Welcome to the second half of what might be the most cursed blog feature I've written since... well, there's probably several others this year alone. This perhaps warrants a closer psychological examination but not right now, as I've got thousands of multi-colored fruit to find first. That's right, I'm still gunning for 100% completion of the RetroAchievement set for Donkey Kong 64—the 3D platformer that needed the N64 Expansion Pak enhancement just to contain its exorbitant amount of collectibles—and the only achievements I have left after Part 1 are the difficult ones. Great!

This entry sees us poised to finish up the fifth world, Fungi Forest, and move onto the final two worlds of the game followed by the game's explosive finale against a certain corpulent reptilian emperor. (Wait, Wizpig and Grunty were overweight too. What does Rare have against fat people?) As before, I will be chronicling these achievements as I earn them and disclosing any special conditions or challenges that they presented. As always, each achievement comes with a free reading on the ol' Exasperometer, which accurately reads just how much that particular challenge rustled my jimmies. Better believe that those jimmies were rustled by the hogwash this episode. Stirred, even. Rumpled, if you prefer.

Anyway, this is Part One of Mis-Simian: Chimpossible, a title I came up with after twenty seconds and spent no longer seeking an alternative when one was so desperately warranted, and I'll also throw in at no extra cost Part 1 of the series that inspired these ape escapades that focused on a much better game. While the perceived target of this feature is to chronicle my suffering the actual goal is to highlight the imagination and insight that goes into forging achievement sets for old games, accentuating particular quirks and roadblocks and opening our eyes to new facets of games we may have already experienced several times before in a less intensive context. It's why I love achievements after all; they often do a fine job of thoroughly demonstrating everything a game has in store.

Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow

100% the fifth world, Fungi Forest. This is, I believe, the only world besides the first two (which require that you rescue Chunky from world three first) that you can't complete on the first visit. The reason being is a very annoying rabbit that you're forced to race against twice, and winning the rematch is only possible with Lanky's speedster barrel upgrade bought in world six. The irksome thing here, besides the rabbit trash-talking you throughout, is that you lose several seconds entering the barrel and going through the power-up animation: the rabbit is as fast as you but takes certain corners a little more widely, making it a very tight race. We'll be seeing that Duracell shill again in just a little while.

Exasperometer: 4.

The Tortoise and the Hare

The sixth world, Crystal Caves, is where three missable achievements can be found and can I just say that it's super cool of the achievement-makers to back-end a whole bunch of these. This one involves that annoying rabbit from Fungi Forest (I told you we'd be seeing him again shortly). For whatever reason you're required to rescue that same rabbit from a bomb he's tied to before he explodes in a mini-game, possibly because the team didn't want to create another NPC for this one mission. This achievement instead posits the suggestion of "What if you just let that fucker die?". A powerful idea.

Exasperometer: 1.

Maze in Ice

This... this one was not fun. There's a room in an igloo where you enter a spiky maze as Donkey Kong and have to navigate to its center to obtain a Golden Banana (GB). However, as soon as you enter the maze it starts spinning around while changing directions a lot, so you really need to be quick and reactive to avoid getting hit by the wall. What doesn't help in the slightest is that these passages are very narrow and DK is very not that despite his best portion control efforts, so you end up getting hurt a lot. To obtain this achievement, you need to reach the center without getting hit once. Naturally, if you accidentally grab the GB after getting hit the achievement is voided. Took me damn near a hour.

Exasperometer: 8.

A Hazy Shade of Winter

100% World Six, Crystal Caves. Not too bad but the mini-games are starting to get real tough by this point. Hardest GB was probably one where I had to kill everything as Diddy within a strict time limit, and most of the enemies were up on platforms from which they could easily knock you down.

Exasperometer: 3.

Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head

100% World Six, Crystal Caves. There's also an extra condition for this one. There's a large enemy with a club that makes it rain stalactites every few seconds while exploring; if you can find and eliminate them early on then you'll save yourself a literal headache as you continue the level. This achievement doesn't want you to do that: you have to get 100% while it still lives. Killing it before then will of course void this achievement, making it the third and last missable here.

Exasperometer: 4.

Burnt Ice (Default: Victim of the Ice Brigade)

Defeat World Six's boss. It's World One's boss again, Armydillo, with a few extra weapons. Fortunately, this is nowhere near as lengthy as the Dogadon rematch and certainly nowhere near as tough. The only troublesome spots are avoiding the ground-pound shockwaves (since it's often hard to judge how high those beams reach) and one point where you have to avoid a very persistent heat-seeking missile for a few seconds.

Exasperometer: 3.

