It’s the Wii’s fourth birthday today! And I celebrated it by… selling six of my Wii games! In all honesty, it was an even balance between beaten and unbeaten games, so I don’t feel too guilty as it doesn’t wildly effect my unbeaten percentage too much. I do have plans to sell one or two more games, but that should be it.
When selling the games at GameStop, I was reminded how awesome this year has been for Wii, especially this quarter of the year. Super Mario Galaxy 2, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, Donkey Kong Country Returns, GoldenEye 007, Sonic Colors, and Disney Epic Mickey… truly amazing stuff, and in terms of sheer, MetaCritic-yielding quality, probably the Wii’s best yet. I hope 2011 provides as many great experiences as this year has, although with the 3DS and its awesome library looming, it may be difficult for Wii to compete.
Oh hey! It’s my first time doing these things. Such a nice option. Gotta thank Segata for turning me on to this.
Anyways, I just beat Donkey Kong Country 3. What a frustrating experience that was, every other level had some dumb gimmick that made completing it a matter of patience and memorization, not skill. It’s like someone looked at DKC2 and decided to take out the best parts (Diddy, Wise’s music, a good theme) and replace them with crappy alternatives. Not to mention the ending “cutscenes” where you have to press the skip text button around 20 times. It’s a good thing the franchise ended with this game (if Jungle Beat doesn’t count then neither does DK64.) Thankfully though, Retro’s crack at Kong Country looks to surpass all three of the original trilogy put together.
For the rest of November I’ll be tackling the original Super Mario Bros. 2, officially called The Lost Levels. So far, I think it’s an decent improvement over the first, but yeah, it’s also hard. I also have issues with it that prevent me from saying it’s the best Mario game, as NeoGAFer Sixfortyfive has.
Anyways, next month is when I’ll finally tackle Okami for Wii, a game that’s haunted my backlog for three and a half long years. No longer!
I’ll also be selling off some of my games so I can buy Christmas gifts, and will probably get a game or two in exchange as well. Currently, I’m placing my bets on Donkey Kong Country Returns and GoldenEye 007 for Wii.
Anyways, I’d keep an eye on this spot at least once a month, if not more. That is, if you care what I’m playing. Which you probably don’t, but hey, if I’m going to assume something I’ll assume positively!
-Andrex
So after conquering the first Donkey Kong Country last year, and re-conquering Diddy’s Kong Quest a short time after, I finally caved and bought the third and final game in the SNES trilogy, Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble, a few weeks ago. I just recently beat it.
To put it bluntly, I don’t think it’s a good game.
I didn’t like the first too much either. It could have been because I didn’t have nostalgia fueling me or it could have been for legitimate reasons, but I just thought it was a bland and frustrating (not in the good way) game. However, I gave it a pass because it was the first in the series.
To be fair, Diddy’s Kong Quest also has some of the control issues, but they seemed to be less prevalent, and the pirate theme actually worked really well for the game. The bosses were imaginative and fun (jumping hooks to escape a flaming sword ranks among my favorite boss battles ever), a huge improvement over the first. The level gimmicks (and I use that term affectionately) were well designed, like hopping the hot air balloons in a lava level. And of course the music was the best the series has ever had.
So for the third, even if I knew the music wasn’t going to be as good, I at least hoped the gameplay would continue the upward trend. Instead, it’s now clear to me Rare’s Kong games peaked with 2, with 3 a downgrade leading into Donkey Kong 64.
So what are my specific issues with it?
Well, let me just say, I love platformers and on the level of “hey, another 2D platformer to play” it was OK. The world map was pretty neat, if completely unnecessary and only adding to the “collect-a-thon” stigma Rare became known for.
However some parts of the overworld are just poorly thought out. In Razor Ridge, for instance, traversing the ski lift splitting the world into two halves is just a complete chore to use, moreso because Wrinkly’s Save Cave in that world is in the first half. If you didn’t know the autosave cheat and are a stickler for saving, you’d be spending about a quarter of your time not playing the levels in the world – just going back and forth to the save cave.
A big contributor to that is the Brother Bears and their dialogue. And in fact, dialogue in general is much more proficient in this game than in almost any 2D platformer I’ve ever played. It takes around 20 “skip text” button presses during and after the final boss battle. It’s just bad mojo.
And I’ve seen it debated back and forth whether Rare’s DKC games have poor collision detection… Let me make this clear, if you want a shining example of this, play the boss level “Squirt’s Showdown.” You’re transformed into the elephant, and you have to navigate on top of six rounded floating platforms as water tries to push you off. For the record, I died more because I landed on the rounded part of the platforms than Squirt actually pushing me off. It’s that bad. And this is the third game! This kind of crap should have been sorted out by this time. No excuses.
Speaking of the elephant, what a dumb idea for an animal friend. There’s a level where you can optionally transform into it a little after the halfway mark, and it’s actually much easier to beat the level by not transforming. Not only that, when you get to Squirt’s Showdown, you’re expected to know how to suck water up from the waterfall to squirt into its eyes. When does the game tell you how to do this? Never. You’re actually supposed to hold A and the shoulder button I think, or something ridiculous like that.
