So, as you all probably know Nintendo is shutting off Wii U and 3DS online service completely in April, early next month. This is a just terrible decision that I hope modders fix -- and they will, I expect -- but for the official service, the big question was, can the Mario community beat every level in SMM1 before the servers turn off and make the game mostly useless? Of the millions of levels made in the first Mario Maker most were cleared years ago, but tens of thousands were left uncleared, most very difficult. The community got to work, though I doubt that even most of the people clearing the levels thought they would succeed...
But, weeks before the deadline, they did! With one exception, but it kind of doesn't count. Yes, all of those tens of thousands of extremely difficult levels fell to the games' best players. I'm not one of them, I'm pretty average at Mario sadly. Then it came down to only one level that was discovered to be exceptionally difficult. It's only ten seconds long, but requires 18 frame-perfect inputs in that time and more within that time. Several people are still playing it, but it still has not been cleared...
Because after a while of people trying, the level creator admitted that the level was actually tool-assisted. Somebody had found a way to make a TAS (tool-assisted superplay) work on real hardware in SMM1 on the Wii U, and made use of that to upload this level, Trimming the Herbs, and one other, bombs5. Nobody knew before this that it was possible to do that in SMM1 back when you could upload levels to the game, so this was a somewhat surprising revelation, but given how insanely hard the level is it makes sense. Illigitimate levels like tool-assisted stuff don't count towards the 'beat all the levels' goal since the goal is to beat evey level acually uploaded by a human, so with that SMM1 was declared cleared some days earlier when the last legit level, somewhat amusingly titled The Last Dance, was cleared. Now, even though it's a TAS, Trimming The Herbs is possible for a human to beat. bombs5 was cleared within the past few months, so despite it being not a legitimate level it's possible to finish these stages, just extremely hard. I hope that someone does clear this last level and some are making progress, but a human matching TAS perfection is really hard so we'll see... but either way, all legit SMM1 levels are cleared, and that's an amazing accomplishment given how many millions of stages were uploaded and not deleted!
There's a lot to like about the new Dune movies, but there's one tiny thing that I just couldn't overlook, and that's Christopher Walken as the emperor of the known universe. He's one of those actors who just looks like himself no matter what roll he's in. I felt the same way about Steve Buscemi in The Grey Zone, which probably says more about me because that movie is HAUNTING.
Yar and all that! Only a year after the first game's release, Rare already had the sequel lined up and ready to go. The team learned many lessons from shortcomings they noticed in the previous game and took those lessons into hardening the overall design of the sequel. Thematically, where the last game was a "wild island giving way to industrialization", this one's a grand pirate adventure through the Kremling's own home base.
A number of changes were made to basic design. Hit detection is more accurate, although it can still at times be difficult to gauge from the artwork where the end of a platform is. Donkey's been captured, an attempt by Rare's employees to distance themselves a bit from Miyamoto's characters after what he'd apparently said about the original DKC. The result was introducing a female character, Dixie Kong, who has a hovering helicopter hair thing she can do. Pay no attention to how weird it is for Dixie to have two different kinds of hair, the helicopter ponytail is very cool and very effective. In fact, almost TWO effective. The sheer navigational capability it allows makes Dixie the best choice for most exploration in the game. Diddy does still have more of a horizontal distance with his roll not losing height off the edges of platforms, but it's very niche. There is no longer a "heavy weight" in this game, so the big burly kremlings now require throwing something at them to defeat them. That leads to a new mechanic, partner carrying. You can pick up your partner and either toss them to out of reach places you can't reach alone, or just chuck them at enemies that aren't dangerous to touch and defeat them outright. New pirate themed items litter the game as well. Treasure chests have unique items hidden inside but require smacking them against an enemy to break open. Cannons often lead to bonus levels but require finding a cannon ball and successfully carrying it to the cannon. Replacing the swinging vines of the last game, fixed "rope rigging" can be found in many places, allowing navigating the ropes up and down, left and right, very much like the controls in Donkey Kong Jr. There's far more verticality, whole levels designed with scaling in mind. Along with this come some deadly levels with something rising from the floor to kill you, requiring speed to stay ahead. And, at the very end of each level there is now a clear "marker" to pass, a target to hit which raises a barrel to win a rotating prize. Hit from high enough a height and the prize is your's.
