twmac

It is on like Donkey Kong Country: Returns

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Got to play this over the weekend for about 3-4 hours. I have only played a little of Donkey Kong Country 2 but it seems like a very faithful re-imagining of the original conceit.

I played through the first two worlds with a friend and have to say that the Co-Op experience is a blast albeit with the person palying as Donkey having to be the better of the two players as Diddy has some pretty unfair advantages. The levels are really nice to look at and each area seems to have its own little gimmick that does not get reused again.

This game also has the best use of the waggle in a platformer so far.

If you a fan of the series or are completely new to this(my friend is the former and I am pretty much the latter) then there is plenty of fun to be had with the OCD types having massive amounts of stuff to collect.

When the day comes and I fork out for a Wii and another television this will definitely be one of the first on my list of must-buys.

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I will definitely be picking this up to play with the GF. She seems pretty interested in it even though she doesn't like plat-formers anymore (but used to in the days of SNES - figure that one out?).

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I am a huge fan of the DKC series. I can't freaking wait to play this game. From what I played at PAX, the controls were a bit loose for my liking, but good enough. twmac, were you playing with the Wiimote held sideways, or the Wiimote/nunchuck combo? At the demo station, they only had the latter. I just assumed that that was the only way to play, but now reviews are telling me that the game is controlled NES-style. Anyone have the scoop?

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We were playing with the combo. To be honest, I think you might have been able to play it Nes style but the Wii Remote/Nunchuk combo felt very natural.

Loose controls? Not really sure, they felt good to me but I am not an expert.

Drath, it is very old school SNES of the little I played of the DKC2 it plays the same. If your girlfriend isn't brilliant at platformers then let her take Diddy as he has all manner of double jumps etc that make some sections easier.

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I've been looking for a platformer to play with my wife since we 100% finished new super mario bros. and almost 100% finished little big planet's story mode(just had to finish all levels without dying, which wasn't fun at all). I really like the visual style and haven't really played one since Donkey Kong country 2 on SNES(I think...)

Will definitely be picking this up, either for Christmas or just after. :tup:

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Just picked this up and have been playing it. 100% this game is going to be quite the challenge I think... more so than New Super Mario Bros. Wii. It's quite fun, imaginative and dynamic (love the background/foreground shifting). Really enjoying it so far.

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Looks pretty good and seems to play pretty much exactly like the original SNES game, except for the controls which may be a bit worse (yay, progress). I might end up getting this just to have something to play with my sister during the holidays.

Jesus Christ, though.. the only Wii games that have interested me at all have been either Mario, Zelda or Donkey Kong related. That's just so fucking sad.

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I desperately want to love this game, but the fucking forced wii controls make it incredibly frustrating. Why map 3 controls to one context sensitive button, but then have two buttons completely un-used?

Oh Nintendo...

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Guest klmn367

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So I picked this up a couple of weeks ago with an EB gift card my sister gave me, and am now 5 levels away from completing it. I gotta say, somewhere around world 6, this game just presses the explode mode button and becomes brutally hard. Most of my sessions since then have devolved into fits of hysterical laughter at how cruel the designers could be. I will run into situations where I'm stuck horribly just after the checkpoint, try 20 or so times, finally nail an absolutely perfect run and feel fantastic about myself, and then what is more or less the Monty Python foot will literally drop from the air and crush me, sending me right back to try again. The level designers at Retro are complete fucking bastards, but I love them for it. I'm still frustrated by "waggle to roll" as rolling is essential to high-level DKC play. The other waggle controls aren't so bad, as the ground pound and blow are used pretty much exclusively to uncover bonus items and maybe defeat one class of enemy each, but rolling should really be a button press. It's just not something you want to allow any kind of inaccuracy with. Having three actions mapped to waggle, while the C button is unused and both the Z and B button are both mapped to exactly the same actions is really dumb. One waggle (the ground pound, because it's awesome to do), and the other two buttons actually doing something please.

Still, this is a rad old-school platformer. Something about it feels sort of hollow, in the same way that NSMB did to me though. Honestly I think it's just that my brain has trouble accepting a traditional platformer with real-time 3D graphics. The enemies are awesome, the style is all there, and the level design is devious and totally ready to make any player not up to the challenge weep. I just wish that it was rendered 3D turned into sprites like on the SNES for some reason. Kirby went back to a 2D art style last year, I want more things like that. That said, everybody who likes watching a monkey jump around and ride rocket barrels (simultaneously some of the hardest and raddest levels) should check this out.

