Finding the fun in a rough year

So, uh, what a year, huh? Haha, yeah, what a year indeed, totally wasn’t full of horrors or anything! Video Games! Wow! They’re cool or whatever! …ok, you know what? Let me be real: this year was rough! It felt like (and still feels like) there was no shortage of bad news coming out every day (which has reduced my usage of Bluesky in turn because the vibes on there are in shambles more often than not), everything’s more expensive for incredibly stupid reasons, and generative AI threatens to ruin everything we hold dear in ways that should be exceedingly easy to avoid. And by that, I mean genAI should have been thrown in a dumpster to rot forever months ago, never to return! I just gotta make sure my stance on that topic is clear in case it wasn’t already, you know? I would rather shut this whole thing down than ever use genAI for even a single word, so I promise you that this writing of Very Questionable Quality And Length is all me, baby! Anyway, it’s really, truly rough out there right now and I hope y’all are hanging in there. If I can be greedy for a moment, outside of the broader news, my year was actually alright! I can’t say I did anything particularly ambitious, but work’s going well, the blog has continued to grow its readership at a rate that still surprises me, I’m fortunate enough that my family and friends are doing alright, and my volunteer work has expanded in really satisfying ways. Despite the horrors, I can’t deny my blessings!

I hope this doesn’t come off as preachy or grandstanding, but if I can offer one piece of advice, it’s this: get involved in your local community! Find some place to volunteer or look for people with common interests! If politics interest you, see if you can get involved in local races or support good candidates! Knowing that there are people nearby you can relate to who are divorced from the daily rumblings of the internet will do so much to ground you and keep you sane. You can’t solve the world’s problems by yourself and capital P Posting through them sure as hell isn’t going to do anything either, but you can make a difference for someone in your community and that’s something we should all strive to do as often as possible. Strong communities are what survive in times like these, so it’s important that you understand the value of doing what you can rather than fixating on what you can’t. Using Bluesky as your only source of social interaction (you better not be on Twitter at this point!) will inevitably wear you down because everything is going to sound even worse than it already is. Social media is designed to get a rise out of people and those who cause the biggest stink or most drama, facts be damned, are the ones who get all the attention. If social media rewarded people with chill vibes who offer things to people without expecting anything in return, I’d be one of the most popular accounts on the site! Honestly, if I wasn’t running this blog, I probably would have stopped using it months ago because it just isn’t what it used to be. I’ve met a bunch of great people on there and I truly do appreciate whenever someone comments on my stuff because I’ve honestly had nothing but nice interactions (thank you all for that!), but you can tell that things have changed and a lot of the people I particularly enjoy hearing from have significantly cut back their usage for perfectly understandable reasons. We all know why it’s worse now, it ain’t hard to figure out, but that doesn’t make it any less unfortunate.

I think that’s part of why RetroAchievements has defined a big chunk of this year for me. While the site is certainly not without its flaws and even had an Incident this year that was the biggest philosophical challenge it had faced up to this point (if you know, you know, and thank goodness they fixed it in a satisfactory way), it’s one of the increasingly few places on the internet that has actually gotten *better *over time. The site consistently gets new features, makes improvements to existing ones, offers avenues for people to contribute, holds events to keep its playerbase engaged, and continues to truck along without the need to charge its users. When there’s no money at play, it’s a lot easier to avoid enshittification! It’s run by a bunch of volunteers who seem to truly love what they do and video games as a whole, which I appreciate so much in a world where people can just say whatever nonsense they want about video games on social media without having any skin in the game. So much of modern gaming discussion on social media is about putting others down and taking jabs at people who may or may not even exist for the silliest little things. I’ve seen so many “making up guys to get mad at” posts reposted on my feed by people who think they’re _Discoursing or something and it honestly drives me crazy! I don’t know how y’all put up with how petty some of these “debates” can be!

