Secrets of the N64 Expansion Pak (Ft. Matt McMuscles) | Punching Weight [SSFF]

The Nintendo 64 Expansion Pack... ...is a piece of junk, almost completely useless, and is being sold on a bed of lies! But I'll still find some amazing things with this little guy, because this is Punching Weight: a celebration of the strange, ambitious and unnecessary, and the N64 Red Top here is all three! So whether you're a hardcore collector or just interested in weird Nintendo peripherals, buckle up, because we're going to take a deep dive into the Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak. But first, shout out to our Patreon supporters! This is a Patreon supported program. Stay until the end of the video to see all the people who made this program possible!

On with the show! So what is the

expansion

pack? It is a peripheral that replaces the original Jumper Pak and increases the power of the Nintendo 64, doubling the RAM with four additional megabytes of power. It's easy to think of this as a product of a bygone era, like the Sega CD or the 32X. Yeah, they did dual versions of that. But how different is it really from the Xbox One X, PlayStation 4 Pro or S model iPhone? Well...except this is a hell of a lot cheaper. But really, this is a Nintendo classic! They love updating their stuff!

The NES Top Loader, the Super Game Boy, the DS, the 3DS, the New 3DS, don't forget all the Game Boys, I mean, the reason the Wii U failed was because everyone thought it was just an update to tablet for the wii! Which, yeah, I guess in a way it was, but let's focus. The Expansion Pak was salvaged from the 64DD, meaning this was created for something completely different. Perhaps this is why so few games used it, and those games that did didn't really benefit much from the extra juice. How do I use the

expansion

pack? Well, on the front of each system there is a little hatch with a tiny cartridge.

This is the Jumper Pak, also known as the TERMINATOR PAK. I'm not kidding, that's what it actually says in Japanese on the front. Pry it up with Nintendo's official plastic object or, failing that, a screwdriver or table knife, slide off the old Red Top and bam! Your Nintendo 64 has now been overloaded! ...except it's not like that. The sole purpose of the Jumper Pak is to allow the system to boot without the Expansion Pak. I'm not kidding, this thing might as well be empty. Now, being designed this way, you'd think that most of the library would naturally support it, so before we get into what Red Top does, here's what it doesn't do: It doesn't improve any unsupported games.

It won't improve the frame rate of GoldenEye or Smash Bros., nor will it improve your speed of Mario 64. However, it works like a normal Jumper Pak in those situations, so you don't need to worry about swapping packs, something Nintendo really recommends not to do. Although it's probably worth keeping your original Jumper Pak, just in case. More on that later. The Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak won't tell you where to suck it, either, like pro wrestler X-Pac. That covers unsupported games, what about supported games? In North America, just over sixty games are compatible with Red Top. Now, I know that doesn't sound very impressive, wait, it's actually even less impressive than that.

The most common improvement was an increase in resolution and texture quality, but at the cost of frame rate: games would look better but run worse. Bad news for a game library that already had big problems with chug. High resolution options are usually best left alone. This is the case with most Turok and Star Wars games, as well as some sports games. There are some edge cases, such as South Park and Duke Nukem: Zero Hour, that have the option to improve resolution or frame rate. Other games improve graphics in different ways: The World is Not Enough, also known as 007 TWINE!! offers a high color mode and Quake II 64 offers more colors and a small increase in frame rate.

But some of these games are still exclusive to the N64, so the additional graphical options are still an interesting little novelty. It's not really worth going into, but it's cool! However, some supported games were ported to other, more powerful systems, such as the Dreamcast, PS2, and PC, making the graphics less significant today. But I'm sure at the time it kept the N64 in the conversation as new systems hit the market. In fact, the more I think about the Expansion Pak, the clearer it becomes that it was just marketing nonsense, another example of the tired but still marketable pursuit of graphics above all else in gaming.

So, I'll be honest, you'd be forgiven for dismissing this entirely, but digging deeper, the Expansion Pak is still in the midst of some mysterious and fascinating stuff! Enough farting, it's time to really get into the mud! The Red Top had a more interesting and complicated relationship with a handful of games, enough to justify its existence. I still wouldn't say this is one of Nintendo's best products, but... ...man, you know I love this kind of stuff! I had to make a video about it! And before we go any further, for the record, we are capturing all game footage from the original hardware, with standard composite cables.

There is no emulation for this video! Not that we have any problem with emulation, but for this video it was important to get something real, just for the sake of due diligence and journalism! And of course, we need to start our deep dive into the Expansion Pak with the three games that required it: DK64, Majora's Mask, and Perfect Dark. First of all, DK64. Here in the United States it was the only N64 game included with the Expansion Pak; That's how I got mine. In other parts of the world, it was also included with Perfect Dark and Majora's Mask, but here in the United States, it was only included with DK64.

On its own, the Expansion Pak sold for $30, maybe more depending on your region, making the package a good deal! It also came with a Jumper Pak ejector tool and an instruction book that referred to this piece of plastic as the Jumper Pak ejector tool. Yeah, that fancy red top doesn't actually make it any easier to remove from your system. For fun, here's what DK64 looks like when you try to play it with the Jumper Pak. Yes, just this screen and nothing else. At least he could have let us listen to DK Rap! DK64 was advertised as such a big game that it needed the Expansion Pak just to fit it all in.

ANNOUNCER: "It's so big we included an expansion pack to include it all!" And it was a really great game! Many would say it's too big, but it also houses stylish lighting and a decent frame rate. However, it is worth noting that Rare's next platform games, Banjo-Tooie and Conker's Bad Fur Day, released in 2000 and 2001 respectively, were also quite massive games with impressive graphics that not only did not require, but did not even THEY USED. the expansion pack! So what's up? DK64 was Nintendo's big Christmas game of 1999. Nintendo expected it to do Ocarina of Time numbers and received a huge advertising budget.

