![]() From giant hammers to conveyor belts to hands, everything works in massive sequences of recognition and action. It’s a Game & Watch cameo! Sorta…įactory, the seventh world, contains some of my favorites Donkey Kong Country loves the factory setting, for whatever reason, and Retro places tons of strange obstacles your way. From tidal waves to tar pits to lava, all the common platforming theme tropes add something for once, rather than just being there to be there. Each and every stage throws long, varied sequences of platforming mastery that demand your attention, and you’ll find yourself doing some on-the-fly thinking to survive. However, Retro Studios explodes with creativity somewhere after the (repetitive) Cave world, throwing in this and that and every little challenge you’d want. All of them reveal impeccable representations of the original game’s rather stellar design – not bad, but definitely derivative. At the beginning, you’ll see traditional platforming levels along with DKC’s “one mistake and you die” minecart and cannon barrel levels. Retro Studios paints in strokes of notable design gimmicks for each stage and world. Since Donkey Kong himself never demonstrated a great penchant for different moves, the level design needs to compensate for a limited ability palette. ![]() ![]() Replace Tikis with Kremlings and this looks really similar to the old game.īut, as per a new developer, there’s a certain element you wouldn’t expect, a focus to please gaming veterans at the same time. The music remixes a lot of David Wise and Eveline Fischer’s memorable themes while adding original compositions that evoke the same spirit, and the first half of the game rips its aesthetics wholesale from the original series game. and the ability to blow things out) and design gimmicks fitted onto the Wii (those aforementioned abilities? Shake the Wiimote! Sigh…). If anything, they’ve only added a few new abilities (a ground pound taken straight from Super Smash Bros. It starts the same way, with a giant banana hoard being stolen, and the physics often strike an identical manner to Rare’s 1994 game. It didn’t hurt that many Retro Studios employees loved Donkey Kong Country, and kept the elements they knew worked while adding their own.Īt first blush, for example, Donkey Kong Country Returns feels like a soulless cash-in on your Rare-era DKC nostalgia. Somehow, Donkey Kong Country really points to the past through its music, systems, and art design, while also showing level designs that actually push elements of the platformer style to a wonderful craft. ![]() Enter Retro Studios most known for the Metroid Prime series, they would take their penchant for innovative design and inject that creativity into the most commonly derivative genre known to video games. Surely Nintendo could still make a really good platformer? Absolutely! They just needed the right license, development studio, and idea. If you like co-op, it only works well as the ultimate “trolling” game, but plenty of games exist for that purpose. I find NSMBW slow, clunky, and weird if anything, it’s a half-formed grab at two audiences, failing at both. Wii emerged, scoring well with critics and not so well with me. Some might say they came as a result of indie platformers, but I sorta doubt it Nintendo already had it in their mind to resurrect this dead genre, and it just happened to coincide with a recent explosion of those games in the scene. They would represent a combination of modern refinements (read: making the game really easy), and bring that same nostalgic combo of difficulty, trial, and error to a new generation of kids and adults alike. Nintendo decided, after the success of New Super Mario Bros., to revive their 2D platformers right from their graves. ![]() In a surprise to me, Donkey Kong Country Returns is one of the most stellar, well-designed platforming experiences of the past decade. ![]()
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