RetroAchievements, though it definitely has some, uh, interesting users and no shortage of old internet-style forum bickering that’s usually funny in its relative innocence, is ultimately a place where people can actually lift each other up and help one another improve at something they love. Events encourage players to work together towards shared goals that benefit everyone, the Discord and comment pages allow people to post strategies to help future players, and the achievements themselves offer clear curriculum that players can aim for to get started with learning a game to its fullest. You could say “Just play the game, you don’t need achievements to have fun!” and I’ve indeed seen people say that in the most annoying way possible on Bluesky, but that isn’t really the point. The achievements give structure to the same goal; you still play the game and have fun, but now you have a greater understanding of the possibility space. If you grew up in the arcades, 1CCs and all sorts of obscure tech probably come naturally at this point, but for people who grew up on consoles, they assume arcade games are just “Quarter Munchers” that feel completely at odds with the typically more forgiving design of console games. By making achievement sets for these games that gradually increase in complexity and challenge, you offer an onramp for getting good and appreciating arcade game design more than you would have if you had just banged your head against random arcade games in MAME bereft of historical and mechanical context. It’s very rare I contribute to anything on the internet that isn’t this blog or Hardcore Gaming 101, but I’ve found myself making several comments about games lacking in English documentation online because I find the idea of contributing to a greater pool of gaming knowledge and helping others find joy in video games so fun. That was why I came up with this blog, after all! Sure, I tend to play games that aren’t popular on the site, but I’m confident that the breadcrumbs will eventually help others down the line and that fills me with the same pride a master teaching his students feels. Surely someone else other than me will try to master the DS version of SaGa 2 someday, right? I think of it like partaking in the modern version of the Japanese arcade scene; instead of filling in a notebook with how to get the items in Tower of Druaga, I’m posting the secret to getting easy A ranks in Dream Mix TV World Fighters and I think that’s so damn cool!

Of course, my recent obsession with RetroAchievements has made appreciating modern video games a bit more difficult. I barely made it to the 10 games threshold and I didn’t even finish playing the games I’m going to talk about until a couple of weeks ago! While there were fun games that I’ll be gladly talking about in due time, I think this year might have been the least passionate I’ve ever been about modern releases. I don’t know how much of that is due to the industry being in a pretty terrible place in a lot of ways, but I do at least know that part of it is due to the ways I’ve changed as a person. While I still love the types of games I usually do, I’ve gained an immense appreciation for grinding games out until I feel like I really, truly understand them. I’m not saying I’m gonna be interested in speedrunning anytime soon, but for the first time in my life, I’m regularly thinking about trying to 1CC various arcade games and shmups to see how far I can push myself and how I hypothetically stack up against some of the God Gamers you can find on RA and Twitch. Think of it as me being a Shonen anime protagonist undergoing some harsh training after realizing their own weakness to get a cool power-up later! If I had a time machine, younger me wouldn’t recognize who I am now at all! The thrill of improving and pushing myself to be better is downright intoxicating and the things I’ve managed to pull off so far have given me such newfound confidence that I deeply cherish. I want to see myself succeed in things that people assume aren’t possible at first glance, and though I have no idea how often I’ll actually pull off such daunting tasks, the idea of trying fills me with the most passion I’ve had for video games in quite some time. Modern games simply can’t feed those newfound feelings of mine in the same way because of how differently they’re designed nowadays, but they can offer different things of value and I intend to interrogate that to the best of my ability in the next post.

For now, though, part 1 of this whole shebang is gonna be a bit different to accommodate my ever-changing state of mind. Instead of picking all of my usual categories, I’m gonna replace them with a few new, lighter, sillier categories that focus exclusively on older games. You’ll still see a returning one later on (I’ve got a doozy for “Contrarian Corner” this time that’s gonna make some people real mad at me lmao) and the usual “top 10 older games” will be there as well, but I wanted to give this change of pace a shot since I think it’s more representative of the year I had. I’ve played a lot of strange stuff I didn’t make blog posts about and y’all deserve to hear about it! Well, with that much bigger than expected preamble over with, let’s talk about some gotdang video games!

The “This is messed up… but I respect it” Award

“Another Cave” in Golvellius (MSX)

You ever encounter something in a game that’s so perplexing you simply don’t understand how it came to be? I don’t mean perplexing like a challenging puzzle but rather something that’s just so unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. If you’re like me and you dig through old and obscure games all the time, running into seemingly baffling choices is inevitable. It could be something as simple as a really goofy hit/hurtbox or it could be a mechanic that you don’t grasp the reason for its existence and seemingly does nothing for the game’s benefit. Golvellius for the MSX (not the Master System one!) has any of these ideas beat, though, because its most messed up thing is a true beauty to behold. And just think, Golvellius is already a game filled to the brim with weird secrets and intentionally obtuse tricks! This one requires a bit of explaining and maybe even a video so that you truly understand the gravity of the absurdity I’m about to talk about. If you want that full context, this excellent video by sylvie has a full walkthrough of “Another Cave” as well as coverage of all Golvellius’s most fascinating secrets.

