Treasure's Mischief Makers makes use of the deepest control schemes ever to grace an action-platformer in the last year and a half and utilizes your hand-eye coordination so much, that you may even question your very own skills as a gameplayer. Not to worry though, if you become proficiant at Mischief Makers, you could very well enhance your gameplay abilities by far. Mischief Makers also has variety, and lots of it. One minute, you're rescuing Clancers, the next minute you're trying to find "ingredients" to shake up in a Clancer Pot and the second minute you're fighting one of the game's many multi-jointed, hard-as-nails, gargantuan boss characters (all of which are presented in a variety of panning 'wide-screen' views to make them more intense). Control is deep with an assignment for each and every other button and, get this, no control stick. I don't hate analog, but sometimes we old-school gamers just need that digital fix.

  Marina has three basic moves, with several, much broader advanced moves. The three basics are Grab, Shake and Throw. This sounds silly at first, but once you give this system a try, you just might like it. No more jumping on enemy heads, my friend, you must now primarily use your enemy's own weapons (and occasionally the enemy itself) to your overall advantage. Take this for instance: you're fighting an evil Clancer and he has a machine gun. What do you do? You grab him, jump and pound him into the ground. He'll then be unconscious long enough for you to grab his gun and shake it, making the gun shoot three streams of bullets in place of the usual one. This sounds like a whole lot of fun doesn't it? The advanced controls involve mostly rolls, sliding jumps, a variety of throws and grabs, pounds and booster rocket propulsion; here's where the control gets interesting. Marina's rockets work as a way of flying, dodging, floating, leaping higher, diving faster, backing away, staying out of range and attacking faster. One of the other notable gameplay features is that when you find a Clancer Pot, you can put enemies and objects into it and shake them all up. This causes a variety of effects and is the key to solving many of the game's puzzles. Needless to say, this is one of the most interesting play systems I've seen in quite a while.

  Also, roughly halfway through the game, your gameplay skills are tested yet again, this time by a contest of strength, stamina, brains and speed. This event is one of the niftiest little variety levels I've seen in a game. Now that I've toiled over Mischief Makers vast gameplay for a little while, let's talk graphics. Showing an impressive resumé, Mischief Makers pulls off some stuff that three-dimensional titles just can't compare with. Stuff like multi-scrolling parallax backgrounds, huge fill-the-screen explosions of the large boom kind, flawlessly and rapidly animated sprite-based characters and objects, limitless panning and zooming in extreme settings and more multi-jointed characters than you can shake a stick at (even a really big stick). The sound is more a matter of taste, however it's of very, very good quality for the Nintendo 64. It's not a classic soundtrack, but then again, this isn't an RPG, it's a platformer. Give me a break. Overall, Treasure's Mischief Makers is truly an amazing title and in case you're wondering why I used the word "variety" so much, go rent or buy the game and you'll see what I mean. For old-school platformer fans that want a change from today's three-dimensional bias and a challenge from back then, it can't get much better than this. So, until Treasure's next two-dimensional masterpiece, farewell.
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