January 2003 Archives

So when the hype hit for Metroids Prime and Fusion this past fall, I was admittedly unaffected. I don't even play Samus in Super Smash Bros. Melee. In the end, it was the overbearing quality of Metroid Prime that brought me into that title, and Metroid Fusion came along a month later (a Christmas present from Rhonda!) as a happy by-product.

So I've been learning about "the Metroid style" of gameplay somewhat late. Equal parts action and exploration, yer average Metroid game presents a claustrophobic sci-fi tale of Man (woman) Vs. Aliens. Each game in the series begins with a fully powered Samus who quickly loses her powers, so you spend most of the game hunting down her powerups so you can use them to advance to higher, hidden and better areas of the level. Although Prime made the leap to a first-person 3D title, Fusion falls right into line with the 2D classics.

Coming out of Prime (which actually takes place retroactively between Metroid and Metroid 2), I was able to apply much more meaning to Fusion's storyline. If you're playing Fusion as your first Metroid game, you're probably not going to be impressed by the plot. Knowing some Metroid history adds some gravity. Thankfully, a very nice Metroid primer (hah!) is included in the Fusion manual.

In Fusion, Samus faces a ecological lesson. Ever since she exterminated the entire Metroid species in all the other games, the beasts right below Metroids in the galactic food chain have been running unchecked. These parasites - named the "X", for lack of a better term - have severely overpopulated ol' SR388 (the former Metroid homeplanet and setting for Metroid 2) and now threaten to expand to attack the known universe. The X can infect and control other organisms, so get ready for the traditional Ridley boss fight, even though Ridley has been dead forever. Samus finds herself infected, wrecking her usual orange suit, but her transfused Metroid DNA (flashback to SNES Super Metroid) keeps her from dying. Now being the one thing in the galaxy resistant to the X, Samus must clear them out of a biological research station while coming to terms with the idea that even nasty, evil Metroids had a place in the universe.

The graphics are terrific... bright and vibrant. Samus is exceedingly well animated, as are the various bosses and more complex enemy types. The audio is great, especially in headphones, where you can fully enjoy the stereo effects and musical subtleties. The pacing is stellar... you're pointed from task to task with increasing tension and desparation. This is especially evident when you meet up with the SA-X, an X that has taken on Samus's form. Similar to Resident Evil's Nemesis character, the SA-X will hunt you down in certain scenes, and your only reaction is to get the hell away since you have no weapons that will affect it.

The other bits of presentation are also wonderful. The automap works two ways: a tiny nine-block grid that is always on your screen, and through pausing you get the full scrollable map. Conversations with your computer pal take place over that map screen, but with added animated bits and occasional inset viewscreens. Sometimes Samus will engage in a little internal monologue, which, like all imporant conversations in Star Trek: The Next Generation, usually takes place during an elevator ride.

Metroid Fusion can also be a very fast, very action packed game, which I always appreciate in a GBA title, because there just isn't enough handheld games that do fast action well. Many boss fights require you to keep moving - platform jumping and directional shooting simultaneously. Just about every boss is deep enough to require an attack strategy... many require experimentation to uncover a weak spot or a particular weapon that works better than others. I've already spoiled the Ridley boss fight for you, so here's an example of that...

Ridley (a re-animated pteradactyl monster) is a gigantic boss. He fills about half of the GBA's screen. He has a slow triple fireball attack that is easy to avoid, but his main attack is his spiky tail. At times the tail will attack straight up and down and Ridley flies back and forth, just like a hydraulic press on a conveyor belt. At other times the tail will attack diagonally, purposely seeking your position. He weak spot is his main body, and you need to empty about 100 missiles into him. But Ridley likes swooping in close to you to hit you with his tail, not to mention picking you up in his claws for extreme damage. You have to fire off missiles when your angle is right, and then ball up in the corner so he can't grab you (and endure a few tail lashings regardless.) It's a fast fight and it's an endurance fight, meaning that you need to avoid taking damage for as long as you can while still heaping out the missiles. If you slip up and let Ridley catch you, you'll likely suffer so much damage that you'll never make it through. Plus, even when you blow up Ridley, you still need to take down the free-floating X amoeba that was inside him.

(Ridley also has the coolest avian scream. You definitely want that in your headpones.)

That kind of boss strategy is typical of the best 2D games, and Metroid Fusion lives up to that standard.

Interestingly, Fusion's constant pace makes it easy to avoid the hallmark of the franchise: exploration. Each level is littered with Data Rooms, where you receive your instructions from Adam the computer. It's very natural to just follow those orders (always a directive to Get to Point A or Eliminate Monster B) and totally forget about using your new powers to uncover secret rooms and powerups. In fact, I fell right into this trap and ended up beating the game with a pathetic 42%.

I felt like Fusion was working against me in this regard. There's the constant pressure from Adam to get moving to the next plotpoint... and the secret stuff is so well hidden that unless you're attacking every wall in sight, you won't even realize it's there. Compounding that is that Fusion doesn't use the regular video game symbology to tell you that This Wall May Be Destroyed... IE, putting a little crack on the wall, or making a section of the wall a slightly different color. Most of Metroid Fusion's destroyable walls look exactly like non-destroyable walls.

The only surefire way to uncover "soft" wall segments is to light up a power bomb. Of course, you have a limited supply of power bombs. The bomb will reveal which wall blocks can be further attacked with a missile volley or a speed dash or whatever special attack will actually break through the wall. The concept of the hidden soft walls is at the very core of Metroid's exploratory gameplay, but you're being hustled through the mission so fast that you may not feel that you get the chance to explore thoroughly.

AND... Metroid Fusion doesn't support save-switching. You know, when you save your current game on a different slot so you can return to an earlier save if you end up not liking the new save? You're stuck always saving to the same slot here. By the time I got Samus's full assortment of weapons (and thus the complete artillery for uncovering hidden soft walls), I was deep in the final throes of the game, where I was saving after every difficult fight. My advice to you: ignore Adam's threats of speed (except in the timed levels) and set yourself a leisurely pace.

I actually almost bought an original Sunset Riders machine last winter, but I was afraid I couldn't get the wide four-player unit into my modest house. Nevertheless, this is precisely the kind of arcade game I like: noisy, colorful, multiplayer, and silly.

You are one of four cowboy heroes, hilariously named Steve, Billy, Bob and Cormano. Well, Cormano isn't so hilarious; that actually sounds like a decent cowboy name. I'm sure that cowboys named Bob existed, but it's not exactly heroic sounding. According to klov, there's another version of the game where everybody has more appropriate names, but I've never played it.

Anyway, Steve and company are basically out to eliminate anything that moves, and especially anything that might be an end-level boss. Although most of the game takes place in walking, side-scrolling levels, there are several times when you are on horseback or stuck in a single room in a boss attack. Tens of enemy banditos will come after you at a time, creating a sea of running figures and laser bullets (more on the lasers in a bit.) The baddies are fast too, much livelier than the enemies of TMNT or X-Men. The tradeoff is that rarely anybody takes more than one shot to kill.

