Pi Reviews Part 6: Donkey Kong Country

I'll be honest with you. I really don't like Donkey Kong. By Donkey Kong, I mean the arcade game, and NES port. Are these games super important? Yes. Are they objectively good games? Yes. Did they introduce us to Mario? Yes! Did they put Nintendo on the map and enable them to have the cash to make my beloved NES? Yes! Are they fun? Sort of.

I know that in the very early days of video gaming, Donkey Kong was a titanic technical achievement, and represented a serious jump forward in terms of storytelling in games, graphical excellence, tight controls, and innovative and active level design. In other words, it's just another great leap forward for Miyamoto and Co.

And I know that Donkey Kong is a great arcade game, but that doesn't always translate well to consoles, and it's on consoles that I truly fell in love with games. They were longer due to exponentially expanding amounts of memory that could be included on a cartridge. They allowed a more natural learning curve of difficulty due to this long length, and due to the fact that there was less incentive to make the game super difficult, thus sucking away all of your quarters and making profit for the company. The arcade games that I truly love and grew up loving were the ones that exemplified all of the great elements of console games, rather than the reverse being true. I loved arcade fighting games that featured competition between players (Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, Tekken, Guilty Gear) or games that required collaboration between players (X-Men, The Simpsons). The great thing about arcades for me was the social aspect, not the crushing difficulty.

And boy is Donkey Kong difficult. The hitboxes are weird. The jumping is difficult to time. And the fall damage.......ugh. The best change from Donkey Kong Mario to Super Mario Bros. Mario is no fall damage. Does it make logical sense? No! Jumping from impossible heights should hurt. But it's just not fun. It doesn't encourage liberal experimentation in game play. It doesn't make your heart leap at death defying stunts.

All that is to say that the first Donkey Kong game with which I fell in love was Donkey Kong Country. I am a huge SNES-N64 fan of Rare. They were Nintendo's go to ace third party developer in those days, and a ton of my favorite games from those systems were developed by Rare. The decision to license one of Nintendo's most famous and important characters, the first one that made them great, was gutsy, and it payed off big time.

The visuals are excellent, and represented a huge leap forward in graphic design for the time. Most games that take huge leaps forward with visual experiments are cool at the time, but later are looked back on with a bit of derision. They just don't age gracefully (e.g. the first generation of 3D console games like Tomb Raider, Virtua Fighter, Space Harrier, etc.). Somehow Rare avoided this, as all three of the DKC games look great to this day. Their use of 3D models turned into sprites is fantastic.

The controls on the first one are good, but not quite as tight as the second. The rolling off the edge and then jumpy simply doesn't work sometimes, resulting in a lot of deaths trying to get all of those secrets. Additionally, there are sometimes waaaay too many levels between save points (I'm looking at you, level with the platforms that you have to refuel).

The design of levels and music, however, are fantastic. They are only a slight touch below the second in both categories. The levels have a great amount of mystery to them, with all of the secrets peppered throughout.

The bosses are fun, and challenging.

And they took Donkey Kong and turned him from a princess stealing villain into the hero of the day, fighting sinister crocodiles for the sake of his precious banana horde. Yes, I know that Donkey Kong from the DKC era is technically Donkey Kong Jr., but who really cares?

In an age where a lot of retro games have aged badly, DKC has only gotten better with time. As a testament, in a house full of plenty of modern video games, my kids are most often to request to play DKC, DKC2, or DKC3 for their time playing games. The keep coming back to them time and time again, soaking in the environment, enjoying the characters, and continually trying to better themselves by getting past the part that killed them last time. That quest for self-improvement is at the core of all great games, and kids fundamentally get this, without it needing to be explained for them.

DKC is a great game, and really is the seed of a lot of talent and great ideas at Rare in the 90s (to be culminated in DKC2). I'd give it a 9/10. Go check it out, if you haven't already!

