The Decade of the N64 131
1up is running a piece looking back at the ten years since the N64's launch. The start of Nintendo's slump, the N64 still managed to come out of the console wars with some great and lasting memories, like GoldenEye, Smash Bros., and Ocarina of Time. From the article: "Nintendo certainly gave players plenty of time to get all 120 stars. By the end of 1996, the N64 still had fewer than a dozen games, and even that anemic library was glutted with mediocrity like Mortal Kombat Trilogy and Cruis'n USA. Sure, there were gems like Mario Kart 64 and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, and there was the stubborn optimism of Nintendo of America President Howard Lincoln (who insisted N64 games sold more than 250,000 per title), but industry commentators were starting to see through the emperor's clothes. Meanwhile, Sony was turning up the heat with massive blockbusters like Final Fantasy VII." The Press the Buttons blog has some additional commentary on Nintendo's first 'meh' console.
Uh Perfect Dark? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Uh Perfect Dark? (Score:5, Insightful)
List 'o memories:
-You killing Elvis' friend in the underwater mission. "Everything's going wrong!" while he tears at his hair in an eerily poignant moment.
-The amusing lines of other guards when you headshot someone in another room with a silenced weapon. "MY GOD! Whhhyyyyyy!"
-The bonus mission where you replay an earlier level but get access to other areas (alien suicide mission to blow up the spaceship so it doesn't fall into human hands). I always liked those "you should not be here..." wall textures in other early FPS.
-...and Morgan Freeman as "The President"
-Laptop sentry guns saving the day in combat simulator challenge missions
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Favorte multiplayer moments???
Poison knife in the corpse so they wake up dieing.
Lethal injection around the corner!
Alien sniper rifle campers
PROXY PINBALL
Fly-by-wire enemas
Elvis' head is an easy target
Re:Uh Perfect Dark? (Score:5, Interesting)
If I recall something Rare said before on their letters page, they specifically made the Dark Sims to be unfair. Like, they could shoot from ladders like that, they could run faster than you could, they could fire without reloading, they could get infinite ammo at their whims, they could see through walls, etc. And I could swear I once saw a Dark Sim that I killed simply fade away and immediately respawn elsewhere, instead of flailing backward and taking a few seconds to respawn like any other player/sim.
I kinda liked that. If you're so l33t at PD that you can take on anything, it'll give you something blatantly unfair to deal with. Except on that same letters page, they still admitted that none of the sims of any skill knew how to deal with explosions (either firing or reacting to an explosion in progress).
That's another thing about the N64. They had an interesting amount of quirks to their games. Or maybe that was just Rare's N64 days. Ah, fun.
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Players could shoot from latters too, you just had to be moving in the direction of the latter. Another trick that you co
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Well, I never said they were PERFECT...
No, wait, those would be the next rating down from Dark. Erm...
Goldeneye was better (Score:2)
Perfect Dark had sims, which were cool, and better game modes, but Goldeneye had far better levels and weapons, and ran at a more acceptable framerate most of the time.
I found the levels in PD cluttered and hard to navigate by comparison.
Ah, those were the days, 4 player Goldeneye on license to kill with no-one able to move more than a few metres in the level without being exposed to grenades, rockets, or a hail of RPC-90 fire... and our games would end on scorelines like 20-19-19-1
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You should try Goldeneye: Source. Not exactly the same, but closer enough that it brings back some memories
It'sa me, Mario! (Score:2)
I'm not at all saying that there weren't go
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Sadly, the same thing happened with Gamecube
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SSBM was ok too, but it really required friends..
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Super Monkey Ball 2, Mario Kart:DD, PacMan Vs, WarioWare might be multiplayer "must haves"
Metroid Prime comes close as well.
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Meh? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not following this sudden 'meh' comment. The N64 was a great machine with a lot of great games. Its only real failing was that it was bloody expensive due to its cartridge format. Nintendo still had a solid base going into the Gamecube. It's just too bad they pissed it away with a poor launch lineup, loss of third party support, and a rather small library of *good* games.
Probably the biggest blow, however, was the loss of Rare and its properties. Rare carried the N64 with its Donkey Kong, Banjo & Kazooie, and Conqeror titles. Unfortunately, the loss was internal to Rare, so there wasn't much Nintendo could do other than unload it.
