Episode 156 - The Three Genres - Donkey Kong 64

Oooh, banana. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, for Simian September, we’re going to be talking about Donkey Kong 64, the only 3D Donkey Kong collectathon platformer that’s fit to print. This game certainly has a reputation, it’s almost infamous, so we thought it would be interesting to see if that reputation is warranted coming back to it after all this time. DK 64 is a platformer, as mentioned, and one that is in the vein of Rare’s prior N64 classic Banjo Kazooie. The difference, primarily, is that in DK 64, the game centers around the fact that you have five characters to play as, all with unique abilities, forcing you to swap characters many times to complete objectives and collect all the bananas, coins, golden bananas, etc. (seriously, there’s a lot more). This is probably the most important aspect of its design, because while it opens up a ton of space for design to create a bunch of challenges in a relatively small space, it also forces the player to constantly be mindful of who they’re playing as and what they need to progress. This is cool, for sure, but it can also be extremely annoying and, by design, time-consuming to have to continually swap Kongs to do something as simple as grabbing coins off the ground. It has a solid game underneath it all, though, so depending on your tolerance for these annoyances, it can definitely be worth going back to check out, if for no other reason than the kickass soundtrack and the absurdity that gave this game its cultural impact. We’re going to be talking about games preservation, the signature style of Rare’s music team, and in a stunning return to form, we determine what food DK 64 is most like. Thank you for joining us again this week! We barely squeaked this one out within Simian September proper, so I hope y’all don’t mind our diminished output recently. We’ve been podcasting remotely for a bit and are still working the kinks out, so give us some time and things should get relatively back to normal. Did you have opinions on DK 64 before you played it? Do you think the game holds up or does it deserve its current status as a meme? Let us know down in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be entering into October, which means horror games, an original concept pioneered by us and no one else, so we’re going to be kicking that off by talking about this year’s Dead Space remake. We hope you’ll join us then…if you dare!