The hype was effective - all this time I really thought it was so big it needed the expansion pack to work! ANNOUNCER: "This is the first game to require the use of the N64 expansion pack!" Yes, yes, yes... but it turns out it was all a marketing spin. There was actually a game-breaking bug that Rare couldn't fix. The real reason DK64 required the Expansion Pak was that it was an easier fix for this bug that randomly crashed the game. It was an expensive solution, but Nintendo needed its Christmas success. Delaying the game was out of the question.

And furthermore, the Expansion Pak didn't even fix the bug, it just severely mitigated it: if left on for more than ten hours, the game will still crash. This isn't really a problem for N64 owners; However, for emulation and Virtual Console players who use save states instead of saving and exiting the game as you normally would, this is still an issue. The bug is apparently due to a memory leak and may have been the result of an inexperienced development team within Rare. It's true that Rare as a company created some incredible games for the system, but for most of the DK64 development team, this was their first N64 game.

According to some members of the Conker's Bad Fur Day team, their game didn't need the Expansion Pak because they did a much better job optimizing the graphics than the DK64 team. SEAVOR: "Donkey Kong 64...they used it, right?" MARLOW: "Indeed they did! They had to use it!" SEAVOR: "Which means we did a much better job optimizing the game!" MARLOW: "There's also a good story behind why that happened." Oh! Damn, that's some serious shade! Anyway, this leaves us in two places: either the Expansion Pak simply fixes the bug, or it does more than fix the bug. If the problem was just the bug, then...technically, DK64 can run with the standard Jumper Pak.

In theory, if some genius could hack the system with a GameShark or something, or avoid the Expansion Pak check at startup, the game would work perfectly! I mean, it would probably still crash all the time, but if it's true that it just fixed the error, it shouldn't need additional RAM to run, and the Expansion Pak... even more useless than I thought. But here's what I can't understand: DK64 was released in November 1999, but the announcement that it would require the Expansion Pak came in May, six months earlier. Six months!! And it is not known when that decision was made internally at Nintendo.

Now, I'm not a programmer, but it's not exactly breaking news. If the Expansion Pak simply fixes the bug, that means that, with at least six months of development left, no one said, "Well, since we have to use the Expansion Pak," "we might as well beef up the graphics and framerate while" . We're on it." Now, it's entirely possible that no one said that, but when the truth about the mistake came out, the world seemed to declare "Okay, case closed!", but there are still mysteries to be solved with DK64. And one last thing: people are too harsh on this game!

It's definitely not a masterpiece, and it's probably Rare's weakest N64 platformer, but it deserves a remaster and a second chance! requires the Expansion Pak: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask Majora's relationship with the Red Top isn't as juicy as DK64's, but it's still really interesting and, again, for fun, here's what it looks like when you start it up. with the Jumper Pak. It's strange that some of the text is blurred. It's just a text message, what's the problem? The Legend of Zelda and the Expansion Pak go back a long time. Both Zelda 64 were planned at some point. for the unfortunate disk add-on, the 64DD, which, as I said before, is what the Expansion Pak was originally created for.

However, like many 64DD games, Ocarina shipped without Expansion Pak support, although there are beta versions of Ocarina that require the Expansion Pak, although they may have been technical demos for the slightly improved GameCube version, as evidenced by the 2003 copyright on the title screen. For a hot minute, there was a third Zelda project separate from Majora's Mask, an Ocarina expansion called Ura Zelda for the 64DD. (Expansions are what they used to call DLC, kids!) From the ashes of Ura Zelda came Master Quest mode, which found its way to a port on the GameCube and the 3DS remake.

Now, what does all this have to do with the sequel, Majora's Mask? Majora runs on the Ocarina engine and reuses a lot of assets, so I never understood exactly why this game requires the Expansion Pak. And listen, what I mean by this is that it's clear what the Expansion Pak does to Majora's Mask: its graphical improvements over Ocarina are numerous and well documented. However, why wasn't the Expansion Pak optional? The closest explanation I can find is that Majora had a very short development time. The story goes that because Ocarina took four years to make, Shigeru Miyamoto wanted a quick turnaround for the next Zelda game.

Eiji Aonuma took the baton and made Majora's Mask in just one year. Even reusing the Ocarina engine and its assets, the team may not have had time to optimize Majora for the Jumper Pak. But I think it goes deeper than that: it needed additional RAM for its historical timing mechanics. The world of Majora's Mask is filled with dozens of NPCs, and keeping track of their location and your progress on their side quests at all times was a huge memory drain! I imagine it's similar to how the PS3 and 360 versions of Shadow of Mordor have a very stripped down Nemesis system because those previous generation systems just don't have the specs.

I think it's possible that Majora is the opposite of DK64 - Aonuma knew that the time mechanics wouldn't be possible without the extra RAM, so they improved the visuals while doing it!mine, it's jumping and jumping! In all my years of broadcasting, I have never seen such dominance in the ring! MATT: Now, this is a big tactic of hers, she's going to do... DEREK: Yeah? MATT: Uh... nothing. MATT: That's good! That's good too! DEREK: Matt, does this game still suck? MATT: Yes. DEREK: Right. Thanks for watching everyone! Check out Matt's channel. He's currently working on an incredible eight-part retrospective on the Prince of Persia games and has already finished up on Matt's Flophouse.

You are watching Stop Skeletons From Fighting, we are a Patreon supported show, a big thank you to all the wonderful people you see on the screen here, they made this video possible. You know, who else made this video possible? Our friend Alex from S House Studios. Thanks for helping us with the editing! Again, to support the show on Patreon.com, one dollar is enough, but two dollars gets you access to our activity feed and our private Discord, check that out, thank you so much for the support, thank you so much for Watch and stay mighty!