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I did finally trade in the 64 to get a Gamecube, but I believe I kept the Ocarina game for sentimental value. Or something.
Anyway, how dare they call the N64 'meh'!
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Understandable, I've still got my "Basic Programming" and "Codebreaker" cartridges from the Atari 2600 on my shelf
Sorry, dozed off, must be time for my nap or something.
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Did another 120 star Mario 64 over the summer, when it was too hot to do much else. Damn fun game.
Off to start Perfect Dark for the 2nd time!
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You know, the one that looked like the Batman logo... Maybe it's just me, but I found the control for games like Mario64, TLo Zelda *, StarFox64 and even GoldenEye to be superb.
The PS* style controllers aren't all bad, but the analog sticks couldn't compare. I could never get the hang of the GameCube controller for some reason - I think it's the different sizes
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Space Spartans, Shark! Shark!, Beauty and the Beast, Space Battle, Utopia, Thin Ice, Burgertime, Happy Trails, Dreadnaught Factor... yeah, I could go on. What great games those were.
;)
Kudos on your taste in systems! Back in the day, that thing kicked the 2600 in the rear. Even now, it kicks the PS2 up between the ears.
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Halo? Meh, after playing it for a couple hours, I could at least move like I wasn't a retarded toddler, but I still felt the baggage of the control system weighing me down. That one James Bond game on the PS2? Same problem. Any game on the N64 that was dumb enough not to use (or even to make available as an alternative) the G/PD button mapping? AWFUL, to the point that playing it was only w
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I don't remember playing much of anything after that. 8 years later and now consider the N64 as the worst system I've ever owned on the account of lack of games worth playing. GoldenEye is pretty much the only game I remember ever playing that was actually fun.
Re:Meh? (Score:5, Informative)
Although from that list, 8 of the titles had multiplayer play as one of their biggest features (sure, you could play Perfect Dark, Goldeneye, and Bomberman single-player, and we did, but a huge part of those games was playing with/against your friends), so if you didn't have many friends that played video games back then the N64 probably wasn't for you. Me and my brother had 3 or 4 friends over every weekend, and there would always be at least 4 of us crowding the N64. We played every multiplayer game on that list for hundreds of hours. Every group of friends I hung out at the time had and played the N64, and every gathering would see 4-player of some game or other. To us, the Playstation was a laughingstock. There was absolutely no value in it. Sure, you could sit alone playing FFVII or whatnot, or you could all hang out and have insane amounts of fun playing the N64. So, it was the N64 for us.
I didn't even know that the PSX outsold the N64 until well into the Gamecube era. I started hearing that Sony won that generation and was very confused, because out of probably 15 or so people that we played games with regularly, only 2 had a playstation.
Its the same with the Gamecube for me. I have no interest in most single-player games. The only exception to that this generation has been Mario Sunshine and Zelda Wind Waker. Those are my two single-player games. My multiplayer games are: Super Smash Bros Melee, Mario Kart Double Dash, Wario Ware, Zelda Four Swords, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, some Mario Parties, Monkey Ball, F-Zero GX, Pacman VS, and so on. All the gamecube is missing is a decent shooter (the closest I know of this generation on any console is Halo, but Halo pales in comparison with Perfect Dark, so we play Perfect Dark on the 64 instead).
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Battle Tanx: Global Assault is yet to be duplicated on any current or next gen system... I want my damn Tokyo-Wars like tank combat! (WDL:ThunderTanks blows)
The original Rogue Squadron is great, as was Pokemon Puzzle League (albeit a rehash), Space Station Silicon Valley, and Blast Corps. And Mario Tennis.
I need to repurchase Bomberman 64 I think.
I think you should reconsi
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Also, you're right on about Diddy Kong Racing. That's another game I forgot. Also Mario Tennis. I haven't played the others, though.
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It's only max 2 players, but the co-op story mode (or single player) is great fun, esp in 2 (3 gets a little complex)
Blast Corp and SSSV are worth hunting down (the latter has a bug that sometimes makes it incompatible w/ the memory expansion... odd) But obviously YMMV so research first.