This game added something special to the bonus stages. Now, not only do bonus stages have proper presentation with intro screens and clear objectives, you actually have to win each one for full completion. All of the bonus levels now reward special coins. One set is Krem coins, which are pirate treasure to be handed to this gigantic mountain of a croc with a giant spiked club on a draw bridge. Try to fight him and Monkey D. Kong gets utterly destroyed in one swing, but you can bribe him and win him over. Every 15 coins unlock a brand new hidden world full of very difficult levels. This is borrowing from Super Mario World's Star Road and Special Zone worlds. Further, there are Hero Coins. These special tokens are the main completion goal of the game. Getting them all will require finding every other secret, and Cranky Kong now "ranks" your "hero rating" based on how many you get. Apparently, Diddy's competing with Link, Yoshi, and Mario, and a couple "no hopers" who appear to be Sonic and Earthworm Jim. Notably, this does restrict the variety of bonus stage objectives, but they've also adjusted bonus level design to tie the bonus levels more tightly with whatever the level's gimics are. Now, at max a level will have three bonus levels, minimum one. The "Hero Coins" are (mostly) found inside the main level and each one is put out in clever locations that often require very tricky methods to reach.
Visually, the game still uses prerenders, but doesn't recycle the renders from the last game. All the characters have been rerendered using new techniques, most notably in the fur rendering. The previous renders made it look more like Donkey and the other furred animals were wearing suits made out of their own fur, somehow shaved off, glued into a suit, and stuck back on them. This "fur rendering" would be something Rare became rather well known for right up through the amazing "fur and grass rendering" in Star Fox Adventures (And Conker Live & Reloaded). Generally, the art style was also shifted to be more "cartoony" than the previous game as well. Rambi has larger eyes, the KONG letters are now bigger and rotate, and many of the enemies now have a more exaggerated look. This is especially true of bosses, who are now all unique entities rather than just super sized versions of regular enemies. Well, alright there's a LITTLE recycling, but not in the normal sense. The pirate crow (which you fight in the crow's nest of the first world which mainly takes place on K.Rool's pirate ship), later comes back as a GHOOOST pirate crow in the haunted woods world. Since you can't really fight Klubba, you instead get to fight a sort of twin brother as a boss in the swamp world. In fact, only one world is missing a boss completely (something I'll bring up again when it comes time to review the GBA port). Further, every part of this game is designed with the pirate aesthetic in mind. From enemies now sporting peg legs and hook hands and eyepatches and the like to the fancy "age of sail" font used in many areas to often using a "treasure map" backdrop for menus, they lean hard into the pirate theme. Even the locations fit the idea of going on a grand pirate adventure through the island, from the starting large pirate ship (and it's underwater stages taking place inside sunken ships full of treasure chests and the like) to ghost woods and some frankly bizarre mixups like the amusement park beehive world. (Yes you heard that right, BRISBY LAND is real!) All the same, they do manage to make a lot of the pirate kremlings look somewhat intimidating, especially the giant skeletal croco-ghost with a giant sword for a lower half that stalks you through a roller coaster library (like I said, truly creative mixups here).
