Category: Platformer

Posted on

Game Ramblings #210 – Donkey Kong Bananza

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch 2

What a treat.

I know I’m a bit late on this one, but I finally got a Switch 2 so I had to hop on this immediately. As more information was revealed it became clear that this wasn’t just a Donkey Kong title, but instead a prequel to and continuation of the ideas originating in Super Mario Odyssey. In practice, it absolutely feels like that, but given some iteration to really solidify the core meta loop that solved a lot of what I felt was unnecessary grinding in the original.

I enjoyed the hell out of Super Mario Odyssey but I didn’t really enjoy that everything was so heavily gated to collecting large amounts of inconsequential moons all over the place. I simply don’t play games to that level of care for completion anymore. Going into this I dreaded having to find 40 shines hidden in spots for the hell of it to get to the next area. Lucky for me, that is all gone. There is now such an obvious distinction between main path collecting needs and collecting for the sake of it. The main path has goal locations and you happen to collect things between those locations, and maybe the main location has a goal to collect a specific banana or a piece of a record during it, but they are goals and you beeline straight to them and you move on with your life, and if you happen to collect things on the way then that’s generally fun and cool. What I’m not doing is what felt like grinding out a counter to move on.

And I’m very serious about beelining. The fundamental mechanic that the game is built around is the ability to just dig through the environment and make your own path. That is generally what solved my collection dislikes about Odyssey. In this case, most things that you can collect have a clever solution and a chaotic solution. There’s tons of clues all over the place about places to explore – changes in the ground texture showing possible caves, people standing around talking about the possible location of bananas, suspiciously placed objects that seem like they can only hide something. If you’re paying attention you will simply find a lot of things, and that isn’t different from how it worked in Odyssey.

However, there is now also the dumb ape solution. Your goal is 300m in a direction and there’s a town, cliff wall, and a bunch of people in your way? Punch in a straight line! I cannot tell you how many times I would be bashing my way through a cliff only to find that I ended up in a cave that done “correctly” would have required me to search out something like an explosive to blast through a metal wall blocking entrance to the cave. In those cases, being a dumb ape going “lol punch everything” got me a faster reward than playing correctly, and I loved the fact that game is literally built to allow this style of gameplay.

That’s not to say that some things didn’t require me to actually pay attention, because there are certainly core story segments that do require some care. Bosses generally required me to pay attention to specific mechanics and execute them well. Story-specific bananas generally required me to execute mechanics well. Optional challenge rooms (of which there are a lot) generally required me to carefully get through them. However, the balance of gameplay felt a lot more tuned to where I am in life now. There are a lot of moments where I can just shut off my brain, be a dumb ape punching things, and have fun. I can then save those moments of paying attention for specific times where the situation required it. If I compare this to my memory of Mario Odyssey, I feel like I had more relaxed downtime and better specific periods of excitement in a way that struck a better balance for post-work post-kids bed time sitting in a chair and playing.

The weird thing to me is that that change in how I was playing the game changed what to me was a negative about Odyssey – the sheer amount of collection – into something that I largely think is a positive here. Where in Odyssey I felt like I had to collect a lot of things, here I simply happened to collect a lot of things. Where in Odyssey I felt like I had to weave around and explore everything to collect what I needed, here I collected enough simply being a dumb ape and barreling through the environment. Ultimately the change is that instead of feeling forced to explore, I simply was exploring for the fun of it.

This is very much a classic Nintendo first party title. It’s relatively easy in the mainline path, has plenty of challenge when you go off of that, and concludes in a place that left me wanting more. They took what was already a solid foundation and passed it through iteration of core mechanics and adaptation to another part of the Mario IP. What came out of that is a game that is surprising in how well it worked and is almost certainly going to be seen as a much higher point than Donkey Kong 64 in terms of pulling this part of the universe into 3D. I don’t know if I could recommend buying an entire new console to play this game, but if you’re going to buy a Switch 2 anyway this is where you should absolutely start.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #209 – Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution

More Info from WayForward

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: GBA
  • Also Available On: Switch, PS4, PS5, Steam

It’s interesting playing a new GBA game that clearly benefits from lessons learned over 20 years of making games. While this is an “old” game revisited and completed it’s clearly been given a modern touch. This is simply a great game on GBA rather than a great GBA game and that modern feeling is surprising, even knowing how good this series has been.

Looking at this purely from a Shantae perspective, this leans a lot more toward the level focused gameplay of older titles than that of Seven Sirens but that makes a lot of sense. This was supposed to fall in between the original and Risky’s Revenge. It certainly has some Metroidvania elements like hidden treasures, upgrades, and small segments of paths that require revisiting areas. However, the focus is on core platforming gameplay and it is smooth.

The thing that I often find difficult about going back to a lot of older games is that they dealt with a lot of platform restrictions via brute force, and that often meant that there is jank or slowness built into the experience. You’ll sometimes see if with weird air control or slow movement in platforming gameplay. You’ll see it in slow usability of menus. You’ll see it in extreme levels of not explaining what the player should at least be trying to do. None of that is present here.

