Intro:

If there is only one game N64 import freaks acknowledge as a must-have than it must be Sin & Punishment aka “Tsumi to Batsu: Chikyu no Keishousha”. After the game was praised with great reviews by many critics and handled as the last major adult-style game for Nintendo’s ceasing 64-Bit console, many gamers around the world were extremely upset that there was no release outside of Japan. Thanks to the efforts of Vanit Studios and a special graphic plug-in for N64 emulators, developed by Rice you can now enjoy this game completely in English.

Story:

Right at the beginning of the game you are running over a plain, shooting giant bugs, dragons and other enemies out of your way. After this short but easy warm-up you wake up and realize that this was just a dream. You are Saki, a government agent, who fights alongside a woman called Airan against a group of revolutionists backed up by strange monsters called “Ruffians”. The story of the game is presented by a lot of short cutscenes in game graphic. However the story is very confusing (even in English) as you only get very short bits of information thrown together at a fast pace. To really understand whats going on you should play the game through several times and still then there are lots of gaps in the story you’ll have to fill for yourself. As this is an action game the story is not that important anyway.

Gameplay:

The game plays a lot like Starfox just that you are running on the ground and not flying over planets. You see your character from behind and run along fixed rails through the levels, shooting all enemies on the screen without getting hit. The controls are made to fit the N64 controller perfectly so don’t try to play this on a keyboard when using an emulator! With the left and right C-buttons you can navigate right and left on your otherwise fixed path to avoid enemies and obstacles. With the Z button you can shoot your gun. There are two modes of fire available a manual aiming mode and an autoaiming mode which does less damage. You move your crosshair around with the analog-stick. When an enemy gets very close to you a quick tap on the Z button will let you use a powerful sword. Finally you can Jump by pressing the R button. Especially the usage of both the analogue-stick and the c-buttons to avoid projectiles at the same time needs some time of getting used to it. The game offers a training mode which you should definitely use to get a little familiarity with the control scheme.

While running through the levels you will encounter a great number of different enemies. You won’t find the same enemies all over again, as in poorer made, similar games. All enemies you encounter are unique and require a strategy to beat them. The levels provide a lot of little surprises and variety. You will come through cities, factories and war zones. In the best part of the game you fly on a platform out of scrap, which moves because of psychokinetic powers of a companion (don’t ask), through a fleet of aircraft carriers - great! At the whole time the camera follows you behind through the action. The platform will make sharp angles, turns and will even fly upside down for some time, which gives the whole level an awesome dynamic. The bosses do not stand behind in any way. They range from giant mechas (standard) over crazy little anime-pets (cool) to a man surfing through the sky on the back of an aircraft (awesome!).

Difficulty/Replay Value:

The difficulty of Sin & Punishment is, surprisingly enough for this genre, quite low. I played through the game on easy and still had 7 lives left. The game is very short, which is definitely its biggest weakpoint. You can run through the entire game in just a little bit over an hour. There is lots of replay value though. There are two additional difficulty levels for experienced players which even require you to come up with new strategies to defeat some enemies. Especially because of the short length it was seldom so inviting to give the game another spin in order to beat your personal highscore. Because of that and because of the low frustration this game causes you will find yourself trying to beat the game over and over again.

Graphics:

The graphics of the game are very nice if you like the style. The models of your player and the enemies are a bit edgy but to make up for that there are a lot of them on the screen all the time. There is a huge firework of special effects as you shoot your way through the game. The best thing about the graphic is that no matter how many enemies are on the screen the whole action runs absolutely fluid on a very high framerate. If you have played the co-op mode of Perfect Dark you will know how the N64 could struggle with frame-rate problems sometimes, but this game’s engine does its job perfectly.

Sound:

Soundwise this game has no major flaws. The sound effects for the weapons and explosions are good and have enough power. The cutscenes are done with mediocre English(!) voice acting. While the voice acting is not done with a whole lot of emotion, at least its very easy to understand. The music is the usual electro sound for such games. The game is so fastpaced that you won’t have time you pay the music too much attention anyway.

Overall:

Sin & Punishment is both - a way to quickly kill time on a rainy day and a game that you might play for weeks until you perfected your highscore. If you like arcade style shootergames you will most likely love this game.

Note that this is done through a texture-replacement feature with a specific plug-in, as opposed to a ROM patch. You will need to use Rice’s Video Plug-in 6.1.0. or greater on an N64 emulator that runs this game.

• Tsumi to Batsu - Hoshi no Keishousha (Japan).z64
• Unbyteswapped ROM
• CRC1: B6BC0FB0
• CRC2: E3812198