The music is once again composed by David Wise and it's absolutely outstanding. The whole soundtrack is frankly some of the best music in all of platforming and manages to outmonkeyshine all but the very best music from the first DKC. Once again the piratic themes ring strong with things like accordion instrumentation and a few riffs from well known sea shanties used as leitmotifs, with every track building up and up and up to rising complexity throughout a stage. The boss music is suitably bombastic as well. Of course, it's hard not to mention what may be the most famous track from the whole game, Stickerbrush Symphony. Of note is that this song wasn't originally intended for the "sticker brush" levels, but in a crunch near the end of development it was decided to simply use it as a placeholder and then simply kept. It's now hard to imagine those stages without this music which has an odd combination of both soaring and tranquil. The music may not be as "tense" as a level that takes place in a field of deadly spikes hovering over an abyss would suggest, but the juxtaposition still somehow "fits" and also helps to keep the player calm and daring enough to keep trying. Every single level (or I should say every single unique level music track) also now has unique death tracks, and Diddy and Dixie also each have unique victory fanfares at the end of each stage. Sound effects are similarly excellently done. Most enemies have unique sounds to indicate their presence and the "death" sounds on taking them out are usually appropriately amusing. The "impact" sounds from barrel impacts or loading and using cannons are also appropriately punchy really bringing the player into this world.
Then there's the new way the Kong family works. They all got bit by a desire for pirate treasure it seems, because this is the one game in the trilogy where every family member are charging for services. They all got in on it. In most cases, it's a one time fee. For example, pay Funky once up front and you can use his plane rental service in that world whenever needed. Cranky Kong's hint system is dramatically improved. In the first game, he gave three hints entirely at random, making them fairly unreliable unless one had quite a bit of patience. This time, they can be selected from a menu, but they are no longer free. New Kong family are introduced here too. Swanky is a consummate hustler who runs a game show. It's a trivia game which costs coins to try and rewards extra lives. While most of his questions are things you should know either by paying close attention up to that point in the game, a few require checking the manual, and at least one requires some knowledge of the first game. Wrinkly replaces Candy as the game's save system. She also serves as a basic "manual", with new "tips" offered in each world. Considering the game already came with a manual, it's hard to say if this was redundant or an early attempt to make sure players didn't need manuals. But, since you have to pay for that stuff, it's better to just use the manual. Also, the first save is free, but every following save costs two coins. This is one of the biggest issues with this game's design, unfortunately. A platformer shouldn't really have save restrictions like it's a survival horror game, but if it's going to, this is compounded by other issues. Like many Nintendo platformers at the time, the save system doesn't record your total lives, but further it also fails to record how many banana coins you have (the other two coin types, being key to completion, are saved fortunately). So, by restarting your save, you can't even save again until you play some level and get two coins to rub together. This mainly hurts people who take breaks while someone who plays the game in one sitting will pretty much never have an issue. Either allow us to save for free like in the previous game, or remember the number of coins I have so I can stock up, but the compounded decisions hurt anyone who plays a few levels at a time. I found the best tactic I could manage was taking a plane back to the first underwater level, quickly collecting a few easy coins, and then taking a plane back to wherever I could save.
The game's pirate theme holds very strong and the overall world map does clearly illustrate roughly what you can expect to find before you enter each world, but I found the wholistic "storytelling" lacking compared to DKC1. In the first game, there's an overall progression from familiar jungle to more dangerous distances on the island and simultaneously a steady progression in what the Kremlings are doing to DK's island, from open wilds to a more or less natural environment now riddled with dug out mines to factories and horrible pollution and damage to a military base and finally concluding with K.Rool himself aboard his ship, which itself naturally hints that secretly this "king" is actually a pirate lord and sets up the sequel. That said, the "storytelling" within each world is now magnified as a result, so it's more of a tradeoff. The first world, for example, takes place all over different sections of a pirate ship, which at first involves simply charging aboard, then climbing the rigging, failing to reach the main mast and having to escape back down into the sea, sneaking back aboard through a section underwater, which floods the ship, and the next one from there the ship's sinking and you're outrunning the water, and finally bringing the crow's nest down to you with a VERY angry crow boss ready to claw you to bits. This is frankly some amazing linking between individual levels in a very dynamic "living" way. But, there's a small flaw, and that's the lost world. Don't misunderstand, the Lost World itself is amazing, but absolutely none of it's levels really "tie together". It's a large chunk of very different sections that don't tell a cohesive story, because they're encountered as difficulty spiking "one offs" throughout the adventure. In fact, there's no way to just walk from one level to the next. Each one has to be reached through the appropriate bridge from one of the main worlds. It's still a great set of secrets, but it could have been approached a little better.