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Sort-of-realistic, one-hit-can-kill-or-cripple, Japanese-style sword duels? PERFECT for settling a long-running board game that everyone's sick of playing with (Risk and Diplomacy, especially).
SSB, Goldeneye, and Perfect Dark defined that era of gaming for me, as far as consoles were concerned. Oh, and that one game with the post-apocalypic storyline and the Queen Lords, that played like
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Rage Wars? (Score:2)
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Plus, there's something really funny about running around as the velociraptor while playing "catch the monkey" or whatever that mode is called.
But yeah, I guess you're right. Had I played UT beforehand, I
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Re:Meh? (Score:4, Insightful)
*deep breath*
Mario Party 1-3, Mario Kart 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Star Fox 64, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong 64, BlastCorp, Diddy Kong Racing, Killer Instinct Gold, Banjo-Tooie, Wave Race 64, Mario Golf, Super Smash Bros., F-Zero X, Hydro Thunder, SF Rush, SF Rush 2049, and that's without even trying.
You must have had your head stuck in the sand to not be able to find a good game, especially considering that the N64 had a much higher signal to noise ratio than the Playstation.
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Donkey Kong? Killer Instinct Gold? Wave Race 64?
I owned Donkey Kong, it wasn't that exciting. It was Mario with a monkey. KI was fun, and Wave Race were fun, but fun as in "$3 weekend rental" when there was nothing else going on and not $50 purchase.
Of course, this is all subject to personal tastes and such.
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Ok, two quick things.
1.) My brother and I had an N64. It was fun at the time to play golden eye. However, be honest with yourself. These games largely are not fun anymore. The console gaming world was new to 3-D, and most of the play control (I'm looking at you, Mario64) is just abysmal (wait, I was running forward, and now the camera autoswitched and I ran off the cliff to the left...).
The controller was wonky. The games yes were 3-D but even by standards a year or two after launch looked terrible (co
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Speak for yourself. I still think Mario 64 is fun, I still love Mario Party, and I still think Goldeneye is cool. Yes, I have played them recently, so I'm basing this on more than feel-good memories.
Um, the Playstation looked worse, so I'm not sure what your point is. The games were what they were for their generation. I can go back and laugh at the
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Nintendo deserved their loss of dominance, and it has less to do with the games and more to do with Nintendo's bizarre reluctance to develop new systems. Nintendo execs dragged their feet in every console generation; SNES, N64, Ga
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Yeah, no kidding. Because the loss was internal to Rare. (Is there an echo in here?) Rare lost the programmers that made it Rare, then went down the tube quickly. There was nothing Nintendo could do except unload it. (There's that echo again.)
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The Irony of the XBox version... (Score:1)
This was a pretty rare thing because usually Nintendo has the tightest censorship issues, and the lack of censorship is in part what has sold so many XBoxes.
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Admittedly I haven't played through the entire game yet, but it seems to me that the gratuitous sprinkling of those fookin' spikey barrel guys throughout the game--not to mention the changes that keep the camera close to and behind Conker more than previously--make Conker: Reloaded MORE challenging than the original, rather than less.
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Still, the voice acting remained absolutely horrendous. Conker mugs like the boys in my middle school drama club.
It wasn't great, but Mencia wasn't entirely right (Score:2, Informative)
It wasn't a 'meh' console, it was simply one that had had quality and not quantity. I'd still play mine if the controllers weren't prone to get that wobbly joystick feeling after almost no time. I guess that's my only complaint, the controll
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Shadows of the Empire? Good thing they opened with a flightsim level or I'd never have bought it. The Hoth and Asteroid Field levels were fun, but the third-person levels had awful play control. They eventually got it right with Starfighter and Jedi Starfighter on PS2, though.
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Re:It wasn't great, but Mencia wasn't entirely rig (Score:1)
My friends and I still play Mario Kart 64 everyday on our projector. We even have the gaycube version, but never play it. It is one of the greatest games ever, but you are correct about the joysticks... we have about 8 controlls, 5 are so warn down they are the "handicap or marioparty controllers"
I really hope the Wii
PS vs N64 (Score:5, Insightful)
played 8 of them
replayed 3
heavily played 1
N64: 12 games, many rented
played 11
replayed 9
heavily played 3
The best game of the period, Mario Kart 64:
Priceless.
