So here we are. It's all come down to this. Hours and hours and countless hours of soldiering through questionably-designed traps and racing beetles has led up to the first of the game's final challenges. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my esteemed pleasure to introduce to you...

We (and by we, I mean 'I') have foiled K. Rool's nefarious plot to steal the Kong's golden bananas, barely evading the complete slippage of our (my) sanity, and now we (I) get to hit K. Rool right where it hurts. The heart of his wicked scheme. The belly of the beast. The sweet chewy center of the Tootsie Pop. That's right, we get to take down his base of operations...

...by completing some more minigames.

I mean, what do you expect me to do at this point? I give this game a chance for an epic ending, or at least an epic set-up to an ending, and it gives me the equivalent of Amazing Goddamn Island. I can't really take much more of this.

But, I suppose I better finish up this mess somehow, so let's just calm down and describe how Hideout Helm works. Basically, the second you step foot into Hideout Helm, your ass is on a timer. To disable the death ray aimed at Kong Island, you have to first maneuver your way into the headquarters and activate a series of doors. Each of these doors contains two minigames specific to each Kong and a Banana Medal. Once you clear the two minigames, the laser grid shuts off, part of the main machine is disabled and you get a free Banana Medal for your effort. Do this with every Kong and, well, congratulations, you disarmed the gigantic death laser pointed at Kong Island.

Here's the trick to this level: You know those blueprints you've been collecting throughout the game? You know, the ones dropped by these guys? Turns out they weren't just for hoarding more Golden Bananas; they are literally the blueprints to K. Rool's Blast-O-Matic weapon. The more of them you find, the more time you're given on the last stage to clear every minigame. Collect them all, and the game gives you fifty minutes to complete the whole stage, which is way more than enough time than you'll need to beat all the minigames. Even if you only collected one or two blueprints, you should be able to scrape by with a decent time as long as you don't lollygag.

You know what else is funny about this? Well, I will admit I literally just pulled this from the trivia section on this wiki, but... how is Snide able to delay the countdown for the death ray? Wasn't he, I dunno, banned from the project? Did he just invent some doohickey off-screen that rewires the internal circuits of the Blast-O-Mat - you know, I'm really thinking too hard about this. It's not like the devs were really caring at this point in the game, so why should they stop at defying logic?

Since I really don't feel like going in-depth with most of these minigames, I'll let NintendoCapriSun demonstrate how the minigames in Hideout Helm work.

Yeah, his reaction at 6:00 in the video above is pretty much the same as mine when I revisited Hideout Helm in my most recent playthrough. And, to answer your question, why, yes, the timer doesn't stop while you're actually in the minigames. It just keeps on ticking away.

Anyways, here's part 2:

By the way, I'm pretty sure letting the timer run down inside Hideout Helm is the only way to get a Game Over in Donkey Kong 64 besides saving and quitting. Personally, I'm glad. This game is frustrating enough.

After getting rid of K. Rool's superweapon, the only thing left to do is track him down. Unfortunately, by this point, he's already in a hangar bay getting himself ready to flee in his large crocodile spaceship, something the game delightfully pulls out of its hind quarters. Naturally, the only way to challenge him is to collect all of the game's boss keys and release K. Lumsy from his cage, but there's still one more on the loose. You'd think that after demonstrating your minigame prowess in Hideout Helm, the game would simply give you the final key...

...but this is Donkey Kong 64 we're talking about here, so, in keeping tradition with padding the absolute fuck out of everything, you have to obtain the Nintendo and Rareware Coins from playing through the Donkey Kong arcade game twice and getting a high enough score in Jetpak, which is only unlocked after getting 15 banana medals from other stages. If you haven't been judiciously hoarding every colored banana you come across up to this point, you're pretty much hosed and will have to backtrack, ONCE AGAIN, to the previous stages and recollect everything you missed. And GOD HELP YOU if you didn't acquire the Nintendo Coin at this point in the game. I swear, when I was a kid, once I figured out I needed the damn thing to face the final boss I literally gave up right then and there. This is where I have stopped for all these years.

Not today, though. Through exuberant amounts of effort, determination, and wincing, I powered through the DK Arcade Game twice and obtained the right to see the game's final boss.

And it was worth it.

Yes, that's K. Rool in boxing attire. And yes, you fight him in a boxing match, although it's less of an actual boxing match and more of a 'roly poly clusterfuck no-disqualification bout of destruction.' I always loved the themed K. Rool fights in the DKC series, and they have definitely transitioned well to DK64, even if the rest of the game hasn't.

Each Kong has their own phase of the fight. Donkey has to climb the posts and blast himself at K. Rool when he's distracted. K. Rool is, predictably, at his lamest during this portion because all he can do is pretty much run around and slam his buttocks against the ground causing a huge shockwave. Hell, his gloves are mainly for show; he hardly punches you at all. One funny thing about this boss fight is the intermissions after you complete a phase of the fight. Two of K. Rool's minions fumble around in the announcer's booth trying to end the round so that K. Rool won't lose via K.O. I'm pretty sure that's not how real boxing works, but hell, it's how this game does it, and if the last fight ended right then and there it would have been pretty damn lame.