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So far, my sister and I have reached the volcano levels on co-op. We obviously had to play the mine cart and barrel rocket levels on single player mode, though, because otherwise you would just lose two lives over a single mistake. Some of the other levels are not ideal for co-op play either because of the collapsing platforms and whatnots.

The levels are hard but usually fair, except for the times the difficulty results from poor controls. Mapping roll, ground pound and blowing to waggle is indeed completely mad, and for quite some time I exclusively used rolling for throwing myself over the ledges as I was trying to blow a dandelion or something. For added frustration, the hit detection isn't always spot on either.

Nevertheless, Donkey Kong Country Returns is still an excellent piece of platforming.

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My girlfriend and me finally did manage to beat this. The hardest parts for us was world/area 4 - the one where they introduce trial and error mine cart levels. Everybody knows the waggle for the rolling was a terrible idea, it's just not accurate enough. Thankfully it's not that "necessary", you still have to use it in spots, but rarely enough that it's not terrible. You also get better at it over time as well. The game was really polished and loved a lot about it. If I had to to pick the only faults in this near perfect re-imaging of DKC - it would be the waggle and some co-op issues (some of which was described by Nappi).

Having said that, I'm not a masochist, so I will not be 100%'ing this game.

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And there's the problem. I'm one of those people who does go for the 100% (have it on the first three worlds. I go back and clear out earlier levels when the later ones start to frustrate me) and in order to do that you need to be rolling with perfect timing quite often to grab errant puzzle pieces and KONG letters. In fact, I would recommend getting all the KONG letters even if you don't care about puzzle pieces, as when you have all of the letters in a world it unlocks a really cool bonus level in a temple. I have beaten that level for worlds 1, 2, 3, and 6 (got all the letters on that one in my first run through some fluke of luck) and while they're way harder than the regular game, they're also incredibly exciting and fun. I do intend to 100% this game, and am actually making a decent run at it, it's just very painful to do so at times. Nappi's co-op issues hadn't even occurred to me, but I can certainly see how they would crop up. I'll be playing a bunch of this game co-op in a week drunk with some buddies, so it'll be interesting to see how that goes. Of course, I intend to have the game beaten by then (probably not 100% though) so it won't be an issue that impedes progress.

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Holy shit.. After you beat the game and collect all the KONGs, you apparently have a chance to

do it all again in mirror mode, without Diddy Kong, items or extra lifes

. Now that is brutal.

Miffy, if one player moves out of the screen area, he/she will be reunited with the other after 5 seconds or so. However, it is not always safe to stay put for that long because of the enemies or because you are already standing on a collapsing structure. Furthermore, with some luck, you will be teleported to your partner's location just when he/she is in the middle of a jump across a chasm.

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I'm using just the wiimote NES style just because I like the D-pad over a thumb stick for this kind of game. I think that the one advantage to the nunchuck is that you don't have to hold a button to run, therefore, you can do speed runs without accidentally grabbing onto grassy patches.

So I co-opped this with my 2 year old at times and actually found it quite helpful. She's two and a half actually, but d-pads and buttons are a bit too complex and abstract for her, so I carry her through the levels and she shakes her controller to shoot peanuts. Just shooting peanuts and seeing that she did something onscreen makes her very proud and she tells me about it every now and then.

I abused a little quirk about how damage is dealt in 2-player when Diddy is riding your back to get past the last two bosses. Instead of the first 2 hits removing Diddy, the damage is alternated, so Diddy takes a hit, then DK, then on the 3rd hit you lose Diddy. Couple that with the heart item and you're set, you'll have Diddy for five hits. Its also nice, because you always restart with Diddy, which comes in handy on those stages that don't have any barrels. The price you pay for that is, it costs you two lives each time you die. That alone made me feel like I was using a strategy rather than abusing an exploit.

My only complaint after finishing the game, going back and finishing the time trials and

mirror mode

levels are single player only.

It makes my daughter sad when "baby monkey" doesn't pop out of the barrels in mirror mode.