-TRO

Pi Reviews Part 5: Mega Man X3

Finally, the last (I promise) Mega Man game on this series of Pi Reviews, Mega Man X3. I was already getting a bit burnt out on the Mega Man franchise by the time X2 finished up, so this review may be a bit more negative than this game deserves due to that, but here goes. Mega Man X3 is not good. The levels are much more lazily designed that X and X2, and the music is frankly dreadful. I'm not sure what happened to the team between the end of 2 and the start of 3, but there must have been some sort of burnout on their end, or perhaps a change of personnel. In any case, I wouldn't recommend this one unless you really want to finish all of the Mega Man X games and are thus particularly fond of flagellation. The controls and graphics are still excellent and the boss fights pretty fun, but that doesn't cancel out the lazy levels and dismal music. I did think it was cool that you could finally play as Zero, but since he basically has one life instead of being able to start a file as him, or switch characters between levels, I don't think I even bothered playing as him.

All in all, I would not recommend this one to any but the most die hard Mega Man or platforming fans. I'd give it a 6.5/10.

-TRO

Pi Reviews Part 4: Mega Man X2

The next game I beat on my Pi was, predictably, Mega Man X2. I was particularly excited to play this one, as I love Mega Man X, but had never really given X2 a proper playthrough. And I enjoyed it quite a bit! Most of the things that made the first one great are all here. The music is great, the controls are perfect, the bosses and level designs are fun, and the graphics are fantastic. I also appreciated that the end boss wasn't quite so soul crushingly difficult as it was in X (maybe it's just me). While it mimics greatness, however, it doesn't really expand much on the formula of X at all. And that, ultimately, is what made X so great, paying heed to the Mega Man formula while adding in another layer of complexity that separates it from its predecessors. Again, this is very hard to do, so it doesn't make this a bad game by any stretch. And it was certainly better than X3...but we'll get to that soon.

Altogether, I'd give this one a 8.3. It was fun and engaging, but not very inventive.

-TRO

Pi Reviews Part 3: Mega Man X

Ugh. More Mega Man?!?!?! Yup! I've already written pretty extensively about this one, so I'll keep it short. This is my favorite Mega Man game, and it's the best Mega Man game. I've beaten it before, but it was so convenient on my Pi that I had to play it again, especially since I was planning on playing X2 and X3 for the first time (you have to play the first one first!). The music, controls, and graphics are all perfect, the level design is excellent, and the bosses are fun and varied. Most importantly, for the first time since Mega Man 3, we got REAL updates to Mega Man. Introducing the dash, wall jump, and a variety of secret upgrades to X give this game a depth that the originals can't match. It's a perfect example of how to do a really good sequel or reboot. It has plenty of hat tips to the original series, while also innovating in an interesting way that increases the amount of fun to be had in the game. If you've never played this one, go do it. I'd give it a 9.5 out of 10, deducting slight points for how absolutely annoying some of the huge slowdowns can be when there are a lot of bullets on screen, and for the fact that some of the weapons are pretty useless unless you're using them against the intended boss. Other than that, it's fantastic!

-TRO

Pi Reviews Part 2: Super Mario Bros. 3

As you can probably tell, my first project upon getting the Pi was to beat all the old Mario games I had not yet beaten. As I mentioned last time, Mario is one of my all-time favorite series (top 5 if not top 3), and Super Mario Bros. 3 is the best of the bunch, at least on the NES. While I had already beaten Mario 1 on my NES, Mario 2 and 3 still evaded me, so I went in chronological order. I had beaten 3 on an emulator before, with save states, but never done it in one straight run, so I set out to do it on my pi. And it was so worth it.

While I love Mario 2, both for nostalgic and for game play quality reasons, Mario 3 surpasses it in pretty much every way. The controls are again perfect, the music is the best out of the series, and is about as good as Mega Man 2's music. The visuals are among the best on the NES, and I don't think that's a stretch to say. But Mario 3 not only matched Mario 1 and 2, it continued to innovate in a way that is both bold and successful that you usually do not find in other NES series *cough* Ninja Gaiden Mega Man 4-6 *cough*.

