Yet another blog with a Sesame-Street-joke-based title.
By Video_Game_King 15 Comments
Donkey Kong Country 2
( You're starting to piss me off, Persona.) Hell, I had to play this upbeat music just to prevent my full wrath from descending upon you like a heartless angel. (Anybody who understood that Kingdom Hearts reference understand how fucked the game would be.) Come back when you've decided that I can beat the final boss without grinding more than the 7th Saga; in the meantime, I'll do two things: try to avoid obscure video game references, and blog about Donkey Kong Country 2.The first thing I noticed is that compared to just about every other video game villain ever, King K. Rool is actually rather intelligent. Wait, did I say "King?" Because I meant Kaptain, since displaying any sort of intelligence seems to get you demoted in the DK World. (Although that should've been obvious when you saw how they misspelled Captain.) Just look at the cartoon, where the King's plans ranged from "let's steal his hair" to "let's hope he's never seen a girl before." Anyway, having seen his previous plans fail at the hands of DK and Diddy, K. Rool decides to capture DK so he won't interfere again. Granted, he makes the rookie mistake of leaving Diddy well alone, but can you blame him? Turns out Diddy got himself a girlfriend, so I guess the Kaptain thought all the monkey sex (they don't wear pants!), combined with the fact that Diddy's an idiot for dating a girl whose name literally contains the word "dick", would make DK's sidekick unable to rescue him. How wrong he was.
* record scratch* Did I say that you'd get bored with the levels? Because I was fucking wrong. This game has so much variety that it is now an expert in celebrity pregnancies or whatever. Each level's constantly introducing something new, even if it is essentially using already used mechanics to do it. One level has you jumping around a roller coaster that the Kremlins clearly don't repair anything, another has your parrot racing another parrot for...absolutely nothing. Seriously, why were they racing? It's not like I hadn't seen the parrot before; he'd been put to pretty good use. Oh, that's another thing this game does well: the animals. Yea, they were there in the first game, but you didn't see a lot of them. Not so here; as I said exactly one line ago, there are sometimes entire levels dedicated to these guys. For the most part, it works really well, since all the animals have their own weird quirks that are put to good use (the snake being a slinky, the bird puking up an infinite supply of rocks, the monkey beatboxing at the end of each level, etc.).
I said "for the most part" because a lot of the levels end with no animal signs. What makes this weird is that almost all of those levels have no animals around whatsoever. What the hell are they worried about? Oh, and while I'm complaining, the bosses lack originality to the point where you can call them 3D Platformers. Sure, they may look different, but they all seem to boil down to "dodge attack, pick up barrel, toss barrel at them, repeat until dead." K. Rool mixes things up a bit, but only in terms of attacks, not attack patterns or strategy. OK, we done complaining? Good, let's talk about more awesome in this game: the music & graphics. We already know that the game looks better than Crysis in a skimpy dress (that slut), but what you don't hear as much is that the music is awesome. Go ahead and pick a random song in the game, and chances are 98% that it'll rock. Hell, listen to that Robin Hood shit I've had playing since the beginning of this blog! Therefore, I give this game the Russell Crowe Award for Kicking More Ass than Necessary.
Review Synopsis
- Wow the variety just never stops!
- Oh, wait, there's the bosses. Fuck them.
- Awesome music.
To be fair, alarms do suck.
Dynowarz: Destruction of Spondylus
( Alright, what the fuck?) Seriously, what the hell is going on with that title? I'm going to ignore the part of the title that seems to have been made by executives trying to be cool (and failing), and instead I'll focus on the Destruction of Spondylus. Does anybody have any clue what that means? Is it a threat to a plant's sex life, Lorena Bobbitt style? Or is it some lost Roman tragedy, which also involves sex because they were Roman? The page for this game doesn't help much, either; it says that Spondylus is a solar system of some type and that the bad guy's trying to destroy it, but there are several problems with that, like how you never see any type of bad guy ever. Also, what does any of that have to do with anything in the game? Look at the box art, and nowhere will you find scientists blowing up the Milky Way or whatever; instead, you'll see the pure awesomeness of Boba Fett shooting a hole in a robo-T-rex's face. The only way this could be more awesome would be if Boba had tits and the T-rex transformed into an even bigger T-rex. It would really help if any of this was in the game, since DynoWarz can't even come close to matching that level of awesome. Things start going downhill as soon as you get into the game, when you discover that it's a mediocre platformer. Even worse, you start off as the human, of all things!
It's only when you jump into the dinosaur (pictured included because it's awesome (should probably cut down on using the word "awesome")) that you realize that the dinosaur portions only suck a little less than the human portions. Unlike the pilot, our dinosaur friend actually has a wide variety of weapons at his disposal. Bad news: most of them suck. Get the beam as soon as possible, and don't let go, even if the game makes it hard with power-ups that just refuse to go away. Screw them, stick with the beam and tape down the turbo button. Watch as enemies....wait, what the hell are they doing? Some explode (normal), some back away (normal), some actually rush to you in an obvious misinterpretation of Newton's Third Law (the hell?). The only thing more confusing (and the only thing I'll mention before the end of this blog) is that the bosses are all the exact same, easy boss. This is no way to treat a cyborgasaurus-rex, which is why they gave it to the crappy pilot dude. Like Donkey Kong Country 2, all you do is shoot and dodge, repeating until it becomes repetitive. (It doesn't take too long.) As for the award this game gets, just copy and paste the past four paragraphs until they become repetitive. At the end of it all, you'll find the award.
Review Synopsis
- Dinosaurs combined with robots? Awesome!
- The actual outcome? Less awesome!
- Humans? Not awesome whatsoever!