Tag Archives: Nintendo

Donkey Kong Jr. — 3Q2015 issue

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Like father, like son

I don’t believe there is any­one who reads GI who doesn’t know that I don’t care for Don­key Kong. By now, it should be painful­ly obvi­ous that I don’t care for the simian’s retro exploits or his more recent out­ings, either. It’s not that I don’t respect what the great ape has done for gam­ing; it’s more that I feel he gets cred­it for mediocre-to-hor­ri­ble games. Don­key Kong Jr. falls on the low­er end of the spectrum.
Much the same tripe as the orig­i­nal, you’re tasked with sav­ing some­one by mov­ing across hell and high water. But wait, this time it’s dif­fer­ent! No, you aren’t sav­ing Pauline this time around; no, you’re Don­key Kong Jr., the scion of Kong­dom sav­ing your incor­ri­gi­ble father from the clutch­es of evil human Mario. The fact that anoth­er ape has to save his parental fig­ure from Mario in a com­plete role rever­sal begs sev­er­al ques­tions: Where was Junior when his father was kid­nap­ping inno­cent maid­ens and run­ning ram­pant? Why would Mario even both­er to kid­nap the great ape in the first place? Sure, there’s the motive of revenge, but you’re nev­er going to get your ques­tion answered, try as you might. You just have to accept that DK needs sav­ing and it’s up to you, his reli­able off­spring, to do the job.
Hop­ing that your adven­ture in sav­ing your father is worth it, the game tasks you in uti­liz­ing a jump­ing and climb­ing mechan­ic that may or may not work, depend­ing on where you are height wise. Any fall more than a few pix­els high will kill you, which makes about as much sense as the kid­nap­ping caper you seem to be embroiled in. Who­ev­er had the bright idea to make jump­ing a chore and maneu­ver­ing your ape around impos­si­ble obvi­ous­ly didn’t get that this was a bad design deci­sion imme­di­ate­ly. See­ing as though they are the only skills your ape has, it would have been a lit­tle bit wis­er to make those work well.
Instead, you’ll watch Junior repeat­ed­ly get eat­en alive by croc­o­diles (we’re not sure why a plumber would employ these dan­ger­ous live crea­tures to kill an ape), nailed by ran­dom falling objects and fall to his obvi­ous and hor­rif­ic death, all because he’s under­de­vel­oped at jump­ing and climbing.
And while you’re wit­ness­ing this obvi­ous act of poach­ing, it’d be wise to use some head­phones. The music, much like the orig­i­nal game, isn’t the great­est and it will get monot­o­nous imme­di­ate­ly. Don­key Kong Coun­try this isn’t.
Your best bet is to try the game just for the nos­tal­gic fac­tor in see­ing a pret­ty rare char­ac­ter; Junior was last seen, by my count, in Super Mario Kart for the SNES. He isn’t putting in too many oth­er appear­ances and maybe, just maybe, it was this trip out of the jun­gle that con­vinced him to let his father do all of the adven­tur­ing in the fam­i­ly. This bar­rel isn’t full of laughs or a blast.

Ultimate NES Remix — 3Q2015 issue

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The ulti­mate retro package

It’s one thing to trade off of nos­tal­gia. And we all know Nin­ten­do does that often and well. What we don’t often get to see is Nin­ten­do using its his­to­ry to change the way its games are played. Until now. That’s where Ulti­mate NES Remix comes in. The ques­tion is, do you want to play these remixed games again and at what price?
Remix takes a few of your favorites NES titles and adds dif­fer­ent con­di­tions to them in an attempt to spice things up a bit. In Super Mario Bros., for instance, you have to reach the goal in a cer­tain amount of time or defeat a cer­tain num­ber of ene­mies with­in a time lim­it. That’s the mun­dane stuff in the begin­ning. Lat­er edicts get hard­er the fur­ther down a game’s list you go so as to pro­vide more of a chal­lenge. Whether or not you enjoy these chal­lenges depends sharply on whether or not you enjoy play­ing games you prob­a­bly already have played and want to see some­thing dif­fer­ent with­in them.
While the chal­lenges may be dif­fer­ent, there isn’t much else dif­fer­ent about the games. The music and graph­ics from the 8‑bit era remain intact and about the only thing that’s changed is the slick mod­ern pack­ag­ing of the Ulti­mate Remix itself and the addi­tion of leader­boards and cham­pi­onship mode. So, don’t come into this expect­ing depth or some mag­i­cal upgrade to mod­ern day stan­dards of graphics.
If you enjoy the days of yes­ter­year and can and will pay $30 for a com­pi­la­tion chal­lenge pack­age, by all means shell out for Ulti­mate NES Remix. The chal­lenges are amus­ing for the most part, and there are a few extras that make play­ing through the mul­ti­tude of games offered (16 in all) a real treat. But take it with a large grain of salt and look at it for what it is: A chance to drag the orig­i­nal NES games out that you loved as a kid, more than like­ly, to get a piece of your now-adult wal­let. Ulti­mate­ly, this could have been a lot more.

Excitebike — 3Q2014 issue

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Pho­tos cour­tesy of Gamefaqs.com

Noth­ing to get excit­ed over

Near­ly every­thing game indus­try leg­end Shigeru Miyamo­to touch­es turns to gold. The key­word there is near­ly. While it might be con­sid­ered blas­phe­mous in some cir­cles to ques­tion the god­like ten­den­cies of Miyamo­to-kamisama, there are some­times valid rea­sons strewn about his resume. Excite­bike is one of those excus­es to point to when some­one says that Miyamo­to is capa­ble of com­mit­ting no wrong in game design.

