Supertember: Week 1

Welcome to Supertember! The idea here is that, every week, I'm going to try to complete as many SNES games as possible. These are games I've never played before, or only briefly to grab screenshots for our wiki, that I've been compiling over the years to turn into a blogging project. I did do something similar a few years back with a feature that attempted to fantasy-book the next SNES Classic Mini console, itself another excuse to play through a lot of wishlist items, but I still had an inventory of remainders that I've since continued to bolster.

Our ultimate goal here is to create a definitive, bulletproof, no-goofin' Top 100 list for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System: the last time I embarked on a blogging project with that specific goal in mind it was for games released in the year 2017, which did eventually result in a Top 100 list of its own after some exhaustive research, so that's what I'm going to try to make happen again with this specific console as well.

Now, I'm not likely to play through 100 SNES games in one month—I bet there's some streamer out there that's tried it though, and wisely elided the larger RPGs if I had to guess—but fortunately, I won't need to: my current ranking list includes a fairly set-in-stone 82 bangers right now after adding the two "mild recommendation" tier RPGs from last month (that would be Gulliver Boy and Slayers), with around ten or so games that I'd be willing to sneak onto the bottom there as long as everyone agrees not to focus too hard on the so-so dreck I'm trying to pass off as all-timer material. As I intimated above, I'm probably not going to address too many of my remaining SNES RPG gaps either unless they're the breezy action kind—I've a few of those I'd like to get stuck into, fortunately. This thing's mostly going to be platformers and other action games if I'm being honest; I do still have a few oddities, including fan translations, that I'd like to highlight as well in due course. I'll hopefully have that full 100 item list to show you all by the time September's over.

For our first week, though, we have... two games. Well, I've always been less of a "hit the ground running" sort of athlete and more of a "rise uneasily to my feet and start leisurely ambling towards the finish line after pretending I didn't hear the starter pistol go off" type. In retrospect, I'm starting to realize why family members never showed up to my school sports days...

Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble (Rare, 1996)

I have a checkered history with this damn ape and the Kongfedercy of dunces Rare was kind enough to surround him with, specifically the Donkey Kong 64 RetroAchievements run from a few months back, but for as tough and occasionally unfair as most DK games have a reputation for being I can't say I found any of them particularly disagreeable. The original arcade game's an addictive classic (as are its two sequels to a lesser extent), Diddy Kong Racing remains the best kart racer ever released, DKC 1 and 2 are challenging but fair gauntlets that may have aged a little poorly due to those messy pre-rendered graphics, DKCR and its sequel were fine reintroductions that preserved the inventiveness and soundtracks that made the originals pop, DK '94 is a game I've really been jonesing to replay, Bananza is making a solid case to upgrade to the Switch 2 despite its half-grand price tag, and Donkey Kong 64 is... um, it has a rap song in it? All that said, there was one DK game I'd never given a serious dive into and this one is it. (Well, this and all those Mini-Mario things but those seem disposable enough.)

I suspect this game was both fairly but mostly unfairly maligned around its release. It had the unfortunate timing to be released in November 1996, five months after the world was formally introduced to Super Mario 64, which also happened to be the same month Rare themselves dipped their toes into those 64-bit waters with Killer Instinct Gold as a prelude to the string of hits they'd bless that system with in due course. DKC3 really isn't all that bad though: it's taken on several quality-of-life advancements over previous games, such as easy and permanent access to the save cave or letting you hold onto the special coins from bonus objectives even if you should die before completing the level, while doing more with the series' typically static overworld function (you can rescue banana birds from hidden caverns scattered around the map, if you know where to find them). The only real downside is the introduction of Kiddy Kong: a lumbering infant gorilla that can't glide in the air like Dixie, and has a hitbox that feels even bigger than his already beefy sprite. He also screams like an accursed banshee whenever he dies: whoever said Yoshi's Island's Baby Mario is the most ear-piercing noise pollutant on the SNES clearly skipped over this game back in the day like I did. In a best case scenario he can be used as a sacrificial lamb to absorb a hit, though in most cases you want to keep both Kongs around. Why? Because this game introduces a team-up attack that lets you throw Dixie to all kinds of bonus-triggering and sequence-breaking heights (or throw Kiddy to dig up buried items, which aren't always easy to spot).

