time deals a massive amount of damage to all the players in the radius of the blast.

BattleTanx Nuke in Action (scrub towards the end of the movie)

If you get a chance to put together a group of friends to boot up BattleTanx on your Nintendo 64 do so. If you can get past the muddy graphics of yesteryear, you’ll have a blast.

Difficulty:
Medium

Released:
December 31, 1998

Developer:
3DO

Platform:
Nintendo 64 (N64)