Upgrade U

Just buy all the upgrades. That includes all those from Cranky, Funky, and Candy. The Tag Anywhere hack really made this one quicker but there's not really a challenge involved: you need most of those upgrades and you'll always have tons of coins for them after the first few worlds.

Exasperometer: 1.

My Favorite Things

The easier of the two big collectible-specific achievements. This just involves collecting every banana in the game; that is, the regular ones rather than the progress-critical golden ones. I'd say it's no big deal since you have a running tally you can refer to for anything you might be missing but we're still talking 3,500 objects to find here. Just imagine how long it would take to spin the roulette wheel that many times.

Exasperometer: 3.

Spooky Scary Skeletons

100% World Seven, Creepy Castle. The level itself isn't too hard to navigate but they did carefully hide some of Diddy's items due to him being able to fly around with the jetpack. The worst part was easily the challenges, many of which are now on their hardest setting. The last version of Beaver Bother in particular, which was already a clusterfuck due to its terrible AI, must've taken about half an hour.

Exasperometer: 5.

Madman Across the Water (Default: Protect Ya Neck)

Defeat World Seven's boss, King Kut Out. This is the boss that's just an enormous cut-out of K. Rool that you need to launch yourself into to damage. You have to do this nine times total, and after every three hits a different part of the cut-out breaks off and his tactics get a bit trickier to manage. First, he starts generating a fake (if you try to hit it you'll just fly out of the arena and lose that Kong for the rest of the battle, switching to another) and then after six hits he'll start popping in and out at split-second intervals requiring a bit of prediction work. Obviously, the no-damage achievement also requires you don't launch an ape out of the fight too. Actually, the worst part isn't the timing but rather what happens after each hit, as he'll fire lasers at you as you swim back to the main platform. You can't avoid the lasers in the water as easily as you can on land (since they don't lead much) so every time—all eight of them (ninth hit is the end of the fight)—it's a coin toss.

Exasperometer: 4.

The Secret Place

I had to look this up, but there's a secret test room you can visit after assembling all the blueprints in the game. The blueprints (which are also yellowprints, redprints, purpleprints, and greenprints depending on the Kong) are a set of collectibles, one per color per world, that nets you a total of five GBs per world including the hub (making forty all together). Only by completing it do you unlock maybe the least amazing reward ever: the chance to replay any of the GB mini-games. If you instead hit A+B simultaneously on the mini-game selection screen, you get taken to this ominous area with an unmoving DK clone, some platforms, and a banana balloon (which you have to pop to register the achievement). Kinda neat they left it in, but there's so little here that there's barely anything worth noting. Well, except for the fact you have to reset the console to get out of there.

Exasperometer: 2.

Penny Slots

The first of two achievements for beating one of the mini-games you unlock after the above blueprint hunt. This one's for playing the slot machine, which requires careful timing as you stop each of the four rollers on the banana. You have to do it three times total within 30 seconds for this setting of the mini-game. Honestly, it's not too hard once you get the timing down.

Exasperometer: 2.

Luck Be a Lady

The other achievement for beating one of the mini-games you unlock after the above blueprint hunt. This one is considerably harder than the first, since you're required to play Krazy Kong Klamour (really should've avoided any and all triple-K names, my Rare dawgs). This is the one where you have to play whack-a-mole with GBs without hitting the Kongs, which occupy the five slots the GB isn't in. The timing is intense: the GB and Kongs will appear for about half a second and your shot takes about 0.4 seconds to reach its target, giving you 0.1 seconds to react and fire in time. And then repeat it nine more times within a minute, without hitting a Kong as it'll actually increase the remaining number of bananas you need to hit. Rouuuuugh.

Exasperometer: 6.

Hacking to the Gate

Shut down the Blast-o-Matic, the big cannon pointing at DK Isles. Naturally, this is a story progress achievement and didn't require anything special. I'm just floored someone slipped a Steins;Gate reference into the DK64 achievement set. El Psy Kongroo indeed.

Exasperometer: 1.

Castle Island

100% the eighth and last world, Hideout Helm. This one's simply a (generously) timed gauntlet: you have to complete the intro area, and then ten challenges (two per Kong) to shut down the Blast-o-Matic and have your run of the place. No bananas or GBs, just a few fairies and a Battle Arena to contend with. Apparently this counts as a missable achievement due to a glitch in the North American version of the game where you can permanently miss the banana medal rewards from the Blast-o-Matic shutdown process if you decide not to collect them then and there. It'd be kinda weird if you didn't, though.

Exasperometer: 2.

