Yooka-Laylee - ex-Rare staff 3d platformer kickstarter, reached a million in 6 hours!

[A Black Falcon]

I backed the kickstarter of A Hat in Time. Looks like it could be good, and it is getting closer. There have been several more somewhat similar announcements since, mostly kickstarter stuff. It's definitely nice to see indie games get to the point where they're making 3d platformers! There have been so many indie 2d platformers, it's fantastic that they have moved to 3d as well now. Major publishers sure aren't making many 3d platformers, so there's a definite place for them.

Here's a tidbit about DK64. Remember how it was such a big deal it had the expansion pak and everything? Nintendo went on and on about how DK64 just wouldn't work without it. Well, later games actually did take advantage of it (like Majora's Mask) but it's been revealed that DK64 actually did NOT take any real advantage of that extra memory. In a way, this makes sense, considering how poor things like draw distance were in that game (BT, which didn't use the expansion pack, had much farther draw distance). Why did it absolutely need the expansion pak, to the point where it was Nintendo's choice as the game the extra hardware would be included in? It was to fix a bug... Yeah, that's basically it. There was a game killing bug that would occasionally lock up the game, and the only workable fix Rare was able to find in time for the game's release was to use the expansion pak. Kinda disappointing, isn't it?

I still wish that B-T and Conker had supported the expansion pak. There has to be a reason why those games have worse, less consistent framerates than DK64...

And also, sure it was supposedly "just a memory leak" or something like that, but it's got to have been a bad one given all the additional RAM needed. And I also wonder, once they did go with the expansion pak, did they boost up anything else graphically once that they knew they had the additional RAM?

Now, as the years have gone by and I've had time to play BK and BT a few times (as well as their 360 ports), I can safely say I don't consider DK64 a better game than either. I think at this point I might in fact put BK (original) as the best of the bunch. However, I've never once hated DK64. I still consider it a very well made game, and I'm not sure I'll ever change my mind on that.

My opinion on this one hasn't changed, DK64 is by a good margin the best Rare 3d platformer in my book. The others are great games too, but DK64 is better.