I appreciate the sentiment, but nothing Randar can do will help me or anyone with this

In Golvellius, there are cave areas that change the way the game is played. Some caves have you moving horizontally and give you the ability to jump and swing your sword. Think Zelda II, but nowhere near as polished. The other kind of cave turns the game into what’s effectively a vertically scrolling slasher and while those are pretty neat, our focus is going to be on the first category for today. Another Cave is an optional cave, one that you’re never expected to enter let alone complete, but should you choose to do so, well, you’re in for a time that’s hard to describe. Typically, these caves ask you to get to the end so you can fight a boss (in the regular overhead perspective), but Another Cave doesn’t have one. Those bosses existing are what keep the caves in check; since you need to get to the boss to continue with the game, the cave has to end, right? Well, without that restraint, Another Cave goes absolutely crazy! This cave is so long, and I mean SO, SO LONG, that there’s no indication it’ll ever end. It does, eventually, but even when you’re doing everything right, it sure feels like your final resting place. The platforms, walls, and enemies you encounter change throughout it, so you can tell you’re making progress that way, but those are just barely enough to convince you this isn’t a waste of time. To make matters worse, the background is covered in this very ugly pattern combined with a garish grey that’ll take several minutes for your eyes to get used to and drown out. They’re gonna have to, too, because Another Cave requires utter determination to get through!

It’s important to keep in mind that jumping does not feel good at all in this game

You see, in these horizontal caves, you’re unable to scroll back to the left. You have to keep moving right, but if you hit a dead end, you can’t backtrack to go the right way. If you leave the screen to the left at all, you’ll exit the cave and have to start it all over. Most caves throughout the game try to trick you a couple of times by throwing a path split at you. One path is correct, one’s a dead end, no big deal. You pick one and if it’s right, great, but if not, now you know. Another Cave does not have this same sense of mercy! Within this particularly capricious cave, almost every single moment has a trap. If you walk a little too far right literally as you begin, oops, time to start over! Walk a little too far whenever the path decides to twist at all? Big mistake! Miss a jump at almost any point? Back to the beginning, buster! Let the cavalcades of enemies poke you just a little too much to the left? You’re gonna regret your life choices after that one! It cannot be emphasized enough how hostile this cave is. You have to think so carefully every step of the way, take multiple gambles, and eventually memorize so much of it to succeed. They even had the audacity to put a really precise jump pretty far in that you’re bound to mess up a few times. As long as you’re not attempting it too early into the game, the enemies that populate it don’t have a chance of killing you. It’s all about death by 1,000 cuts in Another Cave; your health bar isn’t what you see on the screen but rather your very sanity.

A little tip if you’re insane curious enough to do this like I did: crouching basically negates knockback from enemies, so don’t bother killing these flying things and just stay crouched so you don’t lose it all!

Despite all this, I… kind of love Another Cave. It’s so egregious, so beyond the pale, that it wraps around to being a masterclass in level design. It took away hours of my life, but I’m not mad about it. Nowhere else will you have an experience like this. So rare is it that you can feel the developers watching your every move with glee as they eagerly wait for you to fall into one of their many traps. You just know they were gathering around and cackling every single time someone at the Compile office tested this thing and messed up! Most video games aren’t capable of reproducing the sorrow you’ll feel when you fail that awful jump for the fifteenth time and resign yourself to doing it all again. You shouldn’t do it again, you should just leave and never look back, but you keep coming back, both because you know there has to be something in there at the end but also because you trust the team at Compile to make it interesting. Heck, early on in the cave, you’ll walk by a mysterious looking sequence of numbers on the wall. Turns out the number is designer Pac Fujishima’s PCS number for the online ASCIInet service at the time! You could hypothetically contact the guy using it, so he was bold and daring enough to welcome “feedback”, if you know what I mean! It takes serious guts, ample chutzpah to create something you know is going to make someone really mad and give them a way of reaching out and identifying you as the person responsible, so when you have that level of bravado on display, it’s impossible not to kneel in awe. Another Cave is the most committed bit out there and we should spread the good word about it to inspire other developers to be as playful, awe-inspiring and hilarious as Compile was.