These games were never very fair. Through the sheer bulk of attackers, you're bound to get aced quickly and constantly. But you always had the advantage, because there's infinite continues as long as you have infinite quarters. I always liked that about these arcade games; it made me feel like I could beat the game if only I brought enough money with me.

The scenery of Sunset Riders is typical of Konami's 2D games of the era. Varied and full of detail. Right before you run headlong into a cattle stampede, a flock of frightened chickens will rush the screen. Different types of deaths yield hokey animations, like being flattened by a falling barrel or singed black from an explosion. Walk into an open doorway and find a hidden powerup in the form of a bottle of whiskey or an appreciative saloon gal.

Your attack comes in the form of expected western weaponry: six shooters and shotguns. Of course, they fire rather slow bolts of colored laser energy. The combat is where Sunset Riders differs from most other side-scrolling fighters... you have no punch or kick, just an eight-direction shot. In fact, walking straight overtop a baddie will have no negative effect at all: no automatic hit or damage. The only danger from most enemies is their own pistol shots, thrown dynamite, and the like. Effectively, you have 360 degrees (in eight positions) of firing range, so considering your angle is an integral part of your skill.

Naturally, you start with a cheap weapon, but picking up the sheriff star powerups will increase your shot strength. For some characters, it will even allow for two six shooters pointed in different directions. Your death resets your weapon back to cheap.

The bosses are long. That's a necessary result of a game designed to run off a steady flow of quarters. Many of them begin the round backed up by a posse of low rent enemies, but once you clear out all of them, they won't infinitely respawn. The bosses themselves move in expected patterns, but fire randomly, again creating the continuous stream of bullets for you to duck and dodge as you attack. Displaying the universal sign of a boss about to die, the evil muchachos all pulse red as they take damage.

Sunset Riders features lots of rudimentary sound samples: horses neighing, chickens cackling, "You got me!", "Are you all right, ma'am?" among others. The voice work especially adds to the corny feel. The music is nothing too special, but it does adequately present a western style filtered through 1990s level video game music synthesizers, which is a rare enough accomplishment.

Divine Divinity has probably one of the stupidest game names ever. I�d say it rates up there with Donkey Kong and Lode Runner in names that don�t describe the game whatsoever. Donkey Kong would probably have best been named �Rescue the damsel from the big ape� and Lode Runner �Get loot from the generic bad guys using only your stupid digging ray gun.� Divine Divinity? Is this some sort of crappy religious game from Wisdom Tree software?

So it�s no surprise it was more or less looked over by US gamers, which is a real pity, because it�s a fun game. It�s not wholly original, it�s not always well thought out, but it is a cultural descendent of Diablo 2 and Ultima 7. Meaning that if you liked these games, but thought they were missing something (any real point in Diablo 2, any action in Ultima 7), you should like this one.

The plot: This is an epic scale RPG, a little like some of SquareSoft�s more winding epics, where there�s one main plot, and a whole scad of quests that don�t really contribute to the main plot. And like Final Fantasy and it�s ilk, you start off as a weenie who has no dang clue as to what�s going on.

You first start out in the healing village of Aleroth, having apparently been conked on the head and all your stuff stolen, so you have to make do with what the guy who found you gives you, which isn�t much. The village also has a very insane, very powerful wizard, and he starts causing trouble. Just outside the village, orcs are patrolling around, looking for somebody soft and pink to kill, and you just happen to fit that description, so you really have to deal with the insane wizard problem, whose madness is caused by a bunch of undead just beneath the town. Gee, folks, if there were undead actively cruising around in your sewers, I�d consider hiring a fumigator. Or moving.

Once you deal with this problem (and gain a few levels and some gear in the process), you can slip by the orcs and get out into the real world� and start finding out more about the plot. Turns out there�s a war brewing between orcs and humans, that you�re a Marked One, which apparently is a big thing, there�s a group of bad guys called the Black Ring who have a hate on for Marked Ones, and the new duke (the son of the recently-and-suspiciously-dead-former-duke) is apparently the Divine One, the prophesized one who will bring all under his heel. All of these elements are going to come together sooner or later, but in addition, there�s any number of shiftless peasants with problems that you and only you can solve, and this is where the story gets both complicated and fun � there�s ethical conundrums. Sorta.

Most quests are pretty simple (go and kill some things, investigate some mysterious activity, go find me something), and the reward is usually fairly paltry, just some experience, but some quests are actually fairly convoluted and involve some decision making on your part, which is nice. One side quest involves cattle theft; turns out some farmer has been losing a lot of cows, and it�s not very difficult to track down a bunch of bloody carcasses in the slums. If you blow in the thief, he gets executed for theft, if you keep it quiet, you don�t get a reward. Not all the quests have defined �win� scenarios, and the main plot winds and weaves around all these people who it affects. Which would make sense in an epic saga.

There are literally dozens of quests in this game, and run the gamut from trivial to really complex. Obviously, the main plotline is a winding road, and me describing it here would spoil it for you. Suffice to say, it�s a good enough story line to keep you moving.

The gameplay: So varied, I�ll have to break it down into further subheadings: Interacting, combat, character building, and my favorite, cheating.

Interacting: Larian cribbed from the best. When something dies, it sprays out goodies (a la Diablo), you can highlight important items by holding the Alt key (Diablo), every container pops up an inventory box (Ultima) and items are clicked and dragged where you�d like them to go (Ultima). You converse with characters in a branching dialogue tree (LucasArts� SCUMM system), almost all items can be interacted with/moved about/taken (Ultima), and almost all characters can be talked to/robbed blind/killed (Ultima). In short, there�s almost every option available to you, and that means fun. Unlike, oh, say, Diablo, where villages were filled with sprites who would absolutely NOT talk to you, everybody has something to say, even if they�re generic peasants or guards.

It boils down to a fairly rich world. All the people in the game stand around in their locations 24/7 (which is odd, because the designers even went to the trouble of giving NPCs back rooms with beds in �em), so that�s a little odd, but everything else in the game is yours to muck with. Want to trash an unlikable character�s house? Just drag broken bottles and garbage into your inventory, walk into their house, and dump it out on their bed. Want to force the kingdom of Ferol to go vegan? Make it your goal to slaughter every barnyard animal you encounter. Want to trap characters in a corner until they (theoretically) starve? Lock the doors in their house, push boxes in their path, and pin them in helplessly. There�s no real response to doing all this, but you get the satisfaction of shaping the world to your own liking, and that�s far, far more than most RPGs allow you.