Excite­bike isn’t a ter­ri­ble game. In fact, it’s one of the bet­ter games to come out of the NES line­up. But that isn’t say­ing much in the long run. Excite­bike takes a sim­ple con­cept and makes a moun­tain out of a mole hill. So much so that if you have no idea how the game works, you’re not going to imme­di­ate­ly fig­ure it out just by rum­bling through a cou­ple of tracks. My per­son­al learn­ing curve stretched from age 8 to age 28, and it was only because I asked some­one about the nuances that I became a bet­ter player.

That’s the thing about Excite­bike, though: I get that it’s a real­ly sim­ple game. You, the dirt bike rid­er, are gift­ed and able to chal­lenge a mul­ti­tude of tracks. You aim for the high­est score, stay off the rough patch­es, use your boost to speed up and attempt to keep your bike lev­el with the course once you make big leaps. That’s the extent of the game. There’s a track edi­tor thrown in for good mea­sure and a sec­ond type of race that’s basi­cal­ly time tri­als. Sim­ple, right? Yes.

And frus­trat­ing. No one knows what I would have giv­en to know that press­ing A rapid­ly when you fall off your bike helps with recov­ery. I would have trad­ed my tiny king­dom in lit­tle old Colum­bia, S.C., to know that. It would have also helped to know that dri­ving over the arrows on the ground reduces bike tem­per­a­ture. Know­ing these two impor­tant pieces of infor­ma­tion might have made a dis­tinct dif­fer­ence in my con­tin­ued career of dirt bike rac­ing. But, alas, that dream went right out of the win­dow with my incli­na­tion to con­tin­ue rent­ing the cart back in the day.

If you want nos­tal­gia and you can appre­ci­ate being forced to learn the ins and outs of dirt bike rac­ing, by all means pop a wheel­ie in Excite­bike. But don’t be sur­prised with the unimag­i­na­tive locales, race lay­out and pen­chant for keep­ing you the play­er in the dark. Sim­ple con­cept? Check. Sim­ple con­trols? Check. Mario cameo? Triple check. But Shigeru Miyamo­to’s genius touch to make the game a bet­ter expe­ri­ence for the unini­ti­at­ed? Nope. That’s still sit­ting in the garage with my dri­ve to play the game as a frus­trat­ed 8‑year-old and now as a more dis­crim­i­nat­ing 32-year-old.

Metroid Prime — 2Q2014 issue

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Pho­tos cour­tesy of GameSpot.com

The return of Samus after 8 years is welcome

As a long­time fan of the Metroid fran­chise, I sup­pose I could be for­giv­en for not mak­ing the imme­di­ate leap onto the Prime band­wag­on. After all, Super Metroid is my bea­con of hope still shin­ing for 2D games, a sym­bol of the pin­na­cle that the genre reached. I mean, I plan to name my first­born daugh­ter Samus. That’s how much I love Metroid. So, when Prime hit the shelves, I was duly skep­ti­cal. It had been eight long years with­out so much as of a whiff of Samus’ scent in the mar­ket of solo games and I was starv­ing. Enter Prime.

Prime isn’t so much a pure Metroid game as it is a com­bi­na­tion of Metroid and first-per­son shoot­ers of the day. What you need to know to under­stand Prime is that it’s set between Metroid and Metroid II: Return of Samus, and it’s the first real game in the series to start putting the pieces of the Metroid saga togeth­er. Samus roams around Tal­lon IV to uncov­er the past of the Chozo (her care­tak­ers after the death of her par­ents in a Space Pirate raid), and takes on the vil­lain­ous group, who are con­duct­ing bio­log­i­cal exper­i­ments on the plan­et. That’s the meat of the sto­ry essen­tial­ly, but it most­ly means that you’re going to do some explor­ing. This being Metroid and all.

The first-per­son con­trols could have been haz­ardous to the game’s health but they aren’t. They’re actu­al­ly sim­ple to use and sur­pris­ing­ly easy to get used to even if you’re inti­mate­ly famil­iar with Super Metroid’s set­up. My main con­cern was how does Samus’ action trans­late to the first-per­son mold? Can she still move around flu­id­ly? And, how is the action han­dled when she has to switch to Morph Ball mode? All of these ques­tions were imme­di­ate­ly answered with a sim­ple playthrough. Action is flu­id and move­ment is clean and paced well. There are no prob­lems with switch­ing modes, and I rather liked how that is han­dled. It’s almost as if some­one on the devel­op­ment team at Retro Stu­dios remem­bered what it was like to imag­ine you were Samus in the Varia Suit.

I appre­ci­at­ed the atmos­phere of Prime, con­sid­er­ing that if a game is to be called Metroid in any way, it must have the “Metroid atmos­phere.” I cer­tain­ly got that as I mean­dered through maze-like cav­erns with fore­bod­ing music play­ing gen­tly in the back­ground. What I appre­ci­at­ed about the sound­track most­ly was the use of old themes to tie the games togeth­er. You can tell you’re play­ing a Metroid game if you lis­ten hard enough, and I liked that the issue was­n’t thrown in my face con­stant­ly. I did­n’t need to be hit over the head repeat­ed­ly that this is a Metroid tale, and the music was polite about remind­ing me.

My only prob­lem with Prime is that while it feels like a Metroid game should, I was­n’t that immersed in the tale. Every Metroid game released up to this point, I played through and was engaged thor­ough­ly. Prime? I real­ly could­n’t get into the sto­ry that much, and I did­n’t real­ly care all that much about the Chozo. I real­ized that because of the way Metroid ends, Samus can’t real­ly go back to the Moth­er Brain issue. How­ev­er, Prime just struck me as boring.

Prime was the start of a good thing, obvi­ous­ly, since there are two sequels and a host of spin­off games. What I was most pleased with, how­ev­er, was the fact that Samus returned in top form. It was about time. Eight years was way too long to go with­out using some ver­sion of the “Metroid instinct.”