Mischief Makers was just really different, is all. Once you get past the rendered sprites, the game starts to open up. The bosses really work your reflexes and your brain, but don't get stupidly overwhelming.
Sometimes you need to ride a kitten ontop of a rocket in order to throw other rockets at a giant robot dog/motorcycle that's chasing you down. Another boss has you piledriving a giant nuclear tank/robot sasquatch. There's a stage where you're navigating through a battlefield as soldiers blow the fuck out of everything, and you can grab their weapons and use them to clear a path. Clanpot was pretty cool too, albeit a tad slow.
If you play on a controller that isn't an N64 controller (yay emulation), then the controls shouldn't bother you too much (a controller with three hand grips! Brilliant idea!)
Also, I don't think it was half done, save for maybe the final world, which is literally half the size of the other worlds. Too it's credit, though, that final world was jammed with some of the coolest stages and fights. And I thought the lava world was annoying as fuck. Once the Snow World started up, I started to really dig it ("The Day Before" was a throwaway stage, though). Then World 4 started getting into the more puzzle-y stages, like ghost hunting and King Aester's Maze. Rescuing Marina as Tristan was pretty rad too.
Now I need to download it