…Wanna know what’s at the end of the cave? Nothing! Nothing! NOTHING! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

THe “I just think He’s Neat” Award

Chuck Rock

Even after doing an entire month of Core Design games, did you really think I was done with my newest fixation? Of course not! Considering that Wolfchild clicked with me so hard that I still don’t fully understand how it happened (I’m still the only person on RetroAchievements to have mastered the Sega CD version as of this writing lmao), I figured it only made sense to go back and check out Chuck Rock, the company’s earlier and more popular take on the genre. Well, I did cover BC Racers, which is part of the Chuck Rock Cinematic Universe, but that’s ain’t exactly a great representation of ol’ Chuck at his best. Probably thanks to The Flintstones, there were an awful lot of cavemen games in the 90s, and while Chuck Rock doesn’t quite take the crown for me (you can’t beat Bonk!), I think he can stand proud as one of the best options available. Most people won’t agree with that statement, I know (have you seen the Backloggd reviews on this one? Ouch!), but seriously, give this game a chance and you might find yourself pleasantly surprised!

Chuck Rock is even simpler than Wolfchild to grasp. Chuck can jump, hit things with his belly (the range is pathetic, but more workable than you’d think), do a little jump kick, and of course, chuck rocks. The actual platforming and action feels pretty good as you’d expect from Core Design, but what’s nice about this game is that it manages to maintain the company’s penchant for well-placed secrets and carefully routed level design. Levels are pretty lengthy and tend to contain secrets if you explore multiple elevations. I ended up doing a deathless run of the Genesis version (I plan on visiting the other ones, too!) and I felt like I learned something new every time I practiced. Enemies can often be outsmarted even if they frequently try to jump you and finding a healing item you didn’t know existed can make a tremendous difference. This sounds like elementary stuff and I suppose it is, but you’d be surprised how many platformers end up with at least one moment that’s out of wack compared to everything else when it comes to difficulty or pacing. That’s why Chuck Rock is worthy of praise; it’s remarkably consistent across its entire runtime, always offering varied level design while upping the difficulty in a gradual and sensible way.

You can in fact chuck rocks in Chuck Rock!

Variety is a key asset in Chuck Rock’s arsenal and like Bonk, I think it gets a lot of mileage out of the setting. The first area is a forest area, but it incorporates swamps, rocks that aren’t your friends, and a nice balance of grounded and airborne enemies that get you used to using all of your attacks. It’s easy to gawk at how short your belly bump is, but by the time this level is done, you get totally used to how it works. You know how everyone glazes Super Mario Bros. for teaching you all the fundamentals in its first level? Well, maybe you should bring some of that praise on over to my boy Chuck here, huh? Anyway, the second level, a massive cave, is where Core Design starts throwing in some of their signature designs decisions. A lot of stuff jumps out really suddenly in this level, such as these goofy looking mudmen, so you have to learn to take things slower. This is a lesson that benefits you hugely throughout the game, especially in the later ice area that loves nothing more than to throw fastballs your way. In an interesting contrast to that, the second boss, a sabertooth tiger, has an attack that stuns you for way too long if it has time to charge it up. The best way to beat the boss is to simply rush it down as fast as possible. You gotta know how to be flexible in Chuck Rock, too, and I think it’s great the game teaches these lessons so early in its runtime. Chuck Rock even manages to provide a water level that I don’t hate since it tests your combat accuracy and routing rather than slowing things down for the heck of it. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Chuck Rock does in fact end with a level where you go through the insides of a dinosaur, you know, just like how every other 16-bit caveman game did it for some reason!

Because of its consistency and subtle but effective design, I found Chuck Rock to be really pleasant and enjoyable to grind the way Wolfchild was. It’s super straightforward and not even close to being “innovative”, but if you recall playing a lot of 16-bit platformers, it absolutely fits in with whatever you were playing. If you were like me especially, the kind of guy who played Joe & Mac, Smartball, or Spanky’s Quest almost as much as any Nintendo 1st party platformer, Chuck Rock will probably click with you the way it did me. Turns out that a lot of games actually have hidden depth and/or clever instances of smart design chops if you give them the proper time of day! There’s something to be said about a platformer that’s so simple it maintains a 30 minute or so runtime, too. Because other platformers of this era tend to run much longer, Chuck Rock has a valuable and fascinating niche of feeling like an arcade platformer that wasn’t actually one and also wasn’t developed by one of the Japanese kings of the genre. It offers its own take on things while taking a lot of the good ideas of the games that came before it. It’s willing to be itself, but it’s also not so presumptuous that it thinks it’s “saving the genre” or is better than the shoulders it stands on. Chuck Rock is just a Good Video Game and, once again, I recommend that you give it a shot because I just think he’s neat!