Lay Down Your Arms

A Battle Arena achievement, and a real nasty one too. The hardest Battle Arena is the one I just mentioned in Hideout Helm: you have to survive two (later three) Kasplats for 90 seconds without attacking them or the weaker Kritter enemy they spawn with. The Kasplats are the guys you get the blueprints from and they're tough to deal with in these small arenas because of their big shockwave attacks (even the name of this Battle Arena, Shockwave Showdown, emphasizes this). Real hard to keep away from those constant shockwave attacks but this is one case where the Tag Anywhere hack made a significant (possibly even disqualifying) impact: normally you can only reach this place as Diddy but by switching to Tiny before entering you can use her hair twirl glide to stay in the air away from the shockwaves longer. While I feel a little bad that I got a major leg up from what was purely meant as a convenience hack, I'd hate to imagine what doing this achievement with Diddy would be like.

Exasperometer: 7.

Fairies' Lamentation and Dance

Just collect the reward from capturing all 20 banana fairies with the camera. Finding these flighty fey isn't an issue thanks to some very pronounced visual and audio effects whenever they're close by, but actually centering them in the viewfinder and taking their picture without them suddenly zipping away is the hard part. Still, this is a necessary step of a normal 101% completion run so it's nothing out of the ordinary.

Exasperometer: 2.

Homeland

100% the hub level, DK Isles. With many of these GBs you have to come back later after discovering them the first time because they'll need power-ups from later worlds, but as long as you remember where everything is there's nothing too taxing here. I had an issue remembering where the second Battle Arena is: you need to shoot a mushroom on the ceiling (??) of an earlier world's lobby with each Kong once to open the path to it. No hideously difficult mini-game challenges or bosses or anything of that nature at least.

Exasperometer: 2.

This is the Savanna

Since I'm poised at the precipice of a final boss fight I desperately don't want to do, I decided to procrastinate with some sweeping up. This is the Rambi Arena high score challenge that I demurred on back when I earned that Enguarde Arena achievement, both of which are bonus modes activated from the main menu. The idea is that you smash an endless amount of beavers (I think I read a doujin like that once) for a single minute. However, since the beavers are only worth two points each, you won't be anywhere near the achievement's 175 point threshold just charging around without a plan: instead, you need to find the golden beavers that are worth 10 points and then make sure you kill it in the same attack as another regular beaver for a combo, which doubles the amount you earn. The 20 points you get for each of these golden combos is absolutely necessary to hit the goal in time; missing a single combo, or taking too long to find ol' Goldy once it respawns, ensures you'll never get close. It's almost entirely RNG, in other words, and it took more than a few attempts before I finally got it. Not so much a skill issue but a luck issue, unlike the Enguarde one.

Exasperometer: 7.

Nickels and Dimes

Now let's talk some real bullshit before we hit the big finale. This is the other big collectible achievement, along with the all-bananas one above, except it involves collecting every Kong Coin in the game. There are two exceptions with this set when compared to all the other gewgaws: The first is that you don't need anywhere near the total number (which is 974, so at least it's fewer than the 3,500 bananas) to complete the game. In fact, you can buy every upgrade with just 160 coins, which is less than 1/6th of the total. The second is that the game doesn't track coins like it does with the other items since they're not compulsory for 101% game completion. That means there's 974 of those little guys just floating out there that are completely unaccountable unless you bothered to keep a tally yourself. My total before the ending was 945, 29 away, so I definitely had my work cut out for me.

Fortunately (?), it only took three hours to find the four missing solo coins (three were Chunky's, one was Diddy's; I was at least able to compare my own coin totals to the full total found online so I could see who was deficient) and the last 25 came from one of the rainbow coins you collect from the dirt mounds. It was, in fact, the recently-discovered dirt mound attached to that earlier achievement from Part One; I guess what I'd done was to dig up the dirt mound for the achievement and then somehow forgot to collect the rainbow coin afterwards. It was the one dirt mound I could confirm that I had found too, so that figures.

Exasperometer: 10.

Returns a King

Well, this is the achievement for beating K. Rool and completing the game. Believe me when I say that just surviving this fracas is enough of an accomplishment. The way the final battle works is that every Kong Family member takes on K. Rool in a boxing match, tagging out after every four solid hits. DK's round involves using a barrel blast when K. Rool's guard is down (there's a certain number of shadow-box punches he'll do before he forgets what he's doing and starts playing to the crowd) and dodging shockwaves in the meanwhile. Diddy's involves evading K. Rool's boomerang gloves while shooting down some stage lights, each requiring two hits on some targets. Lanky's has him activating barrel lifts, throwing the barrels onto the ring to create a banana skin trap, and then summoning K. Rool (still blinded by a stage light on his head) with music so he'll run over and slip on the peel. Tiny's has her shrinking down and attacking K. Rool's toes, quickly avoiding a recurring pattern of them shooting in and out. Finally, Chunky has to power-up by hitting a switch, using a pad to turn invisible (for some reason), and then entering a barrel to go into Hunky Chunky mode so he can sock K. Rool with a perfectly-timed Primate Punch. Chunky must do this while avoiding K. Rool charging around the ring following a specific pattern of 90 and 180 degree turns that you need to carefully revise with a comprehensive document: a K. Rool Angles Thesis, as it were.