In one deft stroke, you get to rent or buy a house later in the game; it doesn�t really matter, because you can sleep anywhere you dump a bale of hay, but it�s nice to have a place that�s really yours. To decorate my pad, I made it a point to steal every throne in the game (there are 4, but one isn�t takeable), heads on pikes, skulls, and bottles of body parts. The thrones went around the dining table, the skulls were piled up outside as a warning to others, and the bottles of guts replaced all the wimpy flowers that were junking up my pad. It doesn�t matter one whit; nobody ever comes to your house, but all the wimpy townsfolk that blunder by my place had better think twice about snooping around. If that gives you any idea of my sick sense of accomplishment, so be it. It should also give you the idea that you�re really free to do what you like in this game, and at very few points are you actually railroaded. I like that.

Combat: Once again, Larian cribbed, this time utterly from Diablo 2. You fight with your left and right mouse buttons; left is your weapon, right is whatever option you assign. Weapon swinging is automatic based on the weapon�s speed; you run up to the monster you left click on and start batting away with your sword, mace, axe, hammer, or dagger, or you open fire with a crossbow or bow. Hammering on the left click button is pointless; your guy won�t swing again until the weapon has recovered, so there�s definitely a quest to get faster weapons, same as in Diablo 2.

What is a departure is that you assign a lot of functions that you couldn�t do in Diablo to function keys. There�s all your special abilities and skills, such as shooting lightning, poisoning weapons and doing a whirlwind attack, which you assign to a function key and pull off with a right click, but you can do more than that. Weapon toggles and potion drinking are also done with a function key assignment, and that�s pretty nice � instead of having to muck through your inventory to swap to a ranged weapon, you simply hit a function key, and voila, instant weapon switch. Unlike Diablo 2�s expansion, you�re not limited to two different weapon set ups; you can assign as many swaps as you have weapons. You can�t do this while you�re fighting (duh), but if you step back, you can toggle immediately.

One nice thing that is actually novel to Divine Divinity is that you can pause the action and enter commands. So long as you don�t interact with anything, the game won�t unpause. Need to make a get away? Pause the game and open your inventory, then drink an invisibility potion. As soon as you quaff the potion, the game unpauses, but all that time, you weren�t getting beat on. This also lets you assign function keys during a fight � that�s very useful.

So that all said, is combat fun? Yes, if you like fighting mobs. You�ll very seldom go mano-e-monstero in single combat, instead, you�ll largely fight clumps of monsters. Because the odds are stacked against you, you�ll need to use a variety of tactics to soften up the pack, either by freezing a few and picking off the rest, poisoning some and backing up, or buffing yourself up and charging in there. Simply running up and clicking monsters until they drop probably won�t work; some monsters are incredibly powerful, and you�ll be killed. This is where some tactics are required, and your range of tactics depends largely on your skills and weapon choices.

Character building: Divine Divinity has a freeform character template; there are three character archetypes, warrior, mage, survivor (thief), and each has two sexes. Beyond starting skills, starting point allotment, and your special skill, there are no differences between the characters; there�s absolutely no reason why a mage can�t learn fighter skills or a fighter can�t learn how to backstab. In fact, you�ll pretty much have to mix and match, which is a pity, because it means that no one character template has enough skills available to survive.

I�ll say this right off the bat: The skill system is seriously unbalanced. Simply put, you can�t possibly win this game as a mage; monster resistances become way too high, and despite how plentiful restoration potions are (you can make them yourself, or just buy them), you won�t have enough mana to take down some monsters. Even the fighter and thief range from incredible to pathetic, and there�s no rhyme or reason as to why this is the case. It�s like the designers all went into separate rooms, came up with skills, and implemented them in the game without doing any checking to see if some skills were unbalanced compared to others.

The most notable example of this is in your special skills. Warriors get a whirlwind attack; it�s not the pack-crushing skill it was for barbarians in Diablo 2, but it�s a quick sweep attack that has a chance of smacking everybody around you. It does cost some stamina, but that�s easy enough to recover. This is an effective way to deal with a pack of enemies. What does the survivor get? Sneak. That�s great and all, in that it gets monsters off your back, but you can do the same thing with shadow potions. How about the mage? Something cool, like turning monsters into frogs or creating a magical barrier? Nope. You get to swap positions with a monster. Which would be great� except monsters tend to clump up, and swapping positions will simply put you in easy biting reach of all the other monsters it was traveling with. Doh! Beyond the starting skills (each character starts with 2, non randomly assigned skills), there�s no reason NOT to play a warrior. �But,� I hear you saying, �Teleporting could help you cross barriers.� And indeed, it can.. but all classes can buy a 24th level warrior skill that lets you leap attack a monster, thus teleporting you to where a monster is. Making that skill utterly redundant.

Every level, you get a skill point; every 5 levels, you get 2. All skills have a minimum level requirement, but there are no prerequisites, so you won�t have to buy a lot of crap skills to get to the one you want. Which is merciful, because a lot of skills are utter crap. In addition, each level (up to 5) in a skill has a level requirement; you�re allowed to spend the first skill point at level 12, the second at level 18, and so on. Thus, your character actually grows as you spend your skill points, and it isn�t just a parade of �Well, I spent all 20 of my skill points in my ultimate skill, so now I�ll go through the rest of the game using that one skill� like you did in Diablo 2. That�s well thought out.

So what about these unbalanced skills? Well, first, let me explain resistances. Monsters get resistances, same as you do, to fire, lightning, poison and spiritual damage. Most monsters are weak against fire and lightning early on, particularly anything obviously wielding metal (orcs, steel skeletons, etc). Also, it makes sense that the undead are immune to poison; after all, they�re already dead, making them feel urpy probably won�t affect their performance much. The undead don�t resist spiritual damage very well, which also kinda follows, what with the whole holy-defeats-undead schtick. Animals (snakes, boars, bees, etc.) are always immune to spiritual damage. I suppose Larian Studios don�t believe in doggy heaven.

So how does this affect skills? Most skills only deal one type of damage, or have an upper limit on effectiveness compared to resistances. For example, for every level you have in Polymorph, you can affect monsters with 5 x level spiritual resistance or less. Meaning, at level 5, you can only affect monsters with 25 or less spiritual resistance. Bad news, folks � every monster later in the game has at least a 25, if not a 50, in each resistance. There are two spells that lower resistance, and they�re useful, but if the monster has 100% resistance, lowering it by 10 or 20 won�t bring it to the threshold it needs to be for your skills to work on it.

I found this out the hard way. I had designed a warrior to use a maul, which, compared to swords, suck ass, but I found a good maul with level 5 deathblow. Deathblow is a skill that has a 1% chance per level of instantly killing a target if they don't have a high spiritual resistance. In addition, hammer mastery gives you a 1% chance of the same per level, and you can buy the skill deathblow as well. Hey, a 15% chance per strike of killing a target instantly � good deal! Except that every damn monster in the game has a high spiritual resistance later, meaning that I don�t get to ever see anything drop dead.