It’s a series of really small things, but movement here feels modern. In regular platforming movement is really fast. Normally I would expect that the limited screen space of the GBA would be a hazard here, but this is paired with what is really one of the best visual styles of any game I’ve played on the platform. Importantly, the thing that makes it work is that distinguishing enemies from the background at a glance is immediate so you don’t have to slow down to avoid danger. You run quickly, dispatch enemies quickly, and move on. This is paired with the movement being similarly smooth in transformations – climbing on spider webs is super agile, flying as a harpy is fast, wrecklessly dashing as an elephant removes a lot of danger – so that no matter what movement you’re in you just kind of intuitively go at it.

This bunch of little things also goes straight into overall UX. Transformations are linked to B+<something> combos and are super snappy, so you can switch to the right transformation quickly. Switching between magic types is fast and quick to use despite the overall lack of button options. There’s a whole upgrade path that you can steer your play time through, but they’re all obvious in terms of their use – some are power curve upgrades while some are simply ease of use, such as a purchaseable money multiplier. Talking to characters in the world is the primary way of getting clues about what to do, so it’s both not hand holding but also not vague. If you want to simply explore you can, but you can also be given instructions if you choose to dig for it. The primary meta game mechanic involves changing the background and foreground layers and moving between them, and that again is super fast but flashy enough to be impressive every time. Basically, it all feels like something that would be incredibly in-place in a modern retro-styled title, but as something played on GBA hardware is even more impressive.

That’s not to say that this is an all timer or anything though. While the original Shantae was unbelievably good for its time and this released 20 years ago would have been up there, we’ve seen a lot of progress since then. Where this falls is somewhere along the lines of really good game that is elevated by nostalgia and the reality of the platform it’s on, but on modern platforms it’s probably more of a curiosity for fans of the series. It doesn’t really do anything new or interesting now so separate from the story of its development delays and original cancellation it doesn’t necessarily stand out from the crowd.

But boy could I think of games that are far worse.

Posted on

How’d It Age #11 – Epic Mickey: Rebrushed

More Info from THQ Nordic

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch, PC
  • Originally Available On: Wii

I bounced off this game HARD when it originally came out. It’s not that the core game wasn’t good, but the forced integration of the Wii Remote really hampered the core painting mechanic. It made the camera miserable to control. It added unnecessary movement to painting. It was just a chore. Moving to standard controls frankly fixed the game.

Now I’m not necessarily saying that this is a modern masterpiece or anything but what a difference standard controls make. Platforming when you don’t have a good camera or good control of a camera just ruins the experience. You can’t hit your jumps quite right from lack of depth perception. You fall into danger because you couldn’t really see where you were landing. You get hit with things that weren’t necessarily in your camera view. It’s miserable.

Right on its own, having a camera stick fixes so much. You can run easily in different directions from your intended camera. You can look down when you jump to see the drop shadow for your landing spot. You can pan around during combat to make sure you have eyes on all the enemies. It just makes the game smooth. The worst part is that it’s not like this wasn’t solveable in the original title. Sure, the Wii Remote+Nunchuk combo was necessary as the default, but the Classic Controller add-on existed and offered dual-analog controls that could have been another useful control scheme to be used.

The other thing that really stood out to me was that this went beyond just moving to standard controls – it embraced modern touches with dual analog inputs. Since you no longer have pointer controls for the painting mechanic, it would have been easy for that to be incredibly imprecise. However, the game does two things that really improve the situation to do what I would argue matches the original game’s precision.

The first is simply that there is solid aim correction going on. The actual targetable area of things being painted is a decent amount larger than the actual target, and that sort of slushy space really makes quick targeting a lot more manageable. Obviously, this is something that most modern gamepad action games do, but it’s nice to see it here. The second is perhaps more important. The game just inherently supports motion controls during painting but not during normal movement. This is a really smart integration of that mechanic. Rather than the camera always darting around because of controller movement, the player is left to doing most camera movements on the stick. However, when the painting is activated, the camera stick movement is reduced and motion controls are enabled, allowing for really precise fine-tuned movement. This is a really smart touch as it makes combat precise in ways that even the original didn’t match and elevates it over a lot of “standard” action game control implementations.

What is on the surface a few small changes to core input really did end up fixing the game for me. It’s not like the original was all bad news anyway. The story and setting are wonderful, and that is still in place. The surprisingly dark story of Mickey effectively starting a cartoon genocide is still all here. It’s elevated by a pretty solid visual overhaul where everything is nice and high detail enough to now be a cartoon styled game in a modern engine. The platforming and combat are still good enough by modern standards and massively helped by the camera, so rather than being a downside it now serves to get out of the way of the really positive elements of the game.

The Wii was an interesting experiment to be sure, but now nearly 20 years later it’s pretty obvious that it didn’t really serve a lot of genres all that well. Wii Sports? Absolutely a banger for the console. First-person shooters? Metroid Prime on the Wii is probably the most precise way to play the game. However, more traditional genres like platformers really suffered from the lack of dual analog, and this is another example of that. Simply by moving to more standard controls, it took a game that had serious issues and made it pretty damn solid. It’s definitely no Mario Odyssey, but this is now a fun game on its own that can be played in a modern way without the frustration of poor input schemes.