Each Kong has their own health bar, generously, but if a single one loses the whole bout has to be replayed from the first round with Donkey Kong. The kicker for newcomers (or those like me for whom it's been far too long) (or maybe not long enough) is the pattern memorization needed to avoid K. Rool's toes as Tiny and how unpredictable and fast his boomerang gloves are for Diddy. Everyone else is easy enough to survive once you know what you're doing. Worth noting also that each round has a timer, and if you run out of time the whole segment resets (though not the match) and K. Rool's health is fully recovered, whereas yours is not. Honestly, just a really unpleasant fight altogether.

Exasperometer: 8.

The Champ is Here

I'll admit, I was fully prepared to throw in the towel here, apposite as it is for a final boss fight in a boxing ring. I didn't think I had the patience to deal with a no-damage run for what is essentially a series of five consecutive boss fights. However, defeating the final boss "casually" engraved upon me the truth that most of K. Rool's phases are largely based on pattern recognition, meaning I can simply memorize what I need to do by getting some practice pulling off each phase individually. The one phase that still has an unhealthy amount of randomness is Diddy's, and his segment only arrives second (after DK's, who has the easiest and fastest round) so it's not a huge loss of time if I get whupped there. Tiny's is rough but not if you have the toe movement pattern down (it's ten sets of five moves though, so I needed to write it down) and all Lanky and Chunky has to do is stay out the way of a very large and overt K. Rool's path as he stomps around the ring in a predetermined manner. I was fully prepared to spend some considerable time on each individual segment until I was confident enough to knock them out damage-free one after the other—I am, after all, only a single achievement away from completing this set and it's way too tantalizing to abandon—but then I discovered a weird game-breaking glitch in the boss fight rematch mode in the main menu where they take Diddy's guns away (I guess I must've accidentally switched to the PAL version) and was momentarily giddy that I could have a valid reprieve from this achievement. Sadly, I rationalized that the main adventure wouldn't have saved after the final boss and so that option was still available.

I'm not sure what else to say here besides that I was sweating bullets every time I successfully passed the Diddy segment harm-free. Lanky, Tiny, and Chunky's segments aren't so much super dangerous than they are long, giving me ample opportunity to let my nerves get the better of me and slip up with a dumb error or otherwise pay the price for taking the predictable K. Rool too lightly, but somewhere around the eighth or ninth try I made it all the way to Chunky and went super conservative with my opportunities just to avoid any last-minute heartbreaks. Instead of my heart breaking, however, I broke that vile reptile's nose and proceeded to pull off an uncharacteristically energetic little jig as the achievement popped and my long banana-grabbing nightmare was finally over.

This has been my story of courage and determination: an inspiring tale of punching a giant cartoon crocodile on the snoot and being driven almost to tears by the subsequent, overwhelming emotions of satisfaction and relief. I'll be expecting the lionizing movie biopic shortly.

Exasperometer: 12.

Don't Rain on My Parade

Completing the game with 101%, earning the secret ending. Can't really claim to have beaten this game without this, IMO, but then I'm a crazy person as everything above can attest.

Exasperometer: 3.

• Final Golden Banana Count: 201 (100%).
• Final In-Game Progress Tracker: 101%.
• Final Achievement Count: 59 of 59 (100%).
• Hardest Achievement: "The Champ is Here" (no-damage victory on final boss).
• Total Number of Collectibles: 4,865.

I genuinely didn't anticipate I could pull this off, but you can verify right here that I have all the Hardcore achievements for DK64 (I had to confirm it a few times myself). Whether I'm prouder of this or the Mario 64 run is hard to say—this set was harder, though I'm not sure "commendable accomplishment" and "101%-ing DK64 for the third time" necessarily belong in the same sentence—but as before I feel all the more content for actually getting it done. Thanks again goes to the tireless RetroAchievement community for devising such sadistic challenges and to this community for being willing to hear me go on and on about gorillas and crocodiles comprising a dramaturgical dyad or however I filled the word count limit this time around. Thanks for reading, in other words, and I'll see you all again next time with a better candidate for one of these. (What was wrong with my original plan to earn the full RA set for one of the Zeldas? Truly, my actions are a mystery even to me.)