We're now on the final day of E3, and things are starting to wind down at last. We have all the trailers that are fit to show, we have all the news that's fit to print, and we continue to have all the late-night shows that are probably not fit to air. Whether you've seen too much E3 to last a year or have managed to avoid as much of the annual industry hype machine as possible, you are very welcome to enjoy this Alternative to E3.
This year's theme has been 3D platformers for the N64, one of those historical time-and-place genres that is of great sentimental value to me. This culminated in a recent seven-part rundown of the game design genius of Super Mario 64, and I've been in a "never say never" sort of mood about creating a sequel with some other N64 platforming paragon. However, while there are some 3D platformers for the N64 that I cherish dearly, I can appreciate that they won't take to a long-form analysis as readily as Super Mario 64 did. Instead, those games are getting their due here and now during 2015's E3 week. Please feel free to check out the table at the end of this blog to see what else I covered in this four-day period, and talk about your own N64 guilty pleasures in the comments below. I'll even take in Yoshi's Story and Hybrid Heavendegenerates proponents: all are safe here.
And now... it's finally here, performing for you:
Donkey Kong 64
My beloved Donkey Kong 64. The most divisive of the N64 Rareware platformer quartet, DK64 reintroduces the world of Rare's SNES Donkey Kong Country series in a new 3D format, taking what the developers had learned from developing the first Banjo-Kazooie game to make the "ultimate" 3D platformer with Nintendo's simian sparkplug and his primate posse. They may have overdone it, however. Just a little.
Donkey Kong 64's tepid reputation goes beyond a certain opening musical number, focusing more on the game's overabundance of moving parts. There's five separate ape protagonists, each with their own abilities, collectibles and ape-specific interactive stage elements, and there's numerous collectibles beyond simply the coins (bananas) and stars (bigger bananas) equivalents with you completing tasks for numerous goons in return for useful upgrades, special bonuses, the core progression collectible (the aforementioned bigger bananas), or necessary progress of a different sort. Exacerbating this cornucopia of collcetible crap are the grenades, five different types of weapon ammunition and health pick-ups and the stages become so filled with little bouncing/spinning gewgaws that there's scarcely any room for the puzzles and platforming - the ostensible gameplay core of the genre to which DK64 belongs. DK64 sometimes feels more like a modern open-world game, where you're given a huge environment with very little level design variation and tasked with collecting several hundred knick-knacks from every nook and cranny of this enormous world: except DK64's world is not as big, and the collecting is the primary goal rather than some incidental activity that might unlock an upgrade or concept art or something. It's telling that Banjo-Tooie and Conker's Bad Fur Day would greatly dial back the number of collectibles (to almost zero, in CBFD's case) almost assuredly due to DK64's reception.
Still, though, I can accept that collect-a-thons aren't everyone's cup of tea, and while I still adore this game for indulging the very habitual, casual form of enjoyment that is finishing collections of random objects - sort of like how moreish those hidden object games are for the iOS/Android crowd - I can at least recognize, in my kleptomaniac reverie, that the actual gameplay aspects of DK64 are far too busy (and occasionally surface-level rudimentary) to be deserving of a deeper analysis. Maybe an analysis of what went wrong would be a better way to frame a longer piece on Donkey Kong 64, but considering I'm of the mindset that believes this game is amazing I would probably not be the ideal choice to write such an article.
Yeah, we're just going to skip this.Welcome to Donkey Kong 64! I'm not sure where they got the idea for this "DK TV" vignette for the attract mode, but I guess it makes sense for the context.DK Island. Rather than lush, tropical paradise, it's just DK's enormous head. The tropical plants are all on the inside, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but then they wanted this hub world to not be overly confusing to navigate. The logical consistency of a setting is just one of the many sacrifices you make on the altar of pragmatic game design.Not that K.Rool's new hoverboat mountain hideout is necessarily a more rational construct. You know what? These two deserve each other.K.Rool's in full Dr. Claw mode in this game, talking ominously about the fate of Donkey Kong and his flea-bitten monkeys (a phrase also uttered by Cranky Kong, which makes me wonder if they shouldn't invest in some collars). It's odd to consider that Rare would go back on forth with voice acting for their N64 games: Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie didn't bother, sticking with some bastard Simlish made of two or three noises endlessly repeated, but both DK64 and CBFD did. Goldeneye: Nope, Perfect Dark: Yep.Anyway, DK slept through the whole island dreadnought attack and is soon found by Squawks (or... one of several Squawks. The intro was a little ambiguous as to how many identical green parrots live on this island). The banana hoard is gone and so are DK's four friends, three of which we've never seen before. Clearly quite close, then.Cranky might know more about it. He once again serves a support role, in a very loose sense of the word. He's far more helpful than he's been in the past due to his potions: these unlock the special ape-specific powers for the five characters.Of course, he wants us to do these tutorial stages first. Nothing too exciting, and they're unfortunately not skippable, but if you're familiar with the controls they're