Can you have fun with this? Yes, very much so. There are some VERY powerful skills, and I didn�t give them an equal share. Just understand that there are skills that sound pretty good, but due to poor balancing, they don�t work at all. That�s part of the fun of the game, capitalizing on the less balanced skills, which brings me to�

Cheating: Oh sweet lord, can you cheat in this game. I think this is on purpose, but the designers made it so rewarding to cheat, that there�s absolutely no reason not to. We�re talking robbing shopkeepers blind, luring guards to their doom, ripping off castles and slaying innocents cheating. Oh yeah.

The environment is interactive enough that shop keepers not only have a personal inventory of wares, but like any shop, their goods are lying around in the open. If you take one of their items, the shop keeper will ask if you wish to purchase it. If you do, they�ll put it in their inventory and open up the sales window, where you can haggle the price. If you say you don�t, they�ll fuss at you for taking their stuff, and their opinion of you will drop (thus raising prices). Do it again and they�ll call the watch, meaning you risk losing reputation (thus raising prices and lowering starting opinion of you). So you don�t want to go into a store and swipe everything. At least while anybody is watching. You can do away with the pesky shop keep stealthily, by luring powerful monsters into their shop and sneaking away, or by throwing poison potions at their feet, or you can do it the fun way � turn into a spider and bite their ass. You get 3 statuettes in the game; the frog and cat statuette are pointless, but the spider statuette is pretty cool � you temporarily turn into a giant spider. Monsters won�t attack you because you�re a monster, and you can bite people. Soldiers and guards will fight back, but your average peasant and shopkeep will run off, letting you transform back and swipe their loot.

While there�s no real purpose to doing this (i.e., it won�t really allow you access to any good treasure), you can get every unimportant NPC killed by �training� monsters into their midst and sneaking away. The giant heavy orcs are bruisers, and unless you�re very heavily armored, you do NOT want to melee them. Guards and soldiers aren�t all that tough, and you can butcher them at a low level, but it�s fun to watch a single orc slaughter the entire human army. This is chiefly useful in the town watch HQ, where there is a lot of good treasure, but too many watchmen guarding their own stuff. A little visit from a pet orc will put out those watchful eyes.

You can have a lot of fun with the Resurrect skill � if you stay close to the monster you rez, it will remain loyal and ethereal � if it dies again, it dies permanently. However, if you walk away far enough, somehow the monster will forget it ever died and was �saved� by you, becoming a normal, hostile monster, complete with the ability to drop loot. You can literally experience treadmill off of profitable monsters by wiping them all out, resurrecting them, and going away. Rez, rinse, repeat.

In short, so long as nobody is watching, there�s no reason you can�t get away with it. Ripping off stores, running off with chests of loot and lockpicking them later, quietly doing away with peasants, etc are all allowed. Sure, you�re the Marked One, but you gotta eat, right?

The aesthetics: Beautiful music, somewhat ho hum graphics. There are some very talented video game musicians these days, and the same thing that was done for Diablo 2 worked here � getting a composer and orchestra to make the tunes for the game. No cheesy midi here; you�re getting a complete orchestral suite, complete with vocal complement, by the time you get to the opening credits. Consider the bar pretty highly raised on video game tunes for me; I loved the music in this game, and it definitely warrants downloading and listening to. Check out www.larian.com if you want a freebie.

The voice acting is passable but patchy. Some characters are pretty well done (Zandalor the wizard sounds pretty slick, Kroxy the orc has a nice rumbly voice, Janus, the obnoxious new duke has a petulant kid voice), but a lot of characters sound like they were done by the same person, and that same person really had no business doing voice acting. Elves in general all sound pretty gay. The problem is that the voice acting is patchy. There�s no rhyme or reason as to why sometimes you�ll hear the spoken lines, and sometimes you�ll just see the words. I appreciate that it�s not worth making all the proles in the game speak, but if you give a character a voice, be consistent. I shouldn�t complain that much; they didn�t have to bother at all with the voices, but that they did a half-assed job of it makes me pretty sad.

So what about the graphics? Meh. They�re sufficient. Monster models are good but not breathtaking, spell effects are sparkly but not awe inspiring, item icons are kinda ho hum. A sword looks like a sword, whether it�s a rusty two-hander or the legendary Troll slayer Crushbite, which does massive fiery damage and also makes julienne fries. I won�t hold it against them; they had to design so many icons for plates, cups, vegetables, heads in jars and what not that I doubt any one item got attention lavished on it. It doesn�t seem rushed like the voice acting undoubtedly was (as I�d imagine studio time is not cheap), but it�s also not the prettiest thing ever. Whatever.

Major Beef: I�m not terribly upset by this, but as this may be a deal breaker for the rest of you, I need to mention this: There is no multiplayer to this game whatsoever. Not even any announced plans for it. It�s an enjoyable single player romp with a largely linear quest that doesn�t have any real room for expansion. Thus, I expect this game falls off of the radar for many people because of that. Still, as Joe pointed out in his Diablo 2 turnaround, there is no real multiplayer experience in Diablo 2 � there are multiple people playing in the same world, but at no time are you really playing together. Treat this game for what it is, a single character on a single quest.

The only quandary with no multiplayer is that there�s no ability to transfer items from character to character, which is all I ever did in Diablo 2. Fear not, however � there�s always cheating for that, too. Simply start a new character, and copy all the Item and Object files into that new character. Voila, you�ve duped everything you own and everything stored in containers. Getting a nifty suite of items for all occasions gives this game a little replay value it otherwise doesn�t have � good bows are hard to find, so if you plan on making a bow character, dig around for a nice bow with some other character, and transfer it when you get one. The same is true for spell books, rings, amulets, charms, etc, etc.

Cheating. It�s what makes a good game great.

Final Thoughts: I spent more effort detailing the flaws of this game then I did the good, and I did that for a reason � I don�t want you to go into this expecting a perfect gaming experience, and then being bitterly disappointed by some unbalanced skills. This game is flawed, and a lot of the flaws are inexcusable when you contrast them to the bright points of the game. The game is a milestone in game design in that it makes every attempt to allow you to do what you want, yet all the while trying to tell a story. When I play a paper and dice role playing game, this is EXACTLY what I�d expect. The same is true here; you have as much free form as a video game, with finite options and pre-packaged creativity, will allow. The only sour spots is that, despite the fact that you can do just about everything, it�s not always feasible given the limitations of the skills � frustrating, because the game lets you try it, and fail.

Me, I'm an unabashed Disney fan. And this is the first game to take the whole Disney oeuvre seriously. This isn't some simple movie-to-game translation, like the recent raft of Lilo & Stitch/Treasure Planet games, nor is it some kind of wacky platformer with a cartoon license. This is an emotional, dramatic, evocative journey through the Disney Universe. I cried. Many times. Regardless of your opinion of Disney's everpresent merchandising and rampant marketing, this game returns the characters to their original form: actors and entertainers.

