1. Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D (3DS)I played
most of this game while visiting family for Christmas, but wound up pushing through to the credits last night. I have fond memories of the original DKC - got the VHS in the mail, DK Jamz is literally one of the first CDs I personally owned, and it was a game that pretty much everyone I knew with an SNES got for that Christmas, including me. Since my family wound up moving a couple months later, it was the last game that was sort of a shared experience with my friends where I lived. Basically, the original DKC is a game that has a lot of sentimental value for me, and the main reason for including the cart in the handful I brought with me for the holiday.
I'd tried the Wii version briefly, but waggle = no. It did seem like the 3DS version has some slowdown that probably isn't present in that version. Plus, for the times that the game decides that you want to play in the background scenery, the relatively high res of the Wii version probably helps.
The 3DS version also offers a new mode with more powerups to buy and an extra heart - which can be helpful, or can be kind of pointless since the game tends to be a little arbitrary about what will just outright kill you anyway. I went with that instead of the original mode though.
While it does end up similar to the original games, the pseudo physics based platforming seemed like it could have been tuned better. I died a
lot from slow startups for runs or jumps. Part of that might be due to not swapping control from the analog stick, but being fair, DKC has always been a little floaty. Seemed like it could have been made better though.
The main reason that's really an issue is because of the somewhat high bar that Retro put on just getting through some of the levels. Maybe I'm just not remembering right, but the originals were just not really super hard games most of the time. More of the challenge was in finding all the secrets, and actually pulling off getting to some of them. To me, that's a better way to do things - make sure most players are having fun and
want to keep playing.
In that respect, I found DKC Returns to be off. It's not that it isn't a quality product, but it too frequently was simply difficult to get through. Not fun. Not interesting. Just hard. Other folks may well revel in the type of challenge it presents, but I really didn't enjoy a lot of it, and just kind of pushed through it because I'd already made some progress and didn't bring a lot of other games with me.
Technically there's a lot of stuff yet to find, but the credits rolled, it's going back on the shelf.
ElkinFencer10 wrote:I've got whatever the latest PS4 Guilty Gears game is, but I've never played more than a little of the arcade mode in a BlazBlue game, and I've yet to play that Guilty Gears.
I think the latest Guilty Gear might have removed actually fighting in Story mode, but I haven't played it. Generally though, just pointing out that the story mode that they did for Persona 4 Arena wasn't entirely new, Arc Systems had been doing stuff like that already in their own IPs (localized/published here by Aksys). They've got ongoing, anime-as-hell stories that are told through them.
