Donkey Kong 64

[JaySevenZero]

Here's where you can contribute your memories and opinions of Donkey Kong 64 for potential inclusion in the forthcoming podcast.

Friendly reminder to all that where feedback for the podcast is concerned, we love it - but self-editing (brevity) is appreciated. We do want to include a breadth of opinions where appropriate, but no-one wants a discussion podcast that’s mainly reading. Better to save yourself time and cut to the chase if you can.

[rwgibbons]

This is one of my all-time favorite games. People say it went too hard on the collectathon aspect, but I think the enormous amount of collectibles are what made it great. It was a collectathon in the purest form, as opposed to most modern platformers which have collectibles just as a side thing and not the main focus of the game. I wish we could get a sequel or at least some sort of spirtual successor--a game where collecting is the whole point.

I loved hunting for every last banana, completing every challenge to get every token, and I especially loved playing each level with each of the 5 characters, each of who had their own color-coded collectibles.

[KissMammal]

My distinct memory of playing DK64 on release was confusion as to why I wasn’t really enjoying playing it, as I was a huge fan of the 3d platformer genre. Looking back all these years later, if I had to sum up the game in one word, it would be ‘unwieldy’. There were too many challenges, too many worlds, too many things to collect to the point where it started to feel like work, and the enforced switching of characters just felt like a headache, and something that got in the way of the gameplay rather than improving it.

In retrospect it made me appreciate the relative simplicity of the original Banjo Kazooie - a perfectly formed game that didn’t outstay its welcome, and for me remains the pinnacle of Rare’s N64 output.

[Jobobonobo]

Even back in the Christmas of ‘99 when I first played it, me and this game have never got on. Being such a fan of the SNES trilogy, I was much hyped to see Donkey Kong make his debut in 3D. But what I got was not a 3D reimagining of the DKC games but an uninspired Banjo Kazooie clone with little of what made that game such a beloved classic. The term ‘collectathon’ becoming a slur in the minds of many gamers can be attributed to the ridiculous overkill of items you have to collect in this game.

But to me, it is not simply the absurd amount of stuff to collect that is the downfall of this game. It is the fact that collecting the items is restricted to only one character at a time and that you have to constantly go back to the tag barrel to change characters that turns what should be a fun 3D platformer into a miserable slog. You have to ground pound a switch as Diddy which then opens a tunnel which has bananas that only Lanky can collect and the tag barrel is a couple of rooms back, so you change to Lanky and then when you reach the end of the tunnel you will have to go back to change to Chunky in order to remove a boulder to get the Golden Banana! Scenarios like this are absolutely littered throughout the game and are the very definition of filler. If the game had to be structured this way then having you change characters with a button press or having any character be able to collect items would have made this game far more playable. It is a design decision that truly breaks the game in such a way that what should take a minute to do takes five because of all this backtracking and switching.

Other offenses that this game commits include criminal underutilisation of animal buddies, repeating bosses, janky minigames, instruments and weapons that felt ultimately superfluous and last but by no means least, having to make you complete the original Donkey Kong twice in order to even reach the final boss! This really should only have been an optional extra in the game; to have to complete what to my young self was an extremely challenging and frustrating game twice in order to unlock the damn Nintendo Coin was a very obnoxious way to progress in a game I was already struggling to enjoy.

Really, I think trying to do an open world collectathon platformer was not a good choice for DK64. Rare had Banjo for that style of game, DK64 should have been its own thing entirely separate. Smaller, linear levels with secrets and faster paced gameplay ala Crash Bandicoot would have suited the series much better. The tragic thing is that there are things this game gets right: the minecart races have been translated to 3D beautifully, the final boss fight is surprisingly inventive, Kirkhope’s music at times matches the ambience of Wise’s work and his voice work as Donkey Kong is wonderfully charming. I just hope that if Donkey Kong is ever to go into the third dimension again, they actually take full advantage of what makes this series stand out from everything else and not try to be like the current trend. The big ape deserves better than DK64 and Rare themselves were capable of doing so much more. From a developer that was in their prime during the N64 era, this is truly a miss among a bevy of hits.