Other aspects of DKC3 are just plain weird. There's a clan of bear people all with B names—relatives of Banjo if I had to guess—that offer tips and item exchanges that can sometimes lead to some mild adventure game style puzzles, as you deliver what each wants in exchange for yet another object or occasionally something you can actually use. There are carnival mini-games where you throw rocks at targets (which got repurposed for one memorable boss fight) and try to beat Cranky, whose only role in this game is to be the fall guy in these mini-games. Funky's here, because when is he ever not, but his sole role is to give you a water-based vehicle to ride around in and later upgrade to reach more of the world map. Oddest of all is the inclusion of a specific enemy on every stage called Koin, whose job it is to protect DK Coins with their lives: one of the bonus objectives for each stage is to emancipate him of this coin by hitting him with a barrel from his rear side, which typically involves figuring out how to trick your way past his ironclad defenses. That they replaced every enemy with new pre-rendered sprites, including standard goons like the marching Kremlings or the small bitey Klaptrap ones, just shows you the lengths they went to in producing these games even when you'd expect a second sequel on a console that was more or less obsolete by the end of 1996 to be at least somewhat phoned in. All of DKC3's choices, perhaps maybe Kiddy (who does have his uses, I'll begrudgingly admit; he's much faster at picking up and throwing barrels), make logical sense and enhance the gameplay to some degree. Its lesser reputation really comes down to a matter of diminishing returns.

Just to highlight a few of the level ideas that went into this one, since there's very little reused material both within the game and taken from its two predecessors:

• An underwater level in the dark where you keep having to find glowing fish to give yourself a few moments of illumination. It's an idea that's been in other games but something about combining it with the aquatic aspect and tossing in a bunch of narrow passageways to move around in suggests it's aiming to trigger three different phobias at once.
• Another underwater level where you have a piranha following just behind you. You can use its tracking behavior to eat certain enemies that might be sitting in your way, and in fact you're required to do this because otherwise the piranha will get so hungry it'll eat you instead.
• A level where you have lightning striking the ground at regular intervals. The lightning bolts are programmed to land right where you'll be if you keep moving at your current pace and direction, including right on top of you if you're standing still, so there's a lot of juking involved to avoid getting hit. If you have nightmares about dodging lightning bolts in FFX, this stage will reignite those. Even once you've figured out the trick it'll keep surprising you throughout, like having water sections where being submerged will be lethal no matter where the bolt strikes the water's surface.
• An auto-scroller where you're climbing up the insides of trees (think NES Wizards & Warriors) while a giant ripsaw is slowly destroying the level from underneath you. There's a similar one where you're climbing a rope that has been lit at the bottom, where you're avoiding the flame along with all the enemies that fly past.
• A level with moon gravity (it's implied to be a hallucination brought about by toxic fumes) in which you jump much farther but also slower. The level's set inside a pipe network so there's a lot of narrow precision platforming required. On that note, an aquatic level in a similar pipe system has poisonous water that reverses your left/right controls. That one was a real joy (and somewhat easy to cheat with an emulator that offers control remapping).
• Of course, there are several levels built around your animal companions. Newcomers include Ellie, an elephant that can squirt water from her trunk in levels with water to draw from, and Parry, a bird that flies a small distance above you that you can use to collect floating items. Typically, if you can keep him alive by not letting him fly into bees you'll eventually earn a reward. Returnees include good ol' Enguarde, Squawks and his aerial expertise (and also Purple Squawks, who can't spit seeds but can carry barrels around), and Squitter, the spider who makes his own web platforms.

I've just completed the game and though the difficulty continued to ratchet up throughout DKC3 feels much more reasonable than its antecedents with sequences that, while certainly tricky (especially the auto-scrollers), don't feel quite as... well, malevolent is probably not the word to use but is certainly the word I'd like to use. These are the people who created Battletoads after all. Now, saying all that about fairness, we're not taking into account the absolute worst way to play this game: using the TUFST cheat on the main menu to switch the game to Super Difficult mode which not only removes all the checkpoint barrels but also all the DK barrels too, those that bring back your companion should you lose them. Such a setting invariably makes all the levels tense endurance runs where you're only afforded a single mistake. It would be the height of foolishness indeed if someone were to activate this mode for the sake of earning even more Retro Achievements, despite specifically conceiving a feature that required quick turnaround for maximum coverage and despite knowing how adversely such achievement hunting affected their last DK-related playthrough. Friends, I regret to inform you all that I am once again, thoroughly and consistently, back on my bullshit.

Just to let you know what kind of nonsense I've been dealing with the past week:

(For this achievement.)

So that's what took up most of my SNES blitzing this time around; the intent was to keep this feature to playthroughs roughly ten hours or fewer, but earning the RA mastery for this game easily took twice that. Whoopsie doodle. Still, I regret nothing—these games have their quirks (that I can slide off platforms after standing on their edge is something that will continue to bother me in the future too, with LittleBigPlanet and others) but they're considered platforming nonpareils for a reason. Notably, it has the sixteenth highest player count of any SNES game on RA; granted, this type of punitive platformer tends to attract the achievement sickos but I discovered for myself that there's nothing particularly "black sheep" worthy about the third DKC, other than showing up way after everyone had already moved on.