On the topic of bosses, they are probably this game’s second most egregious sin in light of DKC2 (first being the music.) They are dumb, trash, frustrating to play, poorly explained, and plain not fun. You have Squirt (a pair of eyes behind a waterfall, or something), a giant barrel with arms, the abominable snowman (not even kidding), a mutant clam, and some overly-designed generic robot called KAOS (which at the end I found out was supposed to be the big bad, I guess.) They are just bad.
The specific level gimmicks are almost as bad, varying from “not fun” to “rage-inducing” all throughout the course of the game. And example? One level, you’re climbing up a rope as the end burns. Sounds fun right? Well how about instead of you having to navigate around the objects that you’re climbing past, we have these enemies that float down to you, without any indication where or when they’ll be coming. They might have just called the level “Trial and Error with a Rope.”
The level gimmicks aren’t designed to test your skill, they’re designed to keep you playing the level over and over again for as long a possible. In one level, a gas reverses the direction on the d-pad. Since it’s only used in one level, whatever skill you build up learning this entirely new control scheme is quickly abandoned.
Don’t get me started on Kiddy Kong. Seriously, don’t.
And finally, the music. You know what? It’s already been said. It’s OK, which makes it about 10 billion times worse than DKC2′s by default. Wise is sorely missed. It’s like if you loved SMG’s soundtrack, then found out there wasn’t any music in SMG2 at all. That’s how much of a step down it is.
All right, I think that’s everything. Oh actually, one more thing: the controls in the snowman boss are worse than a taser to the crotch. You have to alternate between throwing far and throwing close, but you also have to move side to side to dodge snowballs, and 80% of the time you’re not on the setting you need because of it. There are exactly four main face buttons on the SNES controller, and Rare decided that instead of putting the throwing controls on two of the three remaining unused buttons, it would put them on the d-pad, where they’re easily confused. Argh! Once again, I died more because of control stupidity than because the boss was actually hard.
In short: it’s a shame Rare couldn’t build on the good parts of DKC2, which I now see as probably a fluke of theirs. Thankfully, Retro is here to clean up the mess they made with this dog doo-doo.
I have decided to re-post/cross-post some of my longer-form content from around the web here. Primarily, this content will be rants on gamingforums or Google Buzz. The original source will be linked at the top of each post. I haven’t decided if I should add comments here; I would probably prefer to keep discussion at the original source if possible.
Even after promising that I wouldn’t update any of my personal sites this year (in order to more focus on more important projects, such as…), I caved into my desires and remade the Temple of Andrex once again.
This time, the focus was on unifying all the separate profiles I have across the net, and making the experience as stripped down and minimalistic as possible. In fact, the codename for this design is “Minimacon,” an obvious portmanteau of “minimal” and “icon.” Because of this, I decided to take the blog/news updates off the front page, and instead have the index act as a business card of sorts. For several years now, this website has been the only one I’ve entered into all the profiles I have, so I figured that should take priority. For a newcomer to this site, learning all the latest updates is not a concern.
The homepage takes a cue from the old Links page of Version 3: displaying the various avatars I’m currently using around the net. I think this makes it immediately apparent to a visitor that this is indeed my website.
Of course, this means I’ll have to update the History page with the details behind this new version, as well as an updated look at the future too. That should be fun.
On the miscellaneous side of the design, there is of course a new favicon, and this time, it’s an actual multilayered .ico file, scaling nicely from 8 pixels all the way up to 64. Also, earlier this year I once again ditched the “www” from the URL (something I had done with Version 4, but reinstated for 4.5), and the next logical step was to ditch the trailing slash at the end of the URLs as well. I think this looks so much nicer, especially in Chrome.
Speaking of which, this design is once again HTML5, using most of the same sectioning elements and the same doctype as Version 5. However I was originally not going to do that in the name of pragmatism, and even though I’ve gone through with HTML5, I have some kind of a band-aid for older browsers (display: block on the new sectioning elements.)
It really is the little things that make me especially proud of this design. Thanks to already being on WordPress and all my posts and pages being in a universal format, I was able to focus on smoothing out the experience. For instance, I’m really happy with how my 404 page turned out, as well as the search box, etc. Heck, even the Version 1 retro-design worked like a charm with no modification. Speaking of which, it likewise shouldn’t be hard to do the same for Version 5′s design, as that’s already in the WordPress format and 100% valid to start.
This design does not use Javascript or jQuery, even though I originally planned on using them. I may still add it later on if it doesn’t prove too hard, I have an idea of pages sliding back and forth like on an iPhone or Android app. I really wanted to try and see how much I could optimize and speed up a website, and while I still have a good bulk of work to do on that, I think I’m off to a good start.
Anyways, I’m probably ranting now. I know no one will ever enjoy this site’s design as much as I do, but I do always think of the end-user. Hope you enjoy.
-Andrex
