Donkey Kong Country Returns

Man, that's four video games beaten in the past week that I'd been working on for months each. Spring cleaning!

I was always a huge fan of the three Donkey Kong Country games on the Super Nintendo. I've always considered them to be fantastic and under-appreciated '90s platform games that look better than anything on the Nintendo 64 despite being made for a previous generation. So when Donkey Kong Country Returns was announced for the Wii, I was as pumped as I ever have been for a Wii game. (Quick aside - has anything aged less gracefully than the Wii? For a system that utterly destroyed its competition, clinching the sales victory for that generation of consoles almost immediately, it's crazy how much I'd rather be playing an arbitrary Xbox or PS3 game than a Wii game here in 2013. As a point of reference, my last Wii title beaten was - if Candy Factory doesn't count - Mario Party 9 last July. In that same ten month span, for comparison's sake, I beat nine games on Xbox including Xbox Live Arcade games, five games on PS3 or PlayStation Network, five games on the DS or 3DS, five games on the GameCube, three games on the original PlayStation, and even a Super Nintendo game. Wow.)

Anyway, Donkey Kong Country Returns. I started playing the game last August in co-op fashion with Marissa. I had fond memories of playing the original trilogy in a co-op manner back in the day with friends, neighbors, and even my father, and I wanted to share that experience with my girlfriend. Suffice it to say, it did not go well. In the original trilogy, co-op play was a true team effort. One person controlled Donkey and the other controlled Diddy (or, in later games, Dixie or Kiddy Kong) and only one person was really playing at any point in time. When one player went down, the other stepped up to the plate. Little "DK" barrels located throughout levels allowed you to revive a teammate, so that if you went down, the cycle could continue. But in the spirit of "everybody plays all at once" madness that made games like New Super Mario Bros. Wii a lot of fun at first but ultimately a chaotic nightmare, co-op in Donkey Kong Country Returns consisted of both Donkey and Diddy running around side by side, each controlled independently. This means both can be killed by the same obstacle. It also means one can inadvertently cause the other one harm; Donkey can pick up Diddy and throw him around, and similarly, Diddy can jump off of Donkey's back sending Donkey straight downward, often into an abyss. This led to more back-and-forth blaming-and-shouting matches between the two of us than most healthy relationships should endure over a video game, to the point where I had to propose to Marissa just three nights into our Donkey Kong Country Returns chicanery out of fear that things were heading south fast!

Mostly kidding. I mean, I did propose to her, and naturally, Donkey Kong Country Returns went right back onto the shelf for a while. By the time I was ready to dabble again, around October or November, Marissa patently stated that she had no real desire to play the game again, and we were probably both better off for it. It turns out, this game got challenging. Like, fast. Marissa and I struggled pretty heavily on the third of eight worlds. Playing solo, I did a little better for a little while, but by the sixth world I was dying constantly. I won't lie - I even eventually had to make use of the game's "here, let the game beat this level for you" feature more than once. I mean, I didn't strictly have to - I eventually would and could have beaten all those levels - but with forty-five games left to beat, and having already dumped thirty hours or so into this one, and with it just offering to help me out like that, why refuse? Put an asterisk next to this one if you want to; I really don't care.

So yeah. Donkey Kong Country Returns was a welcome nostalgic trip back to the 90s, and yet ironically, it was so much more difficult than any of those original three games had ever been. Nintendo has taken some well-earned criticism from more hardcore gamers over the past few years, who lament that nothing is challenging in Mario or Zelda games anymore. Donkey Kong Country Returns seems almost tailor-made to address those criticisms. "Oh, you want a tough game? Here. Now go away." I can't say it was as difficult in terms of deaths-per-level-attempt as Super Meat Boy, but that game's lightning-fast load times and very short levels made the constant dying a lot more palatable there. Ultimately, I liked Donkey Kong Country a lot. It was at once loyal to its roots and also modern, sleek, and beautiful the way a modern platform game should be. I could have used a few more animal friends - the only one in this game was Rambi the rhinoceros - as well as more barrel-blasting levels. I also would have preferred that the antagonist King K. Rool and his Kremling Krew return for this game; the bad guys this time around were a group of witch-doctor-like musical instruments, believe it or not. Of course, these are some minor nitpicks; the flavor may not have been exactly right, but it was nice to return to such a long-lost dish in the first place. Is that a fine analogy? Whatever.