At the parks and in the cartoons, we've gotten used to the idea that the Disney characters all live together in the Magic Kingdom and put on parades every day at 3pm and 7pm. But that is purely a result of profiteering on the company's part; obviously The Little Mermaid doesn't exist in the same world as Merlin from The Sword in the Stone. And Mickey Mouse can't leave his house and walk over to visit Tarzan. Kingdom Hearts throws aside that "House of Mouse" happy family model and lets each set of characters exist on their terms, just as they did in the films. These separate worlds are at the core of Kingdom Hearts' storyline, and it's just one example of how the game puts an adult, thoughtful veneer on the Disney characters.

Kingdom Hearts is the story of Sora, a young boy from Destiny Islands. But the peaceful life of his world is destroyed by dark monsters called the Heartless... Sora is split up from his friends and falls in with Goofy and Donald Duck, who are searching for the missing King Mickey. Sora soon finds that his world was not the only world in trouble, and the trio must travel to nine Disney worlds (and several new locations) to track down the source of the Heartless and stop them from consuming everything.

You can tell that the design team spent a lot of time integrating themselves into the Disney mindset, because there is a ton of Disney touches to the story. And I don't mean just the characters and settings. It's full of Disney's usual metaphorical touches: the use of keys, the symbology of hearts, magic used to indicate creativity and wonder, and princesses as the emotional center. The whole thing is pure Disney from intro to credits. But despite all that, the plot avoids cliche and ends on a surprising downer.

Kingdom Hearts also handles some video game traditions with a feather touch. Although there is plenty of hacking and slashing, Sora carries a non-violent-looking key instead of a sword. (Goofy's only weapon throughout the entire game is a shield, and Donald carries a magic wand.) The game's monetary unit is "munny," which subtley sidesteps notions of physical wealth and real-world capitalism. I shouldn't need to add that there is no blood, the Heartless tend to fade away when they "die," and every battle is a festival of colored lighting and sparking stars.

Sounds great so far... but Kingdom Hearts has a terribly inauspicious, non-Disney beginning. Your New Game begins with Sora's Dream. It's mainly a standard tutorial level, framed by a nightmare where Sora first encounters the Heartless. I don't mind the introduction to fighting and jumping and pushing; what bothered me was the series of obtuse questions designed to silently alter the speed of the game and the strengths of Sora.

During the dream, Sora battles over beautiful stained glass windows of the Disney Princesses. (This is the only Disney element to be seen for quite a while, until the first Magic Kingdom movie in the next section.) I was pretty disappointed with this beginning, since it seemed like the game was actively avoiding the Disney characters. Also, it is way too early for the kind of drama this level tries to create, with all the overblown cutscenes with anime characters. You end up rushing through it because you just don't care about Sora at this point. You don't know who he is, so the whole thing just seems pretentious.

After the dream, you're forced through a painful item-gathering mission. This level establishes the relationship between Sora and his friends Riku and Kairi. Riku is something of an older brother type; he tends to play up his experience when he beats Sora in mock-combat and tests of athleticism. They have a friendly rivalry. Kairi is the girl they both kinda sorta like. All three wish they could leave the island and see other worlds.

This is still all tutorial, as far as I'm concerned. You don't get any important plot points until the end of it all, when two movies tell how Donald and Goofy leave the Magic Kingdom in search of Mickey, and how a storm breaks over Sora's home - Destiny Islands, ironically - and summons the Heartless. The storm leads you into your second match against Darkside, a gigantic Heartless boss. By this time, you're probably suspecting Darkside is the game's villain, but you'd be wrong...

Then Sora's quest to rejoin his friends coincides with Donald and Goofy's mission to find King Mickey, and the trio set off on the game proper. Unfortunately, the first few Disney worlds are ultimately lousy as well... giving Kingdom Hearts an extremely difficult first few hours. It's easy to feel yourself turning against the game when you enter Alice's Wonderland and find the whole thing a maze of perfectly flat, square rooms with painted textures. You could blame this on the film's visual style of Wonderland, but I'd call that a cop out. The Wonderland of the movie still had a real forest in it, not a box with heavy angular partitions for walls.

Tarzan's Deep Jungle, the second world, also suffers from boxy rooms. You also spend a ridiculous amount of time here chasing objectives from one end of the map to the other. It wouldn't be so bad if Deep Jungle was easier to navigate, but there's this huge, stupid aerial section of swinging vines smack in the middle of everything. You have to manually swing from vine to vine, and if you fall, you end up in the hated Hippo Lagoon and have to work your way back around. The Lagoon - like all bodies of water in Kingdom Hearts - is disgustingly maddening because Sora can't go from water to land except at designated beaching areas.

Thankfully, those two worlds are easily the worst of the lot. Although the most common feature of all the worlds is a giant labyrinth structure, Agrabah (Aladdin), Atlantica (The Little Mermaid), Halloweentown (The Nightmare Before Christmas) and the rest all shine with much more design, plot, and fun. Of special note is the first fight with Jafar. Jafar snatches the lamp from Aladdin and forces Genie to do his bidding. During the entire fight - while you're trying to whack a flying Jafar - Genie will half-heartedly float around the arena attacking you. I know it's tough, but keep your eye on Genie. He will cover his eyes before his attacks and say something like "Sorry about this pal" or "Get out of the way!" It's a perfect example of Kingdom Hearts at its best. However, problems will still surface; Kingdom Hearts has a nasty habit of giving you puzzles that are impossible to solve.

Obviously, there are puzzles that you won't be able to complete until you achieve a certain ability or level... that's fine. But there are several times when you will be stuck in a room with no idea what to do. Again, it would be fine if there was some hidden solution that makes perfect sense once you figure it out, but often there isn't. Instead, your solution is to simply leave the room. That's not an acceptable device in my book. If I'm presented with a challenge, I want to work to solve it with the tools in my hands, not just walk away from it and trigger a cutscene. I suppose that's my big tip for you in Kingdom Hearts: When in doubt, leave the room.

Battling the Heartless is daunting at first. Unlike most RPGs, combat in Kingdom Hearts is real time... almost arcade like. What this means is no more long, drawn-out battles while you take your time perusing your spell list or swapping items around. You have to manipulate your entire menu heirarchy - items, spells, specials, summons - while you're running around attacking (and being attacked.) It requires a lot of fancy finger work.

You'll spend a lot of time running in circles, dealing with a crazy locked-on camera, hoping that Donald and Goofy are distracting the enemies long enough for you to pull a Potion out of your item slots. Often you'll die while the Potion is in mid-animation. Be heartened (hah!) that combat will get easier and much more fun. Once your party levels up - and once you become accustomed to managing 4/5 of your Dual Shock simultaneously - you'll be able to control your combat situations quite a bit better.