The “Funniest Game” Award

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Sega CD)

Who needs the power of Christ or garlic when you can just kick Dracula in the head?

The Internet as we know it wasn’t available in 1993, but Psygnosis somehow found a way to shitpost regardless of that fact. Seriously, this game is so absurd, so bad, and so hilarious that shitpost is the only way I can think to describe it! I guess because the movie was popular enough, Bram Stoker’s Dracula received a silly number of versions across every contemporary platform, most of which are totally different from one another, and for the Sega CD, they decided to get… oooh, how should I say this? …”Ambitious”. Yeah, ambitious, why not! Instead of 2D sprites, you get a digitized Keanu Reeves awkwardly kicking and punching his way through Dracula’s legions of small animals and bugs. The entire game is effectively a weird, pre-rendered movie that moves along as you scroll the screen, which looks as goofy as the idea is fascinating! I could ask a million questions about these decisions and how this game ended up the way it did, but in the end, I’m just grateful this thing exists because holy moly does it have to be seen to be believed!

This game manages to look even funnier in screenshots than in motion

If you’ve played a single layer beat ‘em up like Kung Fu or China Warrior, this is very much the same idea. You walk forward, do your best to punch and kick stuff coming at you from all directions, and try to survive until the end. I phrase it like that because Dracula here is almost unplayably unintuitive! Keanu moves real slowly, has the worst jump you’ll ever see, and can get taken down really quick if enemies get in his face, which will happen because this game loves to dump hordes on you at every opportunity. Some boss attacks will even take you out in one or two hits! You actually get a surprising number of moves to work with, including a jump kick that catches enemies on the way up, a kick that hits low, and a wide kick that’s great for precise spacing, so in the rare moments where you actually have a grasp on things, Dracula can feel like a coherent game. They’ve got Ideas in that Dracula is supposed to be a game of crowd control and call and response, but the feel of the game plus the pacing of it simply isn’t up to the task of such a cerebral challenge. Keanu feels awful to control and the enemies come at you in such great numbers that if you mess up even once, every enemy in the line gets a shot in on you too because Keanu is way too busy convulsing after every hit. This is a game with very rare healing items and limited continues, so every mistake counts! It also attempts to rely on platforming in various spots, with the first level frontloading a lot of the worst stuff, and none of it works at all. Aiming Keanu’s ridiculous jump is a nightmare! I really don’t know why you would ever think platforming in a game like this is a good idea, but it sure is there and we sure do have to live with it!

Dracula is a taxing game, one that you probably shouldn’t put the time in to clear like I did, but at the same time, it’s something you really, really need to see if you haven’t already heeded my call in the first paragraph. It’s just such an absurd game and there’s nothing quite like it! If you miss the days of licensed games being ridiculous things that seemingly have nothing to do with the source material, then Dracula on the Sega CD is going to be a very good time for you. Sure, it *attempts *to retell the story of the movie through incredibly grainy FMVs that are about three seconds long, but these are so poorly implemented and conceived that they actually make the game *more confusing *to behold! Seriously, these FMVs are so funny that I was cracking up over the course of my entire playthrough to the point that I couldn’t focus on the game! The one you get when you get a game over is just Keanu doing an angry grunt and I think about it every day! It’s the greatest reward they could have given us for failure!

As someone who hasn’t seen the movie (I intend to someday), this game has painted the weirdest possible image in my head and I’m honestly so thankful for that. Does the movie have a part where Dracula attempts to command grab Keanu, only for him to win with most excellent footsies? I don’t know, but I sure hope it does! Does Keanu go through the same building on two different occasions, making sure to kick everyone who crosses his path? Probably not, but I can dream! This game is a pain to actually play, but after I was done with it, I now make it a habit to pray every night for something as inspired to pop into my life again. I’m the kind of sicko who can easily enjoy when a game is bad, but I’m also the kind of sicko who prefers their games to be as funny and/or as stupid as possible! Gaming nowadays, at least on the whole, takes itself so seriously, and I think there’s an actual lesson to be learned from games like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Maybe we all need to lighten up a bit, maybe things like immersion and epic storytelling and maturity and content updates don’t actually matter! Really, as long as games find new and interesting ways to challenge us and make us think about them, I’d say that’s enough for a job well done. And based on that criteria, you could absolutely call Bram Stoker’s Dracula a success!

