Donkey Kong 64

released on Nov 22, 1999

K. Rool has kidnapped the Kongs! Can Donkey Kong rescue his friends, reclaim the Golden Bananas and save his homeland from certain doom? Take out some Kremlings with Chunky's Pineapple Launcher or Lanky's Trombone. Float through the air using Tiny's Ponytail Twirl. Even rocket to the sky with Diddy's Jetbarrel!


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NOT THAT BAD. just because chunky won't eat purple bananas doesn't make it any less of a purposefully well-designed collect-a-thon. gloomy galleon notwithstanding.

The internet said this game was bad after one video on it

I have been playing this since it’s release. It is fun, but the backtracking between characters and levels does get annoying. I swear I will finish it one day!

La Oveja Negra de la saga de DK

Once again, the strongest emotion evoked by playing games from my childhood is not nostalgia, but a sense of amazement at how I ever beat them without reading ANYTHING EVER. ALL of the dialogue is always so unfamiliar, I can distinctly remember even skipping over it all the time, too. Props to babby me for having the patience to just brute force his way through games X3

This is the first time I've played this game in quiiite a few years, and this time I was, at the outset, going for 100%. I quickly realized I didn't have the patience to do that, though, and just went for "as much as I can stand" x3. I ended up around 16.5 hours and 185 golden bananas, and all but one fairy, crown, and medal (and an assortment of a little over 100 bananas). I have no idea how the average time on HLTB is over 30 hours. That's a bit insane to be given that you only need 100 bananas to beat the game. Maybe it's people just having a hard time finding things like the Rare or N64 coins?

This is definitely the 2nd worst of the Rare platformers (with Conker of course taking the bottom spot, Banjo 2-E at first and Banjo 1-E at 2nd). The design philosophy around switching kongs REALLY extenuates the "theme park" approach to level design, and makes the levels feel much less alive and more planned out than something like Banjo, especially 2-E. This game definitely has some mechanical problems as well.

Compared to something like Banjo or Mario 64, the kongs do control a little slippery (a complaint I have heard about the game before, but only now have really come to realize). It's not game breaking by any extent, but it can be aggravating and off-putting at first with how much momentum the kongs seem to carry. It definitely takes a little getting used to. A LOT of the bonus games too are fuckin' shit and I hate 'em. Some, some are just annoying, like the ones that rely on reaction time to shoot the banana when the lights go on and off, but the beaver-herding one especially just does not fucking work. The beavers always run into the side of the hole, as if it weren't a hole but a wall, and given that there are not one but TWO instance of the hardest version of that game, I just said fuck it after a half an hour of trying.

The framerate is really inconsistent as well. They were clearly really pushing the hardware in terms of how many objects could be on screen at once, because some areas in particular (World 7 boss, llama temple, a couple others) just had the framerate dipping aaaall the time. Again, it wasn't anything game breaking, but it was still very noticeable.

The game still has such good style though. It's not quite as funny as Banjo 2-E or as memorable as Conker's, but it's still good. The music fantastic of course, and the kongs really all feel like they have their own personalities, even though they never talk. Their idle animations especially would always make me chuckle X3

Verdict: Recommended. If you like collectathon 3D platformers, you'll probably enjoy DK64. It's not the best on the system by any means, but it's still a good game. Kong switching isn't the most fluid or well implemented thing in the world, but DK64 certainly flows and feels better than a really tedious cluster-fuck like Earthworm Jim 3D.

Though I have beaten this game before, I've never done a 101% run like this. HbomberGuy's marathon charity stream of a 101% run last week inspired me to pick the game back up (once again) and try (once again) to do a full completion after giving up on it a couple years ago. I ended up clocking in a 16 hours and 37 minutes (which would actually put me at #62 out of 65 speedruns of 101% if I were to submit it to Speedrun.com somehow XD). For some reason the resale shop in my hometown had a CIB copy of the Japanese version for just two bucks more than a loose American copy, so I picked that one up, but it's functionally identical save for some bug fixes (making it technically the best version to play on a mechanical level, though only slightly). This was really one of the last unfinished projects of a game from my youth, so I'm really happy that I was finally able to plow through those last few horrible golden bananas and do this XD

Granted, I did get 201 golden bananas, but you only actually need 100 to beat the game. The game is well known to be a collectathon to end all collectathons, and it succeeds (for better or worse). DK64 usually has its Tag Barrels and the constant swapping between kongs to backtrack through areas for more collectables cited as one of its greatest issues with pacing and design, but I would say another big part of that is how inconsistent the difficulty is. The beetle races are some of the hardest bananas in the game to get, and there's one in world 2 (out of 8 ), and mini-games like Beaver Bother are almost comically broken and difficult compared to others like Teetering Turtle Trouble which you'd have to nearly try to lose at.

That said, you only actually need every other golden banana in the game, which is a far lower ratio than in Mario 64 or in Banjo (though not by that much, admittedly), so you can really pick and choose which ones you wanna go for and which ones you can't be bothered with. A bit like Xenoblade Chronicles, trying to complete the entire game is something that doesn't really offer much reward compared to just completing it normally, and will disrupt the pacing to the point where you're really going to hamper your enjoyment of the game compared to just going for a normal playthrough to see the credits roll.

That said, I do still really like this game. It has a lot of nostalgia for me, from the characters' designs and their characters displayed through tiny, silent interactions with the environment (like how Chunky will turn around in the minecart stages to wave hello at you) to how fucking EXCELLENT the music is. I was surprised at the time at just how long it took to hit me that this game has some really damn good music in.

Verdict: Recommended. If you like N64 platformers, this is definitely one to give a go if you're hungering for more after the Banjo games and Mario 64. It has far too many problems with its pacing, difficulty curve, and framerate (and good god does this game have some framerate difficulties) for me to ever say that it's better than either Banjo game or Mario 64, but it's still a good enough game to stand far above the worst members of its genre whom it also shares a console with.