Three word review: Has no grace

[Iain[Ian]Ianson]

Have tried playing this game a few times and have never got more than a few hours in.

The controls are extremely sluggish. Try flicking the stick in the opposite direction to change orientation on the spot, it just doesn’t work. Criminal.

The animation outside of the main character walk/run cycles and a few enemy attacks is uniformly terrible. There’s no sense of what the various animations are trying to convey outside of “As much animation as possible!!”. The camera animation too, is often as confused as the systemic in-game camera.

The rendering fairs slightly better. While the textures are muddy, some of the work on the shinier materials and lighting is genuinely great for the system.

The there’s the design. “This coloured thing opens that, which unlocks this, after that, but only when you’ve got enough of these, with this character, and then that one”. The camera lurches and warps all over the various confusing levels as you activate yet another visually garish new type of switch or panel. It feels endless and it grates almost immediately.

The worst thing you can say is that if directly after playing this game, you slot in the Mario 64 cart, it’s almost like you can feel five years of progress in terms of game design in your hands as you play. Except Mario 64 came out years before this.

Very hard to recommend.

[Simonsloth]

Recently I’ve played both Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 as two towering gaps in my gaming history. Both on the N64 and designed by Rare. One of these is excellent and filled me with glee the other filled me with hatred and rage. Donkey Kong 64 was the latter.


I found the camera control to be diabolical and the platforming in my opinion was terrible. I cannot remember in amongst the spyros, crash bandicoots and even ape escape (which I have just played recently) being this badly controlled. To give the player tricky platforming sections without the ability to manipulate the camera to see the moving platforms coming towards them is unfathomable! Frantic factory was awful for this reason.

The game has a lot of potential in that I think the concept of playing as all the different characters and combining their abilities has merit. The unique abilities and some of the mini games are fun but a a large portion are a mild form of torture. During my time with the game I spent whole evenings trying to tackle a handful of 30 second mini games. I have never felt so infuriated. The mild mannered pacifist in me morphed over the course of my attempts into Michael Douglas in Falling Down. 95% of the game could be good solid fun with a better camera and tighter controls but the other 5% is potentially the most infuriatingly terrible torturous game I’ve ever played.

Beaver bother, the banana shooting gallery, the owl race with Diddy in jet pack and worst of all the lanky rabbit race. I think I won that by pure fluke when the rabbit got caught on the Kasplat under the tree. It was I think impossible without that stroke of luck.

I completed the game with 101%. This is despite hating almost all of my last few nights with the game. I had invested too much time and energy to give up and I finally did it. This was such a low point and genuinely a game guilty of some of the biggest design mistakes I have ever encountered. Trim out the unnecessarily difficult mini games, lower the requirements to reach the boss and you have a half decent game on your hands. As it stands I can only recommend completing this game as a form of low grade torture. To play Banjo after makes this all the more a huge misfire.

[duskvstweak]

Donkey Kong 64 was a game I was incredibly excited for, it seemed like it was going to be huge and all that talk about the extra space with the Expansion Pack added to the anticipation. Unfortunately, that game's size turned out to be the reason I don't look back fondly on this game. It's one of the only 3D platformers I ever finished from beginning to end, and it must be the only one I ever got 100% on, thanks mainly to the strategy guide I had. Without that guide, I think I would have lost interest halfway through. DK64 looked at the collect-a-thon nature of Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie and laughed at their paltry offerings. At the end of the game, as the credits rolled and I saw the bonus material and the Dolphin-tease, I wasn't my normal, excited self. I felt exhausted. Since then, I've never wanted to go back to it again. I've seen it all and it was just TOO MUCH.

And, why the heck would you have Tiny Kong when Dixie Kong was RIGHT THERE!? I'll never forgive them for that.