Ahh, such a good console! (Score:2, Insightful)
oh, and by the way, does anyone else here prefer the cartridge format? No danger of scratches, quick load-times, generally a physically strong media.
With today's cheap and expansive flash memory, shouldn't someone be thinking about bringing cartridges back? Surely 1-2GB is enough for passably good graphics
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Also, optical media doesn't have to be slow loading, they just need to write better code and organize their data better. As an example, Load up either of the Metroid games and see how blazingly fast they load. You can also test load times for areas by timing how long a door takes to open after you shoot it. Except for the very large rooms, it's near instantaneous.
Son
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Think of what flash readers cost, and think of how much they would be saving... Sony is dishing out $250 for that bluray drive, ouch. Flash readers cost what, a few bucks?
Assuming flash costs an extra $20 per game (and I imagine it is not that high, I don't know what the production cost for bluray discs is, especially if you take into consideration the cost of ramping
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Nintendo DS still uses cartridges (Score:2)
The Nintendo DS handheld video game system takes DS Game Cards for official games and, with an adapter that sits in the GBA slot, CompactFlash or Secure Digital cards for homebrew games.
Duck Dodgers! (Score:2)
As Someone Who Still Owns One (Score:2, Interesting)
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You know that there was a Harvest Moon game on the SNES, right?
It was the kind of game you'd never buy if you saw it on the shelf at the store, but if a friend had you try it out, you'd only realize what you were doing hours later, after you'd wasted all that time trying to get with one of those 4 town girls and weeding your fucking in-game garden. You'd feel disgusted with yourself, and stop.
Man, I still get urges to fire up that game in an emulator
First Meh Console? Virtual Boy! (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally think that the N64 was pretty darn good! Mario 64 was great, as were the Zelda games. Ok, it wasn't a huge library of tons and tons of games, but quite a few were very high quality. Nintendo was thinking outside the box a bit with Smash Bros, and started on the 'party game' thing again, something that Sony only got a bit of with DDR and guitar hero, and MSFT has been left out mostly on IMHO. Sure Sony/MSFT can put out a lot of pretty games, but nintendo makes just fun ones that still are fun, and to my eyes don't look that dated, as they weren't made to be 'the super pretty hyper-realistic games'. They were meant to be fun. There's a reason that I still have a 8 bit, and 16 bit nintendo sitting around, AND two game boy advances. I also have a PS2, but I don't have an Xbox/Xbox 360, or a PS1. Nor will I have a PSP, etc. I just want fun games.
Of course Nintendo's first super stupid major flop, was the falling out with Sony while developing the PS1.
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N64 was where I learned I outgrew Zelda (Score:2)
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Just because one has reached an "older" age doesn't mean the taste in certain game types
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Mature usually means the exact opposite. (Score:2)
Frankly I love fun games now. Mario Kart Double Dash is great fun with my wife. If you want hard core Pick up Resident Evil for the GC.
The GC is lacking a good racing game but over all the quality of GC games really impresses me. I don't think they are lacking compared to my PS/2.
I can hardly wait for the Wii. I might get a 360 after a price drop and them maybe a PS/3 when they come down in price and
Ahh, nostalgia. (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember the day the N64 came out, my roommates and I rented one (and Mario,) and played Mario non-stop until we finished it. Different roommates would take over as others had to go to classes. But we finally finished it. Four days later. We played through the night, a few of us even skipping a class or two. That game was played for about 96 hours straight. It was cool.
Hopefully Wii can bring back that feeling.
N64's Secret Gem (Score:1, Insightful)
Hats of to the Big N for their
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This is not to say that the N64 didn't have plenty of must have games. Zelda and Goldeneye make the console worth owning all by themselves, and there are plenty of other good ones (Banjo Kazooie, Wave Race, Conker's BFD, Paper Mario, etc)
N64! (Score:3, Insightful)
Simply stunning, no room for "meh"
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That said, the so-called "time limit" wasn't even much of a factor for most things. It was mainly used for repeating certain events so that you can figure out peoples schedules, and get some of the optional masks or heart pieces. Did you miss an event? Oops, reset the timer, fast-forward to where you want to be, and do it again. 30 seconds lost.