One of the talking points of Square RPGs is the summon animations: long, dramatic mini-movies that reveal your party summoning a powerful beast or monster to aide in your fight. Since combat here is real time, you only ever get six total Summons: Simba, Genie, Bambi, Dumbo, Tinker Bell and Mushu. Each Summon has his/her own unique attacks and abilities, and their biggest downfall is that they kick Donald and Goofy out of the fight for a brief time (except Tink.) In the heat of battle, I tended to forget I had them, despite how cool they look. By the end of the game, I found Tinker Bell the most useful, thanks to her auto-healing ability.

The music is phenomenal. Several classic Disney songs are remixed and included as background music for their appropriate levels, but also of note is the recurring Kingdom Hearts theme. Performed vocally by j-pop artist Utada Hikaru, the game makes excellent use of its underlying melancholy refrain to punctuate important points in the story.

The storyline of Kingdom Hearts is magical. Princesses are being kidnapped, worlds are disappearing (one of the many times I felt close to tears was when I was told that Simba's world had already been eliminated by the Heartless. Hakuna Matata indeed!), and friendships are being destroyed. The most complex new character is Riku, your old friend who chooses the wrong path for the most noble of reasons. Although each world more or less follows each movie's plot, there are still plenty of surprises. Square did an excellent job recreating 2D animation in 3D form, as the Disney characters look, act and move exactly as they should. Having many of the original voice talents return also makes each plot point feel like an alternate look at some familiar stories, with you (n�e Sora) at the center. The superb quality of the cutscenes makes the non-cutscene moments all the more disappointing, as the game isn't 100% live audio. There are far too many bits with purely subtitled text.

I'm old school enough to remember when Donkey Kong first arrived in video arcades, and I also remember the first addition of a Kong, that of Donkey Kong Jr. So I've always somewhat resisted Rare's efforts to continuously add new Kongs to the line up; wasn't two of the poorly named apes enough? Every Donkey Kong country has made a habit of adding new and entirely flavorless Kongs to the brood, and every following DKC has more or less ignored the overwhelming family tree to stuff even more monkeys in it. DK64 is no exception to this; you get 3 new Kongs who you'll never hear of again, plus Diddy, Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong (this time as a wrinkled old hermit who brews potions and insults you).

So you have a cast of 5 characters. This is a platformer game, the same kind of game Rare's been spitting out since Banjo-Kazooie (which is still the superior game), so you'll naturally have the opportunity to troll these 5 primates all around a hub world. Attached to this hub world are going to be non-sequiter "lands" where you have to pick up things and learn new abilities that let you pick up more things. You can probably already predict the worlds, especially if you've played any other platformer. Let's see if you can guess them out of a list:

Natural settings: Grassland, desert, volcano, frozen wastes, swamp, ocean, clouds
Man made settings: Ancient temple, castle, factory, airship, boat

Alright, have you made your picks? Good. The entries in DK64 are: Jungle (grassland, really), ancient temple, factory, ocean, forest (just like a grassland with giant mushrooms), caves. Way to not even nudge the envelope, Rare.

Now, what makes DK64 unique is the sheer number of times you have to repeat each world. Yes, 5 characters means 5 times the suffering PER LEVEL. You see, all 5 primates have their own representative color. Each level has colored bananas , coins, and map pieces that you pick up. Only the right color of primate can pick up their color of item. In addition, each primate has 5 golden bananas (I'll explain that in a second) that they and only they can pick up. There's mercifully a few areas that only one of the apes can get into, so you only need to visit those once. By far and large, you are told where to go by the colored bananas, so you find the nearest change-barrel, which aren't very common, and go back to the same area with that ape to pick up your bananas. Then, you troll around until you see a pad with a character's face on it, go get that character, and stand on the pad to go do something that lets you get a gold banana. And repeat. That, my friends, is the point of every level.

If you like what you hear so far, well� um� go buy the game, I guess. For the rest of you, read on.

The plot: King K. Rool, a tubby gecko with bad eye strain, has made a floating fortress in the shape of his head, and he wants to blow up Donkey Kong Island. He also stole all of Donkey Kong's golden bananas and kidnapped all of his friends (i.e., the other 4 playable characters). He figures that DK Jr. (who's all grown up, and I'll just refer to him as DK), will be so busy getting his bananas and buddies back that he'll never notice the fortress charging up its death ray, just off the coast. Your goal is to find said buddies, get said bananas, and knock the fortress offline.

To do that, you need to collect boss keys, which are hidden in every level, and you need to pick up regular bananas (the annoying colored ones) until you get enough to feed to a pig who wants to outweigh a hippo. Yes, that's right. No, I'm not making this up. It's a weight gaining contest between a pig and a hippo. Imagine, if you will, the designers sitting around coming up with this idea. "Ok, so we want a boss on each level, right? But we don't want the player to just get to the boss right away, they need to pick up some stuff. Ok, what do monkeys like? Bananas, right? So we have them pick up bananas. But we don't want this to be like Mario, and have him just pick up coins he never spends. So we'll have� oh, I know! We'll have them feed the bananas to a pig because a hippo is too fat!"

Does this seem reasonable to anybody else? Because I was flabbergasted the first time I encountered Troph and Scroff (the hippo and pig, but I don't know which is which, nor do I care). Actually, I think you feed the bananas to the hippo, but I don't even care enough to change the previous paragraph. At any rate, the animal you DON'T feed is eventually raised by the teeter-totter the both are standing on, high enough to reach the boss door. The bosses are actually the only clever parts to the game, and I won't spoil them too much, except to say that they repeat two of the bosses. You fight the Armor-Dillo and the Dragon-Fly (who are, respectively, a tank and a dragon, so very clever, Rare) twice. Lazy! Once you finish off the bosses (who are really easy), a giant Kremling that King Rool brought with him stomps around, opening up new areas of the world for you. Yes, that's right, a giant Kremling in a cage stomps with happiness, thus wrecking his boss' plans. I think he was put in the cage for breaking stuff to begin with; if that was the case, why would the king bring him along with his super cool fortress? So that he can break it later in the game, obviously. Try to keep up.

Also, you need to get map pieces, which are given to the toughest Kremlings, who look a bit like Mighty Ducks. Each of these guys has cool colored hair, and guess what? They drop map pieces that are colored like their hair. Now, what do you remember about colors in this game? That's right, only the right colored Kong can pick up their color of stuff. Each level has 5 of these guys, so you need to go through each level with all 5 guys to find their Mighty Duck Kremling and kill him. It doesn't help that these Kremlings like to say "Splat!" a lot. They're also fairly dangerous, but that's like saying "You could choke on that pie, be careful!" Compared to the beavers and grunt Kremlings that exist on every level, they're unholy terrors.

You give these map pieces to a weasel, who helped design the fortress, but I think the King didn't pay him. Or he fired him. Or something. So now the weasel wants to help you defeat the King, and your performance on the Factory level is entirely dependant on the number of map pieces you give him. I.e., once you beat the factory, you need never bother with them again. You then get to square off against King K. Rool and win� well, actually, you just get your bananas back. Not much of a victory, really.