designed to be deliberately quick and easy to get through.This one just teaches you how to swing on vines, switching direction and climbing up and down for different exit trajectories. I'm obviously making vine-swinging sound more complicated than it actually is.For whatever reason, each potion/ability has a Roadrunner/Wile E Coyote-style pseudo-Latin taxonomy. It doesn't really make much sense when applied to special moves instead of species, but I guess we needed to squeeze in more butt jokes somewhere.Subtly, the rest of the game has been closed off by this switch that needs a DK butt slam, making all of the previous palaver absolutely necessary (unless there's some speedrunning trick to get past it all, and I'm sure there is). You'll notice that this switch has DK's face on it: a lot of switches like this can only be pressed by a specific Kong.Some more basic mechanics introduced in this game: these translucent numbered pads are teleporters, but in order for them to work the player has to walk over both corresponding pads. They'll only take you to the corresponding numbered pad, as well. It's a little inelegant to stick another ten things on the floor in every stage, but I guess it's better than having to go through the circuit until you're at the right place. The floating barrel on the last screenshot lets you switch your playable character. There isn't just a dedicated button to switch characters like there is with Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, unfortunately, as the level has to load-in and load-out the various Kong-specific collectibles so the right ones aren't opaque. It's kind of what I mean about how the number of moving parts gets in the way of the game's flow, leading to more legwork on the player's part than the game should really allow.The only available location initially is K.Lumsy's cage here. Though the size of Godzilla, K. Lumsy is far too docile and pacifistic to be K. Rool's sentient wrecking ball, and he's been imprisoned to "toughen him up". The player can find a key to his cage, and getting one step closer to freedom causes K. Lumsy to dance around like a loon. This has the affect of shaking loose various obstacles around the island, allowing the player to proceed. Visiting K. Lumsy regularly is therefore a necessity.He managed to unblock this passageway, leaving behind one of the game's big banana collectibles.Which are necessary to get past B. Locker here, a living breathing broken bridge. I love that Rare even anthropomorphizes those annoying "have you found enough collectibles yet?" barriers.Jungle Japes is the first of eight worlds, and is fairly straightforward. The eight worlds of DK64 are roughly analogous to the commonly recurring stages in Donkey Kong Country, like an industrial Fear Factory world and one filled with ice caves.You'll see this frequently in the early worlds: gates that are impossible to get past without making progress in later worlds. In this case we only need Diddy and his peanut gun, both of which will become accessible before the end of this world, but a lot of each world is closed off to specific Kongs. It's all due to how the progress mechanic works: there's five big bananas for each Kong in each world, for a total of 200. (Well... 201.)There's also these giant K. Rool pads that take you to battle arenas. The goal is to survive for the length of the timer as enemies continue to spawn in.Presented without comment.Funky Kong, like many hippies in their later years, has pulled a 180 and become a Republican gun nut. He's also your supplier for guns and gun upgrades, as if there weren't enough systems to keep track of. Seriously, this game is like the 3D platformer equivalent of an Arc System Works fighter.Despite being called the Coconut Gun in the DK Rap, the Coconut Shooter is a mid-range assault rifle and, like DK himself, an all-rounder weapon for range, rate of fire and damage. It has a modified grip and a custom gun barrel, insofar as someone drilled a big hole through a log and put coconuts and gunpowder into it and called it a day.The guns even have a scope mode, if you wanted to be a filthy casual.After acquiring some firepower, we discover Diddy Kong is trapped inside a Vietnamese bamboo cage and can only be freed by shooting down targets across the jungle. It's First Blood Part 3: Rhesus Positive.Once freed, the apes teleport out and become accessible in any swap barrel. The worlds also populate with that respective ape's colored bananas (DK's are yellow, Diddy's are red), so you'll find a lot of the later areas will have more ghost bananas than Matt Kessler's local greengrocer.The three coconut targets I had to hit, all of which were above gates, now open their respective gates opening up the rest of the world. There's only so much more DK will be able to do on his own, however: the goal now is to collect what you can with DK and Diddy and move onto the next world to find another captured catarrhini. Eventually, you'll be scouring each world of its collectibles five times over, but we'll mercifully cut this LP short before that happens.
I still think Donkey Kong 64 is one of the better Rare games for the platform, but we've discussed my unfortunate proclivities enough already. Well, at least the ones pertaining to this particular video game. I said pretty much all I wanted to before the screenshots appeared, so instead I'll wish you all a happy E3 (what's left of it) and will consider my options moving forward for a N64 platformer I might actually want to cover more in-depth. Banjo-Kazooie seems like the obvious choice. There's also the matter of Yooka-Laylee, which I hope to see next year, and the upcoming Indie throwback A Hat in Time, about which I'm hoping for great things. Grow Home proved that there was some life to the genre, if you know how to approach it, so I don't think we're quite done with games like these just yet.
That's it for Alternative to E3 this year! Cranky, take it to the fridge!