The first "ending" involves taking down K.Rool in his new flying battleship. After dodging countless complicated trick shots from his pirate blunderbuss (which also has a suction mode, though by drawing everything in this pirate king also takes more damage, so use that to your advantage), eventually you give Donkey the chance to break free and he delivers the final blow knocking K.Rool into a bunch of sharks in the water below. He manages to survive and awaits in the Lost World. Apparently there's some power source there that's the "source" of all Kremlings or something.... the lore's weird and a bit unclear, also it's monkeys fighting crocodiles so I guess it doesn't matter. After finding every single bonus coin in the game and finally taking down each level in the lost world, the final boss fight is a rematch, and defeating him here blows up this kroc kore which causes the whole island to self destruct. You win! K.Rool sails off from his sinking island laughing wildly, so that sets up room for a sequel. Maybe Donkey Kong Land 2? Yes, I'll review that at some point probably.
All in all, I'd say the level design and the movement mechanics were perfected in this game. While there are a handful of design decisions that hold the game back from perfection, I'd still say this is my favorite game in the trilogy and one of my favorite platformers of all time. I took quite a bit of childhood pride in finding every last secret the game had to offer (after several weeks of hunting) all by myself without resorting to a player's guide or help online.
It appears they knew that recycling plastic consumes more resources than it saves when they claimed the opposite. "Reduce" is still the most effective means of, well, reducing waste. "Recycling" now appears to be little more than a marketing tool to avoid being more heavily regulated.
It looks like we're entering the petabit era thanks to this. On the one hand, we were finally reaching the point where games couldn't even fit on an Ultra 4K Bluray, but on the other hand, PC game makers never even bothered making the jump from DVD to Bluray, much less 4K Bluray. I found this out in a rather disappointing moment when I opened a physical copy of Doom Eternal and found a circular piece of cardboard stuck to the spindle where a disc should have been. It had my online activation code on it... in the Bethesda launcher... I didn't buy a physical copy of anything. I bought a space-eater. They couldn't even bother to spend the piddling amount of cash it would have taken to just mint a bluray disc. I get it. Very few people have a Bluray (or higher) disc reader on their PC, but I DID buy a physical version, and those people who don't have something to read the disc would still have that activation code to use, so no one's missing out.
So there it is. I'm glad that new tech's coming along, but let's face facts. Both Sony and MS have every intention of releasing "discless" consoles ONLY for their next generation, they won't be adopting this new tech. PC game makers will also be ignoring it. The movie industry never even managed to get 4K Blurays to surpass Bluray sales, nor Bluray to surpass DVD sales, and the physical medium industry has recently had a lot of factories get shut down because physical movies are becoming a "niche interest" product. If no game console just runs these out of the box, that built-in set of devices people already own to play it won't even be there.
I predict this format will exist purely for professional archival purposes, like for long term storage of security recordings or off-shifting server backups. This will be the new tape drive, and nothing more.
Curious little buggers... But you know, they'd have found out EXACTLY what fans wanted in a remake if they hadn't shut that fan remake down several years back.
For my part, at this stage I'm not sure I really need a straight remake but-in-3D. I also don't think I need some kind of meta-narrative where they try to avoid the consequences of the first game (murderers of whole timelines). What I would like to see, if I were asking for a modern remake, was to turn the game into a CRPG with lots of real choices that dramatically affect more than just a bunch of joke endings.
I'll start. I don't get why everyone loves David Bowie. It's weird to me when he pops up as a meme (see: Venture Bros and Zoolander). He just seems like some generic dorky British guy (but I repeat myself). Shouldn't he have charisma or something?
