Four New Carts In: Blast Corps, Glover, Tarzan, and Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness

Four new carts landed on the shelf this week: Blast Corps, Glover, Disney’s Tarzan, and Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness. None of them are expensive, and none of them show up on anyone’s most-wanted list. Each one still has a stranger production story than a bin-find cart has any right to.

There’s a short video coming with gameplay from all four, for anyone who’d rather watch than read.

Blast Corps

Rare’s Chris Stamper reportedly pitched this one back in 1995: a game about blowing up buildings. A small team of four to seven recent graduates spent the next two years turning that idea into something stranger. The game became a puzzle about clearing a path for a runaway nuclear missile carrier before it crashes into anything in its way. You do it by hopping between dump trucks, cranes, motorcycles, and towering mechs, each one flattening buildings in its own way.

It came out in North America on February 28, 1997, one of Rare’s earliest N64 releases. Reviewers gave it near-universal praise for how original the whole idea felt. The puzzle logic owes an obvious debt to Donkey Kong’s stage design. It sold around a million copies, lower than Rare had hoped. It still picked up an Editor’s Choice runner-up for Most Original Game of the Year at EGM’s 1997 awards, just behind PaRappa the Rapper.

Glover

Glover came out of Interactive Studios, a small UK team later known as Blitz Games. Hasbro Interactive published it in 1998, after showing it off at E3 that year. The pitch is as strange as it sounds. You play a sentient glove that can pick up a ball and punch it into different states: rubber, wood, ice. Each state solves a different kind of platforming puzzle.

The N64 and PC versions reviewed well. A PlayStation port that followed in 1999, under Atari’s banner, didn’t fare nearly as well. Hasbro reportedly ordered 300,000 N64 carts instead of the 150,000 the developer suggested, chasing a print discount Nintendo had running at the time. Retailers wouldn’t take that surplus stock back, and the financial hit is what killed a planned sequel before it happened.

Disney’s Tarzan

Most versions of Disney’s Tarzan came out in 1999 alongside the movie, riding the same wave of marketing as the theatrical release. Eurocom’s N64 build, published by Activision, didn’t land until February 15, 2000, months after everyone else already had theirs. That’s well past the window the film’s promotion had built.

It’s a 3D platformer built around vine-swinging and wall-running through jungle levels rendered in a “2.5D” style. Corridors bend and curve into the camera to fake extra depth, without asking the N64 to render a fully open world. Early levels have you playing a young Tarzan learning to climb and swing. Later ones hand you the adult version, fighting off the hunters trailing him through the jungle.

Ms. Pac-Man Maze Madness

This one actually started on PlayStation under Namco Hometek. The N64 version, developed instead by Mass Media, followed later in 2000 as a North America-only port, alongside a Dreamcast release built the same way. It’s often talked about as a companion piece to Pac-Man World rather than its own separate thing.

The story has Ms. Pac-Man chasing down a witch named Mesmerelda who’s stolen a set of Gems of Virtue. It’s dressed up around the classic maze-clearing gameplay, with some light 3D platforming layered in. A sequel was reportedly in the works around 2006 before quietly getting cancelled. That would have made it one of the rare N64-era mascots to get a proper follow-up this late.

Four different games, four different near-misses behind the scenes: a publisher’s cart-order math, a movie’s marketing calendar, a rental-market surplus, a sequel that never got greenlit. That’s honestly a more interesting version of this project than another five-figure Blockbuster exclusive. Most of the 296-game list looks a lot more like this than it does like last week’s expensive-games rundown. That puts the N64 Project at 29 of 296 once the tracker’s updated, 267 to go.

If you want the other end of the spectrum, here’s the ten most expensive North American N64 games. The full running list lives on the N64 Project tracker.