The gameplay: Perhaps I've touched on the boringness of the game once or twice. Perhaps I need to touch on that some more. This game is dull. It literally is an exercise in strolling around, picking up things that are the same color as your monkey, then getting a different monkey and doing that some more. I have learned something very valuable from this game: Never, EVER play another platformer that feels compelled to put in teleporter pads. Teleport pads means that the level was too long to walk around. Normally, that would be an acceptable concession; nobody likes wandering over the same territory over and over again. Unfortunately, Rare has taken this to an unholy extreme, and just made the levels waaaay too big (they repeat the same mistake in Banjo-Twooie). Meaning that there is a LOT of ground you have to cover. 5 times. Did I mention that already? You need to play each level 5 times. The monkeys have different abilities that let them get to different areas, but the main gist of it is that they all do the same thing � they walk. A lot.

Lets spend a minute on your monkey pals. There's DK, who's big and tough, but not as strong as one of the other Kongs. There's Diddy, who's a chimpanzee; I'm not sure exactly who he's related to, but I suggest that the zookeeper keep a lot closer eye on what the primates are doing when they're not on exhibit. The three Kongs you'll never, ever hear from again are Tiny (who I guess is a chimp too; she doesn't seem like a spider monkey), Lanky (an Orangutan, and generally the most fun to play), and Chunky, who's a big doofus gorilla. Each of your apes get different abilities (that's what you spend the coins on), but in general, they're more or less the same thing, except for running speed, jump length, fighting reach, and their special ability. Diddy, who has the fastest running speed, has a pitiful jump length, puny fighting reach, and really nothing to redeem him; I hated playing Diddy. Chunky also has a pitiful jump, a fairly unimpressive fighting reach, he's ponderously slow, and his special abilities only ever come in useful about twice. But at least he's amusing. The other three are ok, and you'll probably run around as Tiny or Lanky, because they typically can cover the most ground and have the easiest time with bad guys.

The special abilities simply let you get to golden bananas. When you get to special pads with your ape's face on it (meaning that you know a banana is near), you can do your special thing. Lanky can inflate himself or speedwalk on his hands, Chunky turns invisible or gets really huge (no, I don' t know why he can turn invisible), Diddy can fly, and I think do a super jump is his other ability, Tiny can, obviously, shrink, and Donkey can turn invincible or shoot up in the air to enter a barrel. Some of these moves require golden coconuts, but those are plentiful enough that they're never a bother to have enough of. Essentially, since you can only do these moves when the game lets you, it makes them no fun at all to have; you collect coins to pay Cranky Kong (the original DK) to give you an ability that lets you go back to each level and get to one of the golden bananas. Hooray.

Now, I should mention the golden bananas. Sometimes they're more or less in plain sight, and you just need to do some insulting task (fly through something, jump up to get something, shoot something) to get at them. Fine. However, to compensate for poor level design and the sheer number (25!) of golden bananas per level, Rare decided to cop out. Not all the bananas are accessible, generally half of them are hidden in mini games. Meaning that you have to fly through something, jump up on something or shoot something to get access to� a mini game. I guess people like mini games. Mario Party has made a very successful franchise off of nothing but mini games. And that's fine, in a setting where you expect mini games. Here, however, it's a cheap cop out, particularly when you find out how lame the mini games are.

The games aren't randomized, but they change each time you encounter them, so the version of the game you played in the jungle stage is different than the one you'll play in the castle stage. However, they're the same game. Two of them are firing games, one, you fire melons at snakes juggling turtles, the other, you shoot at a Kremling and not at the other 5 Kongs. These are both easy and stupid. Two of them are adventure games, one, you have to dodge Kremlings with flashlights in a dark hall and get to the finish, the other, you swing from vine to vine. Donkey Kong alone gets a game where you fire out of cannons that swing back and forth, and fly into other cannons which do the same. That's really boring. Lastly, you get to play Beaver Bother. Beaver Bother gets its own paragraph.

Beavers are apparently the defacto enemy of primates. I'm sure, somewhere in our own evolution, primative Homo habilis struggled against the saber-toothed beavers, hiding in caves until the giant flat tailed rodents returned to their wooden lodges. The designers used beavers whenever possible, which is a real pity, because they're incredibly simple to kill, have no real charm (their only attack consists of them running after you for a short while until they give up and go back to their spawn point), and serve no part of a game dedicated to Kremlings. To be fair, Mario kills his fair share of things that aren't turtles and evil mushrooms. But at least Boos, Thwomps and the like have some character. So enamored was Rare of the beaver scourge, that they dedicated the most annoying mini game to hurting them. Beaver Bother is a circular stage with a well in the middle, and you take the role of some form of Kremling dog, who snaps at the beavers. When you bite a beaver, it runs away from you. Your job is to herd the beavers into the well. Except the beavers also don't want to go into the well, meaning that you spend a lot of time chasing beavers and biting them until you eventually stampede it into the well. This requires you to work very closely to the edge of the well. If you fall in, you lose the mini game, and have to start over. If you fail to get all the beavers in the hole before time runs out, you lose the mini game. You can repeat each mini game as often as you like, but you won't like to repeat Beaver Bother. There were several times in the game that I just gave up on a banana because of Beaver Bother.

The only other "games" are the typical fare of races, battles, and mine cart rides. Most platformers have these, and I won't fault their tried and true nature. However, in a struggle against evil, do you REALLY want to dally with some well meaning aardvark, brine shrimp, apple maggot, tapeworm, plague-infested rat, bloated tick, and burrowing five-toed yak who wants to race? Why is it that platformers are compelled to throw in some well-meaning random animal who has nothing better to do than to hoard the thing you have to collect and only give it to you when you beat them? Mario had to race a Koopa, Banjo had to race a polar bear, the Kongs race all sorts of creatures, just to get their damn stuff back. I wish there would be an option. "Please, kind [insert animal name here], I am on an important mission to save the [insert world name here] from the evil [main bad guy]. I realize your heart was set on this race, but I promise you, once [main bad guy] is defeated and [world] is safe, I will come back and race you, if you'll just give me [the important thing]." If only these mascots would try reason over brute stupidity, the [world] would be a happier [genre].

You also get to turn into a rhino, a sword fish, and I think that's about it, and kill and break stuff for a prize (surprise! It's a banana!), and Diddy Kong gets to ride in a mine cart and collect coins, which, if he gets enough, he gets a prize (oh boy! A banana! Who knew?!). These are generally fun, but they're so rare compared to mini games, you won't really care when you get one.