Contrarian Corner

Donkey Kong Bananza

As with previous years, this “award” is a spot for me to vent about a game where my opinion differs greatly from the general consensus and in a way that I did not expect at all going in. I’m going to be more negative here than I usually am, so keep that in mind and please don’t take it personally if you’re a fan of the game! Nothing I say here is directed at anyone reading and I completely acknowledge that my stance is not The One Truth by any means. Sometimes, talking about your disappointment with something helps you accept it and move on, you know? Regardless of how you feel about this game or my take on it, try to enjoy my unusual perspective on something you’ve probably already heard too much about.

Ok, ok, I know what this looks like, but hear me out! It seems unimaginable that someone could be negative about Donkey Kong Bananza. It got rave reviews, everybody’s gushing about it, it’s the first big post-launch Switch 2 game, people are already calling it better than Super Mario Odyssey, it’s a game that brings kids together with their parents as something that’s easy for them both to enjoy, and I legitimately don’t think I’m able to find any kind of criticism anywhere towards it outside of a few Backloggd reviews and Minnmax (shout out to Minnmax, great podcast!). I have to imagine most people don’t want to slap a huge target on their own back, but I’m an idiot and don’t have that same instinct, so here we are. You’d think me, a long-time fan of the SNES Donkey Kong games, a bit of a 64 enjoyer (I liked it when I played it in full sometime in the 2010s, but I didn’t love it and feel like I would only like it less now lol), and someone who thinks Super Mario Odyssey is the best Mario platformer would be fully on board with this one, but life always finds a way to surprise you. I went in expecting this to be my GOTY, even, but I suppose what I had imagined in my head turned out to be very different from the final release.

Now, I don’t think liking “bad” games or disliking “good” games is inherently interesting, so I’m not here to pretend that I’m some kind of secretly enlightened being who knows better than everyone else. In order to make a non-consensus opinion interesting to listen to, there has to be a story behind it, reasonable logic that you can follow to see where the person is coming from even if you don’t agree. The story needs to be personal, but also contain actionable things that the listener could apply for themselves and potentially change their way of thinking, be that obscure gameplay tricks, learning more about the history of the game, or looking at the story from a different perspective. I’m always a little disappointed whenever I hear defenses for Sonic 2006 (even from beloved Youtubers), not because I think people aren’t allowed to like it or anything ridiculous like that, but because the argument always ends up being something unsatisfying like “it’s bad but I still like it :)”, which doesn’t actually tell anyone why you feel that way. When you have an unusual opinion, you gotta wear it on your sleeve, bear it with your whole chest, have faith in yourself, sling some words that people won’t be able to stop thinking about! Now that I’ve said that, it’s time I practice what I preach even if I regret it later. Imagine me taking a deep breath right about now… here goes:

I think Donkey Kong Bananza is mid! Thoroughly mid! I’d call it a step down from Super Mario Odyssey in every way! I even like Donkey Kong 64 more! One of Nintendo’s most underwhelming titles that I’ve played in years! It has me questioning if Nintendo still has the juice or if they’re starting to get washed up! I’m really disappointed with it and it genuinely pains me to say that!

I’m really channeling my inner Cranky Kong here, huh?

Phew, that felt good to write, just let it all out there so I can get to properly explaining, you know? This is gonna get complicated and messy, I’m sure, but if I had to start with a thesis statement of some kind, I’d say that Donkey Kong Bananza’s biggest problem is that it’s the culmination of all of modern Nintendo’s worst fixations and tendencies, something that feels like it’s trying to be something else instead of something that plays to Nintendo’s historically proven strengths. As far as I’m concerned, everything changed with Breath of the Wild. That game’s open-ended, hands off, almost immersive sim-like design was very unlike anything Nintendo had ever done. And at the time, I was thoroughly tired of Nintendo rehashing a lot of its formulas over and over again on the 3DS and Wii U, so I thought it was great! It was refreshing to have a Zelda game that didn’t take forever to pick up and didn’t feel like you were just going through the same motions again. The way you can solve problems through all sorts of approaches is really cool and just exploring the world by picking a direction and going often leads to new and surprising discoveries. Even after you see behind the curtain and realize that quite a bit of BotW’s magic is just smoke and mirrors meant to cleverly hide all the repetition (that’ll be relevant to DK), most of the ride is so engaging and fun that its problems only end up hitting you once the game is over. If BotW and Tears of the Kingdom after it were the only games Nintendo made that were like this, they’d still feel super refreshing and unique, but their design philosophies have bled into several of their other titles, all of which I’d say are much weaker because they’re not nearly as good of fits for the ideas. I haven’t played Metroid Prime 4, but from what I hear, it only adds more fuel to the fire for this little opinion of mine. Echoes of Wisdom is an exception to this theory of mine, by the way, that game’s just great and I think a lot of you underestimated it!