Super Adventure Island (Produce/Hudson, 1992)

If I'm being honest, my true intent here was to play the second in Hudson Soft's series of platformers starring the diabetic grass-skirt king himself Master Higgins (or Takahashi Meijin to his friends) to hit the SNES since I'd heard it'd adopted a more exploraction focus rather than the standard linear courses of its precedents. However, since I hadn't really played an Adventure Island game previously it felt disingenuous to compare Super Adventure Island 2 to the others without giving this one, its immediate predecessor, a crack. Super Adventure Island is pretty much the classic Adventure Island/Wonder Boy experience with a 16-bit facelift, following a surprisingly fragile version of Master Higgins who can only take a single hit from the horde of enemies around him. If that wasn't enough, he has to constantly eat fruit to keep his stamina up or else die, the idea I think being that taking things slowly and eliminating enemies as they appear would be too "sedate" for what was originally an arcade game.

Master Higgins can absorb an extra hit by jumping on his skateboard, though it has the downside of turning the level into an auto-scroller for a while, and he can also equip axes and boomerangs to protect himself. The former shoot in an arc while the latter do what boomerangs typically do, flying out in front before returning. Your life count is extremely limited—it can only be increased by well-hidden bonus rounds and certain score milestones—and you have two continues for the entire game. On the flip side, the game only has five worlds in it each of which has three sections followed by a boss, so you're going to be done in about an hour at most either way.

I've prepared a gameplay video here, comprising of the last few sections of world 2:

Few things to note here:

• While the boomerang is almost always the preferred weapon due to its longer range and easier-to-predict arc, there are a few cases like the octopus boss where the axe is ideal. As you can see, I messed up grabbing the axe before the end of 2-3 and quickly regretted my error.
• There's a strange high-jump mechanic you occasionally see me pull off, like when I'm grabbing those Dragon Balls at the ends of levels. Counterintuitively, you have to press down and jump simultaneously to make them happen and they seem to have less horizontal coverage to make up for the extra height. The game has a few vertical levels to take advantage of the mechanic but otherwise it's not that useful.
• The game likes to mix things up with the occasional side-scrolling shoot 'em up level. Other platformers were doing this too, notably Super Mario Land, and while I'm not particularly warm on the idea of a platformer abruptly switching genres to something I'm terrible at midway through I can appreciate the developers' attempt to maintain the player's interest with some variety.
• I have to state that the penguins are assholes. They show up again several more times and are a particular nuisance in stage 5-1. I believe they're the only enemies that spawn behind you on a regular basis. A few levels also have extremely small enemies that are annoying to hit, making me wonder how it is that Master Higgins can die from one touch of a cockroach.

Now, while I might have been showing off a bit with DKC3 above, I've no such impetus to bash my head against this game until I eventually get enough lucky breaks to reach its end before running out of lives. Part of that is some truly obnoxious enemy designs, exacerbated in no small part by the larger sprites (taking advantage of those fancy SNES graphics) giving you less room to react to, say, a penguin suddenly spawning behind you and lunging at your ass. Knowing where all the bonus rooms is key to long-term survival—there's five total—but you still have to successfully complete their tough little platforming challenges to actually earn the extra life on offer.

I mean... we have to talk about that music too, right? It's the most early '90s hip-hop/R&B New Jack Swing I've heard from a game since... well, I guess Grapple Dog from last month. Not what I expected from a Japanese game, I have to say. Composed by Yuzo Koshiro, best known to me for working on several early Falcom joints like Ys and Dragon Slayer but I imagine to mostly everyone else for Streets of Rage and The Revenge of Shinobi, the OST is an eclectic mix of musical styles (including reggae, hip-hop, EDM, and what sounds like soccer music with all the whistles) that would've been popular in the contemporary music charts but isn't really the vibe you typically hear from games too often, and less so cartoonishly colorful games about dudes in hula skirts throwing axes at shellfish. Having some "getting down to business (sexual)" music playing in the background as you swim through a whale's innards doesn't strike me as all that apposite. I kind of love it regardless though? It definitely helps the game stand out and feel modern (for the era) given how it otherwise plays like something from 1986.

Beyond the OST I didn't really find enough here to warrant a placement on the Top 100, and that's also why I haven't been motivated to push through its obscene difficulty to see its conclusion, but then the idea all along was to have something to compare to Super Adventure Island 2 when I inevitably cover that in the coming weeks. From what I hear from Adventure Island fans this one's less fondly remembered, for some of the issues outlined above I'm sure. Sorry Master Higgins, your true spotlight will arrive soon enough.

Current List Status: 83 Entries (+10 Emergency Reserves)