I'm not a music aficionado, so I'm probably not the best judge, but his music doesn't seem that great either. Like I've only heard a few popular songs so idk maybe there's more there, but it just seems like crappy 80s pop. His collab with Trent Reznor was cool, but it was Reznor carrying that.
This is probably sacrilege but if I listen to his spotify hits:
Under Pressure: this is stained because the same sample was used in Ice, Ice Baby. Look, if just about the whitest geekiest piece of shitbait in history finds inspiration from your music, you should probably re-evaluate your artistic choices. Mercury's voice is great in this though. Now I just want to listen to Queen.
Starman: the guitar is good but his voice just sounds tepid, like he's working up the nerve to sing in front of someone in the bathroom mirror. Keep it down, bucko.
Okay, I won't go through all of them one-by-one, but... like none of this is terrible, and I'm playing it up, but it's still sailing over my head as to why this guy is exalted. You probably have to have been a kid and watched Labyrinth with the rest of the middle school drama club to fall in love with him for the rest of your life. Fuck, what's wrong with teenagers? I can't believe I used to be one D:
In closing, Space Oddity just came up, and I'll give him this one. Just one.
[edit] I just remembered Dancing in the Streets. That one's real bad too. Someone edited it to make it bearable though.
I'm just going to keep reviewing this game apparently.
In 2003, about a year after MS's acquisition of Rareware, the company ported Donkey Kong Country to the Gameboy Advance. By this point, many developers at Rare had departed for other companies, and worse still, the company had not kept the old source code. A few years earlier, Rare had ported the game to Gameboy Color and ran into the same issue. In that case, they had modified the Donkey Kong Land engine, but in this case they went through painstaking work to reverse engineer the physics by trial and error. This new version is, then, recoded from scratch with physics that don't match either the original SNES version or the GBC version. How close does it get to the mark then? Well, I should do things in the proper order, so let's start with the visuals.
The game's visuals are pulled directly from the SNES version this time, so right away it looks far better than the GBC port. The presentation adds a new title screen, new menu art, some new artwork for the Kong family member's homes, some new mini-games, and a new opening and ending scene. Further, there are changed effects. In the past, I thought the game was lesser based on how the first level no longer shifts from noon to dusk and stays at the same brightness. But, later levels keep these unique effects, so long as it doesn't affect level brightness. I suspect what's actually going on is an intentional choice to not make the level dimmer on the notoriously dark GBA screen. Further, all the colors are washed out in an attempt to brighten the game, as is often the case with SNES to GBA ports. There is one notable degrading of the graphics, and that's the reduced layers of parallax scrolling in level backgrounds. There are a few additional graphical flares, like little animals flying or crawling here and there that have been added, but overall yes, the SNES version ends up looking better. Oh yes, and it should be added the screen is cropped. This hurts this version of the game more than the GBC version because of just how little vertical there is on the screen's aspect ratio. Many secrets no longer have visible clues like a stray banana to guide you to them, and so I actually had to look up a few secret locations throughout the game even though I'd played through this game multiple times in other versions.
The sound effects are mostly the same, though many new sounds from DK64 have been added to the two main Kongs, as well as a few additional effects here and there to various enemies. The music was recomposed, as it had to be due to the lack of a dedicated sound chip. It mostly gets close, but the original still ends up sounding higher quality. Honestly I think I'd prefer hearing either the SNES or the "chiptune" GBC version over this, but it's not so bad it's unlistenable. Over the GBA speaker, it sounds fine. A few new songs were added for things like the new mini-games, menus, and new opening.