The failure of these series to advance successfully is, of course, understandable. Before the NES, there were really no games that got sequels, or at least very few. And three games in the series? There you're pretty much talking about only Donkey Kong, which fizzled out pretty heavily by game 3. There really was no precedent for how to do a sequel well, so the trial and error of a Zelda 2 or Castlevania 2 can be forgiven, since they represented big new attempts at great things, and succeeded partially, and failed partially (neither game is as bad as their modern critics would say). But Mario 3 knocked it out of the park. While you can get fire flowers, mushrooms, and in Mario 1, and mushrooms and hearts in Mario 2, Mario 3 has SO many powerups, from mushrooms, to a frog suit, to a full racoon suit, to a hammer suit, stars, fire flowers, the P finger thing, to everyone's favorite iconic tanuki tail. The overworld map completely altered the way Mario games were played from that point on, and placed Mario in a believable world rather than isolated levels.

And the secrets you can find in Mario 3 surpass any of its predecessors. This is one of the things I love the most about the game, and one of the things I miss most about classic gaming culture. Now, there's no such thing as a secret in video games. Want to find the warp worlds in Mario? Look it up. Want to find those light arrows in Link to the Past? Look it up. Want to figure out how to get Gold Sonic in Sonic 2? Look it up.

We didn't have the internet in those days, and so finding a secret and sharing it with your friends was just an experience that the kids today just won't be able to enjoy the way I did. I still remember discovering from my friend that if you crouched on the white blocks, you could run behind all of the scenery, and use this to find a warp whistle. Or that if you ran fast enough with the tanuki tail in one of the castle levels, that you could fly over the top of the castle to find another warp whistle. It was just so fun, and like learning the hadouken in the arcade, it's a kind of communal and social aspect to video gaming that just won't be replicated.

All in all, it's a fantastic game filled with hours upon hours of pure joy. I'll give it a 10 out of 10, because it's pretty much perfect in every way.

-TRO

Pi Reviews Part 1: Super Mario Bros. 2

The very first game I wanted to beat on my Pi was Super Mario Bros. 2. My absolute favorite games on my NES as a kid was Super Mario Bros 3. And my second favorite was Super Mario Bros. And my third favorite was Super Mario Bros 2 (you get the idea). Mario was such an unbelievable franchise to me. It was colorful. The controls were perfect. The graphics were excellent (and have aged brilliantly). The music was perfect. The balance of fun to challenge was fantastic. And each of the three Mario games had something completely new and unique about them. All three completely blew my mind.

Little did I know that Super Mario Bros 2. in the U.S. was actually mostly a reskin of a Japanese game called Doki Doki Panic. Modern day grumpy gamers will use this as an excuse to say that Mario 2 isn't a "real" Mario game. While this may be, I suppose, technically true, that doesn't take away from its brilliance, nor its commonality with the other two Mario games. It was produced by Miyamoto and his team at Nintendo, just like 1 and 3. Its music was composed by the legendary Koji Kondo (composer for the Mario and Zelda series, just to name a few). And most importantly, it's FUN.

No, it's not as ground breaking as 1. No, it's not as fantastically polished as 3. But yes, it is a great game in its own right. The controls are great, music is catchy, the bosses are fun, the levels are inventive and varied, and it introduced a bunch of characters and mechanics that would remain a part of the Super Mario franchise to this day. If you haven't played it, or haven't given it a fair shot apart from the long shadows of 1 and 3, just try it. I think you'll enjoy it.

Now we just need to get Wart a cameo in a Mario game. Or at this rate, he could probably be a playable character in Smash Bros. ;)

He's a villanous frog that hates vegetables. Should be pretty easy to work a Smash moveset around that.

I'll give it a 9/10, as it's a bit buggy in places, and isn't quite as unified an experience as Mario 1 and 3. But those are very good games to get beaten by.

-TRO

Pi Reviews

My next series will be a set of all of the games I've beaten on my Raspberry Pi since Christmas. These are retro games that I have been struggling to beat since I've been a kid, but once I got the Pi and no longer needed to switch wires to hook up my old systems, I've beaten several old games that I'll review here (hopefully I don't forget any). Enjoy!

-TRO