Next up is Diddy. Here, you have to fly around and drop the ring lights on K. Rool's head while dodging his glove. Damn. Who would've thought that Diddy would be such a dirty cheater? Then again, I'm pretty sure throwing your glove in boxing is also illegal, but jeez.

Now we come to Lanky, and his portion of the fight is probably the longest and most tedious. K. Rool, for some reason, has not taken off the last stage light you dropped on him, and is now running around the stage like a maniac. After a little while, buttons will fly up from the sides of the stage. Lanky's arm attack is now comically extended to several feet so you can press these buttons, which also seems like a last-minute change. After you press one of these buttons (order doesn't matter), a barrel with a banana icon spawns in front of you. You have to throw the barrel into the middle of the ring (which creates a banana peel), run to the corner and lure K. Rool in with your trombone to make him slip on the peel and take damage. The worst part about this section of the fight is that the detection for when K. Rool steps on the banana peel is rather strict. If you're just a hair off, he'll just mosey his way on past it and beat you upside the head.

Tiny's segment is the hardest of the five, in my opinion. Here, you have to shrink down and enter his boot once he starts rubbing his behind from ground-pounding too much. Once inside, you have to dodge his toes as they frantically try to crush you, then you have to shoot the exposed skin under one of his toes with your crossbow. You'd have to wonder how K. Rool could possibly get knocked out from minor toe inflation, but whatever advances the fight, I guess.

Then, at last, we come to Chunky, who gets the dubious honor of knocking K. Rool the fuck out. I think during this portion of the fight there's some invisibility bullshit that K. Rool suddenly pulls out of his ass but it all is made up for when you get to sucker punch him in his slimy face... until he turns invisible while he charges at you, which forces you to rely on the position of his shadow on the ground. I like this part of the fight the most because it's the one that resembles Super Punch Out!! the most.

All of these segments connect together to make a sweet conclusion to an otherwise subpar title. If you want to see the final boss in its entirety, here's a quick vid of that:

And that's basically Donkey Kong 64 for you, guys. Well, not quite, actually; there is a hidden outtakes video you can unlock through getting 101% completion - and no, I'm not kidding, there is one more percent you have to unlock by collecting every fairy and obtaining the last hidden Golden Banana - but because I'd bet not a lot of you have the unyielding patience of a wizard required to fully complete this game, here's another video of that, if you'd like to see it:

And that, my friends, is truly the Donkey Kong 64 experience. If I hadn't said it before, it hasn't aged very well.

While the levels themselves seem to be massive and expansive, a lot of them are just museum exhibits, interesting locations separated by dull hallways. Plenty of areas of the game seem as if they weren't playtested at all, such as the Beaver Bother minigame and damn near half the races. The worst part of Donkey Kong 64, however, is its extreme tendency to recycle every game mechanic to pad out the game's length. Repetition is a humongous theme in Donkey Kong 64 because almost every aspect of the game revolves around it. The level design and layout often repeats itself, the minigames certainly repeat themselves, and collectibles take an extreme habit in being within areas meant for other Kongs, meaning you'll often have to repeat the same area again with a different character. Even the goddamn boss fights start to repeat themselves after the fourth world!

Still, I can't crap on this game too much. The music is fantastic yet again, courtesy of Grant Kirkhope, and I hardly ever had beef with the game's control scheme. The amount of content to unravel, while not as extensive as Banjo-Tooie, was rather sufficient, and I'll admit that segments like the mine cart rides were a refreshing break from the monotony of the rest of the game. The few boss fights that didn't repeat themselves were pretty hectic and formidable, and for a Nintendo 64 game, its looks very nice. The character models are quite well done and the settings are crisp and colorful.

Donkey Kong 64, as a sequel to the Country series, is laughably lackluster and unpolished. Is it truly awful, though? Well no. Donkey Kong 64, on its own, is an average - if not repetitive - platformer that hits head on sometimes and misses by a wide margin at others. If you loved Rare's younger adventures as a kid, Donkey Kong 64 might not live up to them, but it can still be a refreshing dose of nostalgia if you look at it from the right perspective.

Oh, and there's also multiplayer, but it's kinda meh. You'd be a little better off playing GoldenEye, but I'll describe it really quickly, anyways. Up to four competitors can duke it out as any Kong (or a buffed-up Kremling named Krusha) in either a deathmatch-style arena or a battleground similar to the Crown fights in single-player. Whoever gets the most frags wins. It's rather basic, but if you have a group of people it can be pretty entertaining at times.

And with that, I bid adieu to this Retraux-Spective, finally. Don't get me wrong, I love to talk about games, but I was beginning to run out of the will to write there. I hope you enjoyed my ramblings, and I guess you can follow if you'd like to see me review and reminisce upon more shit in the future. This is MBF, signing off. Have a good one!