As mentioned, the presentation alters many things. The new artwork puts Cranky inside of his cabin instead of his porch and Funky inside his flights (and now fishing) lodge. After every boss, Cranky arrives to give some quip about how pathetic the boss was before "taking those bananas back for you". The new ending takes place on K. Rool's ship instead of back in DK's home. This is done so that the "aquatic baddie" reel can now take place underwater (scrolling under the ship), and to give K. Rool a few lines ordering the DK crew off his ship and swearing generic revenge. Unfortunately, this also means all the fun monkey shines between Donkey and Diddy, all unique frames of animation, have been cut completely. Further, DK and the gang are just too wordy, and DK commits the sin of actually talking as if this were the cartoon show (or the manual). While I do appreciate the scroll of underwater baddies actually showing them underwater, all in all I'd say the original ending is more entertaining to watch. The new opening and title also cut out the original "old man playing his Victrola" sequence entirely, though of course a new menu was needed to select the additional options. The new opening sequence on starting a new game is basically what's described in the game's manual, with Diddy doing guard duty before being stuffed in a barrel only for DK to swear he'll get back all his bananas and rescue Diddy a few moments later. Of course, that introduction was always pretty silly considering you find Diddy in a barrel ONE SCREEN away from the cave anyway. Lastly, it's notable that all the maps now scroll and are "zoomed in" heavily. In a few cases, the whole map was entirely replaced with a brand new one, which did throw off my sense of spatial awareness in a few cases.
On to the gameplay changes! Alright, the new level added to the Gameboy Color version is gone. It wasn't the best level, but it wasn't the worst either, but either way it's a shame for them to just forget about it. The added bonus levels put in Candy's save shack are also gone, now replaced with just what everyone always wanted, a rhythm dance mini-game. I'd consider this a straight downgrade and prefer the bonus level style mini-games from the GBC version. Fortunately though, you don't need to get a "perfect" more than once to complete the game, and getting a passing grade on every one isn't too difficult. Funky's flights is now built in as a menu option, allowing full backtracking after only reaching one of his locations. He'll still let you jump in a flying barrel, but there's not really a point, so now the fishing game is broken up into a bunch of unique challenges. It's less dull this way, and getting the "high score" outside of the main game is much more easily attainable, but it's still not much of a mini-game. The stickers from before are now gone, replaced with photos that consist of prerendered artwork made back when DKC first came out. They're also hidden in brand new locations, unlocked in creative ways like as a reward for ground slapping a Klump to death or getting a high score in one of the animal bonus levels.
The real star of the new gameplay options is "Hero Mode". The two difficulty options from the GBC version have now been combined, so there are no continue barrels, partner barrels, and in a unique additional challenge, you play as Diddy alone, in a yellow shirt. This one gets especially challenging in later worlds. Unlike the GBC version, this requires it's own save file so you'll need to find all bonus levels on top of that for full completion. Speaking of bonus levels, this version for the first time "saves" how many of those animal statues you've collected. What this basically means is you will now accidentally go into an animal buddy bonus level so often it becomes annoying, especially since they kick you back to the start of the whole level this time around. It's like a longer "death". All things considered, they should have reworked it so you spawn back in at designated spots at or nearby the third animal token you picked up. However, there's one major issue that's hard to overlook in this version. That's the mentioned physics reworking. Unfortunately, a lot of difficult jumps become even trickier now, or whole sections no longer work as they should. For example, there's a sequence where neckies come flying in bit by bit as you bounce from one to the next so you can bypass a jumping section, but now all of them basically spawn at once and rush at you. Donkey Kong no longer dips a little lower when he rolls off things, now behaving more or less just like Diddy. Bounce height doesn't work quite right, so certain bonus levels can only be reached with trickier jumps. This really becomes a major issue at the very last world, where so many perfectly timed jumps now have to be relearned and require even more perfect timing. The most frustrating section comes at the very last level, where before you could simply carry a barrel as you jumped to finish off the Krushas, now if you try that, you'll bounce off them at the same time you end them, killing yourself. The only way to handle this section is perfectly timed barrel throws, so that was a lot of trial and error.
All in all, this version of the game isn't the worst way to go, but the additions simply don't make up for the way the altered physics mess with the game's delicate platforming balance. Playable, but more frustrating than it should be. The difficulty feels outright unfair near the end of a "Hero" run.
This is pretty stunning... MS and Sony for all their efforts are having trouble actually being profitable in their gaming sectors. Nintendo just keeps being Nintendo.