My guess is that you never ev
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Eh, isn't that kind of redundant? Perfect == 100%, silly.
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Celebrate with a new Mario 64 100% speed run (Score:1, Informative)
Ahem! Paper Mario? (Score:1)
My First and Last Console (Score:4, Interesting)
So perhaps I am a bit biased in my opinion, but I always thought N64 was an underrated system. Who could forget such great games as:
Super Mario 64
Starfox 64
Goldeneye 007
Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Super Smash Bros.
Donkey Kong 64
Mario Kart 64
Perfect Dark
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter
I also got many hours of enjoyment out of the following games, even though most people considered them to be mediocre:
Mario Party 3
Mario Tennis
Waverace 64
Blast Corps
Gauntlet Legends
Diddy Kong Racing
Misson: Impossible
NFL Blitz
Quest 64
With the exception of NFL Blitz and Gauntlet Legends, all of those titles were exclusive to N64. In the past 10 years, I have only seen 4 non-PC games that would make me want to give up my N64 for a different console:
Guitar Hero (PS2)
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)
Super Smash Bros Melee (GameCube)
Mario Party 7 (GameCube)
I am not going to deny that there weren't other good console games out there, but I certainly wasn't exposed to them....
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Has to be one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played. And I completed every inch of it. Ugh.
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It was a fun, challenging combination of a puzzle game and a driving game. Learning all the individual car mechanics was a blast. The whole concept behind the game was just great. And then there were the moon levels, and the additional levels, and all that kind of stuff... lots to keep you busy, hehe.
I'd buy an updated version in a heartbeat.
Tony Hawk (Score:1)
Voodoo PowerVR (Score:1)
I wonder how much say Nintendo America has in the hardware for the Revolution (Wii) because of that.
Ignore parent! (Score:1)
My bad!
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I always hated Nintendo.. (Score:1)
Tetrisphere (Score:2)
Innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
The games are different from the PSX - Mostly "meh" titles, and maybe a dozen games that were to die for.
I'm currently developing homebrew for the N64, and from a hardware standpoint, the design is very forward-looking. The RCP 3d coproccessor was fully upgradable - the game transferred microcode to the RCP to tell it how to draw polygons, for example. This was a very sensible design choice - as Nintendo optimized their Fast3D microcode, you got better speed in the game you were developing.
Unfortunately, Nintendo neutralized that advantage by not making microcode tools available until it was too late - some developers did some amazing things by writing their own microcode (Boss Games, and Rare for example)
It was a pretty solid design, the only glaring limitation I can think of is the small (4KB) texture cache and high memory latency (making the N64 fill rate limited, instead of polygon limited.)
It's a shame Nintendo didn't make it easier to develop for - it seems they kinda pulled a Sega with it, and lost some 3rd party support. In any case, it's quite an adventure to learn about.
I still disagree. (Score:4, Interesting)
To this date, I think the n64 is probably the console I had the most fun with. The quality of the games was superb. PS1 was great fora single player experience, but I was still in university at the time, in a house full of roommates, so the n64 got at least 20x the play time of the PS1.
There were genres that were invented on the n64, as well as techniques that redefined existing genre's. There still has not be an FPS on any console that compares to Goldeneye or Perfect Dark, either one. This is not nostalgia speaking, I still play these games occasionally. For all the framerate issues and decreased graphics, they are just that good.
In some ways, I think GC was more disappointing. It hasn't produced nearly as much that has invigorated console gaming. All the innovation and newness has been on the PS2, with GC and Xbox presenting a lot of the same old, same old. Of course, I suppose that's to be expected, the PS philosophy is to keep throwing rice at the wall, and eventually something will stick.
And now, in handhelds, the DS is doing what the n64 and PS2 did before it, it remains to be seen which of the 3 upcoming (or 2 upcoming +1 existing) consoles will actually move videogaming forward.
Re:Sad To Think I'm Going To Skip My First Nintend (Score:1, Flamebait)
I'll buy my first. (non potable that is)
Enjoy SONY control over your brain!
It would've shipped on 25 carts? (Score:1)
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