I should have known as soon as they did The Thing again…

This realization first hit me hard with Nintendo’s secret closed test for their mystery game that they may or may not be working on. I actually got picked to play it and I gotta tell you, I thought it was utterly terrible! I thought it was so bad that I told them in a survey after the first day that I wasn’t coming back! They invited me to the second test, too, and I never bothered to download it! In case you didn’t watch any of the people streaming it who weren’t supposed to, it was this weird thing where you had to build trees and stuff in big open spaces. It was extremely boring, poorly communicated to an almost impressive degree, frustrating to control, and completely lacking in personality. It wants you to experiment and approach the goal as you please, but it fails to provide the tools or environment to make that an appealing proposition. Why would I want to waste my time figuring out how to build a bunch of nonsense if the world is just gray cubes abound and there’s no challenge that makes achieving that goal something worthwhile to pursue? Modern Zelda works because they intentionally make you feel weak (at first) while making all of your potential options clear so you know what you can do and what you can become after enough effort. Enemies are commonplace and can be challenging for a fresh Link, so you get thinking: should I try fighting them? Should I sneak past them? Maybe I can steal their weapons! Or, maybe I can use one of my cool powers to cheese them out. Even a situation as simple as a camp of Bokoblins is exciting when you start, which is so vital to getting players to play as you ultimately envisioned. All of this is to say that Donkey Kong Bananza, like this test game, wants to do what BotW started and give you open sandbox areas where _{you get to play how you want}, but completely fails to nail that balance between player choice and considered authorial design.

The Bananza transformations make Donkey Kong even stronger than he already is. The Elephant Bananza makes it so you don’t even need to punch to devastate the environment anymore!

This isn’t a complaint I get to drill into often, but one of my biggest issues is that Donkey Kong is just too damn strong! From the very start of the game, he can climb almost anything in a flash without worrying about stamina, literally punch through walls and floors, do some flashy jump tech using rolls and rock chunks to get around quickly, collect items from a distance, throw things with precise accuracy, and take out most enemies in a punch or two. It doesn’t take long at all for his power to snowball even further; as you unlock Bananza transformations, you can fly, suck up everything in sight, run faster, punch harder, jump higher, and even slow down time! That’s still not the end of it, either! Every five bananas you collect gets you a skill point, which can be used to grant new moves, give DK more health, increase the potency and duration of Bananzas, make punching through stuff even easier, and even give you up to five instant revivals upon death. Playing Donkey Kong Bananza in even the most laidback fashion is effectively playing with God Mode on, so how exactly do you design a game around that? Turns out, you kiiiiinda don’t!

They really, really love these challenge rooms where you have to make a path for balls so that they fill a container for some reason

Like Super Mario Odyssey, the goal is to collect tons of stuff (the Moon equivalent being those bananas I mentioned) as you go and every little thing you do has a chance of earning you one. The thing is, there aren’t many things you can really do! Bananas are typically hidden inside a wall, buried underground, on top of something, or inside one of many Zelda shrine equivalents because Nintendo just can’t stop bringing us to the Challenge Zone for some reason. Something about games with Nintendo characters just love doing this no matter how played out it is at this point; heck, even Wario World did it and that was by Treasure! Anyway, when a banana is just lodged into a wall, what is there you can even do to make that interesting? You can climb up and punch it… or you can punch through another wall so you can punch it. Riveting stuff, huh? Later on, they try to get wise and introduce walls you can’t punch through or climb, but simply finding a different path never takes any real thought or effort because you never truly have to solve what I’d call a proper navigation puzzle. The ability to use monkey sonar (I guess monkeys are bats now) to identify exactly where everything is from a great distance makes sure of that! Sometimes, bananas will just be placed in front of you in a way you can’t miss and many layers repeat the same objectives such as buying them with chips (I truly have no idea why they felt the need to make a second currency just for this), finding some of those blue rock guys, or listening to Cranky Kong tell you the same story again, so an undeniable, profoundly noticeable malaise sets in real quick.