@Nappi Not only do you have to collect all of the KONG letters, but you also have to

beat all of the K levels that are unlocked in each world. Then you unlock the golden temple at the end of the game. There's a world in there that you have to beat to get mirror mode. I'm quite enjoying it right now. I'm playing backwards doing all of the normal levels from World 8 to World 1, as the bosses and K levels in mirror mode are absolutely insane!

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Very late to this party but finally got this game. Holy shit, it's great! I was initially expecting another OK but nothing-like-DKC Donkey Kong game, but this really is a proper sequel and tribute to the old games at the same time.

It's definitely got its own flavour imparted by Retro, but the heavy use of the old games' soundtracks combined with surprisingly authentic gameplay is really speaking to me — this is nostalgic in a way normally only Mario manages. Having Kremlings too would be the icing on the cake, but I guess not being constrained by the enemy types/abilities of old makes it easier to craft imaginative gameplay.

A lot of old mechanics and set-ups return, but they're infused with enough innovation to bring back that long-lost experience of discovering a new DKC game. Also the art in this game is absolutely gorgeous, second only to Mario Galaxy as far as the Wii goes I reckon.

And as you guys noted, this game is damned hard. The old games got impossibly difficult at times too though, so this is appropriate. God knows how I managed to find all the bonus stages in the originals though, I must have had a lot of time as a child. I'm finding hardly any in this one although I know they're there.

Oh, and Cranky's return was a very welcome surprise!

So yeah. Fan of DKC? Get this fucking game, you twat. :tup:

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As somebody who played all three of the original DKC games, i was not so into DKCR.

I felt they were missing a lot of the things that made the original DKC games really distinctive. (DKCR is, for example, missing the tag-team mechanic and the tag-team co-op. Diddy is reduced to being a glorified jetpack and an extra hitpoint.)

DKCR is a fine platformer, but i don't feel that it actually had all that much in common with Rare's games.

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OK I'm over this game now. Christ, it's so frustratingly difficult. The originals weren't exactly easy, but there was a sense of discovery and wonder that compensated for it that I'm just not feeling this time around. I'm enjoying the nostalgic music and gameplay throwbacks, but it requires so much effort to get through I'm losing the will to live. I just want to spin up the originals instead and get my fix that way.

Having had more time to get over my original excitement, I agree that it seems like Retro just didn't get the point of many of the things Rare did with DKC. Those games had a very specific and unique atmosphere that I'd say they nailed with the first two iterations, but unfortunately lost somewhat in DKC3 — probably because by that point development had ramped up for N64 games and they knew the SNES was essentially done, so less heart was put into it.

One the key things is simply the style. I loved how dark and foreboding the original two games felt at times, about as far detached from Mario's cutesy world as you can imagine. Conversely, Returns doesn't feel very far away from Mario at all with its deluge of cutesy enemies, cartoony graphics, and comedic sound effects. Rare made a real effort to ground everything in a stylised reality: things looked like they'd look, behave, and sound in real life. Retro haven't even tried to do this, really.

That's not to say the games were realistic, but they felt more like some actual world somewhere than many platform games have managed. Rare put an immense amount of attention to detail into them, along with huge amounts of self-referencing (epitomised by Cranky's Monkey Museum). All of that is absent in Returns, apart from the obviously reused music. And even then, the reused music has been made more upbeat and friendly — the dark tone implied in the originals has been drained away. Then you've got Cranky, who seems to be more like a friendly old man now. The clue's in the name, surely?

So yeah, delight has turned to disappointment. It's a quality platformer for sure, I'm sure many newcomers to the series will love it and it'll probably get sequels. But it was very much targeted at us big DKC fans and it gets too many things wrong to ever be more than a one-time curiosity. Its issues are exactly the kind of things you'd expect to happen when one creator takes on another creator's work: things get misunderstood, missed, or simply changed. It's a good game (if you can handle its bone-crushing difficulty), but it's not DKC.

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this thread is really making me want to hit up some DKC with a pal again. I played through them both with a friend a couple years ago now while drinking. Somehow we spent literally three hours failing to get past the first mine cart level while drunk. We thought it was the hardest thing in the world and then as soon as we woke up I nailed it in like 30 seconds. What a great game.

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