donkey kong country shennanigans

[queenlua]

on impulse, i replayed most of Donkey Kong Country 2 yesterday, a thing that... did not take very long, because it turns out I Am Ridiculously Good At This Game. (it's the love of my childhood and all that.)

i did not think this game could still surprise me, but it did! or rather, the platform i was playing it on did.

see, i was playing on the SNES emulator on the Nintendo Switch, and there's a "rewind" function built-in, right? it lets you reset back to wherever you want within the past ~minute of gameplay.

i'd played this game in an emulator before, but had never actually used savestate features or anything, out of a combo of "too proud to cheat" and "too lazy to figure out the settings/shortcuts." but, since the rewind feature was right there, i started using it just a little bit, here and there, and...

it made the game easier, of course, but i expected that. what i didn't expect was how it... radically changed the nature of what the game even was?

like, i didn't realize how much caution/care/attention there is in my usual approach to even bog-standard levels, until i just... didn't need those things at all. within minutes i found myself changing my entire playstyle, trying out the wildest shit, doing really meme-y jumps and aggressively fast moves just to see if i could pull them off, because hey what the hell why not.

and it's cool! you can finish the game much faster, and it's rewarding in its own way! i'm very glad the option is there!

but it's definitely not the same experience. doesn't give the same types of satisfaction or reward the types of patience/attention it does when playing normally.

(my partner compared it to top roping versus lead climbing, for any rock climbers in the room, haha—when you're on top rope you can just kinda Do Random Shit, but mistakes/falls are way more annoying/painful when doing lead climbing, so you climb way more by-the-books.)

i don't have a larger point here; i was just pretty surprised how much even a little tweak can change the whole flavor/experience of the gameplay even in a bog-standard 2d platformer. (i guess i got some unexpected sympathy for my friend who mostly likes Crufty Old Arcade Games That Take Forever To Master, haha. i like that games are generally easier now, but he did really lose something when we were no longer feeding quarters into machines :P)

Comments

[necrophilia]

I’m glad you had time to spend a day playing an SNES game and then philosophise about it.

[queenlua]

sad i don't have a philosoraptor icon for the occasion (assuming that's a meme that's actually still recognizable/relevant and not just for boomers)

[rionaleonhart]

I played the Donkey Kong Country games on Switch for the first time recently, and my main thought was 'people... people originally had to play this without the rewind feature?' I died so many times; I can't imagine having to replay half the level every single time it happened!

I just checked what I said about Donkey Kong Country 2 in my periodically-updated entry of brief notes on every game I've played, and I've written 'I have no idea how anyone ever finished this game in the SNES days; it's clearly impossible.' I'm impressed that you mastered it back in the day!

[queenlua]

HA. i'm flattered!!! it's funny, there's these skills you can pick up when you're really little, b/c you can enter The Zone without getting impatient or frustrated the way you would when you're older, and then they can more-or-less be yours for life... some people spend those points on like, piano or something else useful, but also there's "2d platformers" and APPARENTLY THAT'S WHERE I SPENT A LOT OF POINTS. i actually had no idea my level of mastery was anything special until ages later, when i first watched my now-husband playing some platformer or another, and i was like "wow you're generally good at games why do you suck so much at this one," and, yeah, turns out i'm just a lil bit of a monster at that genre specifically lol

[rionaleonhart]

I can't remember if you've played Celeste, but you might enjoy it! It's a fun and challenging 2D platformer with (in my opinion) endearing characters. It took some effort to master it, but I found it very rewarding, and now I replay it every few months just because I have such a great time zipping through the levels.

[queenlua]

i've heard good things about it! but haven't played yet. your endorsement has ticked it up some in the Never-Ending Games Queue, though :D

[superborb]

I'm kind of jealous that I didn't spend any points on platformers, because it's SO hard to pick up as an adult! I usually just turn it over to my husband to do those parts of games...

[queenlua]

it is pretty satisfying to be on the other end of that, haha, as someone who's beaten the platform-y heavy bits of games on behalf of others ;P

[neotula]

makes me think of playing fire emblem fates with phoenix mode on! Characters come right back to life, so there's no need for caution! it's led to me just playing it and just going as fast as i can the whole time, just brute forcing maps.

[queenlua]

oooh i didn't even know Fates had a phoenix mode! (only played it on hard for the ~18 or so chapters i played... makes phoenix mode sound super-neat tbh, i may try it sometime!)