Game is very pretty, though, can’t deny that

It really does feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over again, turning your brain off and collecting the shiny bananas because that’s what you’re supposed to do rather than it actually being engaging in any sense of the word. This game is supposed to be fresh in my mind but I struggle to remember anything about it because it’s all just so mindless! Typically, I don’t want to turn my brain off when playing video games because using my brain is a major part of the whole appeal of this video game thing! It doesn’t help that the environments are mostly bog standard ideas and there’s a weird fixation with putting lava everywhere throughout, even in levels that should have other gimmicks be more prominent. A lava focus in the hurricane level and the food-themed level? Really? I just don’t get it! That one level where you just dig downward for a few minutes before fighting a reused boss? One of the worst levels I’ve ever seen in a modern video game, straight up! Anyway, Super Mario Odyssey has plenty of easy Moons and it’s not a challenging game at all until the postgame, but it at least makes an effort to mix up what you’re doing without giving you the power to bypass everything with the same couple of tricks. Minigames like volleyball and jump rope are potentially annoying in the moment and captures are varying degrees of exciting, but at least they dare to leave a lasting impression on you by being something unique you can’t replicate with a platforming maneuver. Donkey Kong Bananza is so uninterested in mixing things up or expecting anything out of the player (they don’t even ask you to collect any bananas for unlocking layers!) that you can get through this game with ease while skipping so much of it without changing the fundamental experience in a significant way compared to someone who takes their time. I know this is how speedrunning works, but it’s very funny that a proper speedrun is basically just skipping past everything with the same starting abilities over and over, really sums it all up by showing you how frivolous the upgrades are! It’s also indicative of a modern platformer trend that I don’t really care for in which the quality of a platformer is defined purely by its movement options rather than things like stage design or objective variety. If you were one of those people complaining about the level design of Bubsy 4D (what they’ve shown so far, anyway), you should be complaining about this game too because it’s effectively the same thing!

It’s telling that the only parts that made me perk up at all were the ones referencing past DK games

It gets even worse when you realize that the scant variety of enemies means there’s nothing even trying to stop you or make use of your combat abilities. You’ve got “thing that charges at you”, “other thing that charges at you”, a flying enemy, and a thing that swings a big club very slowly for almost the entire game, all of which can be defeated in a second by mashing the punch button. They occasionally attempt to “mix up” these enemies by putting thorns on them to dissuade punching them head-on, which makes perfect sense on paper, but if I can easily pull out infinite rock chunks to throw or just run past the enemy, then this isn’t actually an impactful restriction at all. Some of the Bananzas have combat-oriented abilities that could hypothetically be used to reduce the repetition of the combat (that’s an incredibly generous “hypothetically”…), but I skipped all of them because they’re completely impractical compared to “use Kong Bananza and mash punch”. That even works so well on the bosses that there’s a good chance you’ll beat them before you even know what they’re supposed to do! The game also has the gall to reuse a majority of the boss fights with marginal improvements and have you take them out in the same fashion. Heck, even though it’s the best part of the game, they effectively make you do the last boss two times back to back! Granted, the second part is amped up a fair bit, but it’s still the same general template and it goes on for ages in comparison to any of the other boss fights, too. That’s not actually a bad thing, but it sure comes off as random and strange considering the rest of the game goes by with so little resistance that it’s hard to remember anything about it! Anyway, it really is staggering to me just how seemingly inconsiderate the game is of its own offerings when it comes to trying to design challenges around them. Any attempts they make to mix things up literally don’t work because you have too many options to get past them with zero effort. What a strange conundrum to behold from Nintendo, of all developers! I’m used to them being too restrictive in games like Wind Waker (starting your Zelda with a really boring stealth section is some crazy work), but modern-era Nintendo is now in the opposite extreme, relying too heavily on fancy distractions and vague concepts without laying down the foundation to make them interesting enough to last through an entire game.

You heard the Fractone here, you’ve still got way more post to read!

It might seem like I’m having fun hammering into Bananza, but I truly do hate that things worked out this way. I expected to adore this one and came away more disenfranchised than I ever could have imagined. I’m not sure if it’s an issue with modern Nintendo or my feelings on modern video game design, but something just isn’t right here. I loved Mario Odyssey when it came out, but would I feel the same way now? Maybe I’ve just changed a lot as a person s