I'm purposely leaving out two more factors of the game, musical instruments and guns. The only reason either exist is to add two more things to collect (music energy and ammo), let you do more stupid puzzles (go to a music pad and play, or shoot switches), and let you spend coins (on instruments and weapon upgrades). There are two Kongs who sell you this crap, and clearly they're more interested in lining their own pockets in a time of crisis than they are with helping save their precious island. "Hey, news flash; if King Rool kills us and blows up the island, you're out of business, sucker. And we're your ONLY customers. Why not just hand over the crap, and nobody gets hurt, ok?"

Lastly, I'd like to detail the sheer amount of garbage you have to pick up in this game:
Colored bananas: To feed to the pig. Or the hippo. I forgot.
Banana medals. You get one for collecting all the colored bananas. They unlock something lame.
Map pieces: To give to the weasel. He gives you a golden banana for it.
Colored coins: To buy special moves, music power ups, and weapon upgrades.
Battle crowns: To unlock something lame.
Nintendo coin: To unlock an INCORRECT port of Donkey Kong (they goofed up the level order).
Rare coin: To unlock a port of some ancient rocket game.
Boss keys: To unlock the big dumb Kremling's cage. He opens up new areas.
Ammo: To reload your guns.
Oranges: They're grenades. You'll probably never bother to use them.
Crystal coconuts: To power your special moves.
Film canisters: To take pictures of banana fairies. Don't ask.
Golden bananas: To open up all the levels until you can beat the game.

Barring special items which are only there to unlock junky optional features, you still have to pick up a load of crap in this game. Note to Rare: This isn't fun.

The aesthetics: The graphics are very nice and bright; hell, they made you buy the memory expansion pak just to play the game (Majora's Mask and Turok 2 were the only other games I even know of that required the pak). Things do pop up, but by far and large, the graphics work out well enough. It's a cartoony platformer, so you don't really expect realism, which is fine, because you don't get any.
The sound is where the game really takes a beating. The level music is both generic and annoying; there's no real sense of orchestration in it, and there's nothing to listen to besides the awful midi-synth music. Your characters largely just grunt when you tell them to jump or fight, and no character in the entire game can talk. You just get annoying word bubbles floating on the bottom of the screen. If not for the "Monster is respawning" whoosh warning, there would be no reason to even have the speakers turned on.

That the music is so atrocious and that no characters can even talk is a real let down, particularly when Banjo-Kazooie had excellent music and hilarious use of limited sound memory. I won't go into great detail about this here; suffice to say that the main game theme music was catchy, and they made excellent use of it near levels � it would slowly morph into a hybrid of the level music and the main game theme. DK 64 tries to do the same effect, but flops miserably because the level music is obnoxious and the main game theme is forgettable. As well, B-K gave each character a couple of sound effects, and repeated them at various pitches to effect "speech" � none of the characters could talk, but hearing Gruntilda rhyme her insults like "heh herrrh hennh, herrrh hrrrr heh!" was worth a good chuckle every time she did it. At least to me, I'm easily amused.

The only characters that can talk is an annoying parrot (who only squawks, and generally fills up your screen with "Hey! I found a banana, and you can have it!") and King K. Rool, who only says "Rahhh!" and "Thank you!" You don't get to hear that, really, until the boss fight (oh, spoiler, by the way, you fight King K. Rool as the final boss. Duh.) However, the sound effect is so horrible that it sounds like "Fuck you!" and not what it's supposed to be. Strangely, I think it works better that way.

Lest I forget, I need to mention the Monkey Rap. When you first play DK 64 (not generally recommended), let the Monkey Rap play all the way through. It's awful, and it's your first slice of hell. That it resurfaced in Super Smash Melee was a bizarre nod to the game, but they remixed it so you couldn't understand it very clearly, and for that, I'm grateful.

Final thoughts: Avoid. Even if you love platformers and love Donkey Kong, avoid. This is an exceptionally tedious entry into the "Me too!" category of platformers, and really soured me on the genre in general. You spend so much time on each level that you'll absolutely hate it by the time you're done, and I can't imagine why you'd ever bother to replay the game. I haven't, and I've owned the game for years. The levels are too big to effectively memorize, the only real challenge is getting your ape to where it needs to go, and you have to get so many new abilities from so many of the later levels that you forget where those areas where by the time you get the ability to go there. It is, however, too long of a game to rent, so unless you're keen on late fees, you'll need to buy the game in order to beat it. Clever of Rare, I suppose, but that shouldn't be the motivating reason as to why the game needs to be 30-40 hours long.

Banjo-Kazooie came out after Mario 64, and was the only other platformer at the time for the N64. Banjo, the honey bear, made his debut in Rare's somewhat lackluster Diddy Kong Racing, and he's teamed up with a red bird (a breegull) named Kazooie, who lives in his sporty blue backpack. Banjo and Kazooie together work very nicely as a platformer mascot, and have enough novelty in their moves that they didn't seem like Mario clones (even though, yes, they are Mario clones). That, plus the general humor of the game, made Banjo-Kazooie my favorite platformer.

Despite a sequel and a handful of other Rare platformers, Banjo-Kazooie is probably their strongest outing, which is a real pity, because you would expect their later efforts to be better, not worse. Unfortunately, Rare took the wrong lessons from Banjo-Kazooie � the game is short (fun, but you can complete it in an afternoon once you know what you're doing), and the moves are sufficient but not entirely varied, so they made overly bloated games with far too many useless moves in them after this point. I've not played Conker's Bad Fur Day, but their other games were far less enjoyable than Banjo-Kazooie. If you want to start with a good platformer, start here, and don't pick up Rare's later titles.

The plot: The game's opening intro explains it well enough: Gruntilda, an ugly fat witch, is doing the whole "Mirror, Mirror" thing into her cauldron. The cauldron reports that she's the fairest of them all, except for this little girl bear named Tooty. Grunty, quite peeved that her previously reported beauty has been outmatched by a new face, immediately sets out to kidnap the innocent bear. Meanwhile, Tooty is paying a visit to her big brother, Banjo, who is sleeping in bed while Gruntilda kidnaps her. Goggles the mole, who essentially serves as your new move trainer, sees the whole thing, and once Kazooie wakes Banjo up, lets you know what has transpired. Hence, you go to Gruntilda's lair, go through the different "lands," open up more of her lair until you can confront her. Should you fail (or quit the game, you get this ending either way), she transfers Tooty's beauty with her ugly, and becomes some sort of leather-clad witch hottie, and Tooty turns into a grotesque monster.

It's simple and it works. Banjo is a generally nice guy� bear, but Kazooie's a smart-ass, and she generally makes your interactions with the supporting cast a lot more fun (although not easier; she gets you into a fight early in the game). Each of the lands are, much like Mario's use of picture-worlds, opened up by completing a jigsaw puzzle of a representative scene within that world. Once you collect enough jiggies, you complete the puzzle and can enter the world. It's really the same thing you did in Mario 64, but with a little more class than just holding up a spinning star at a door. Essentially, if you liked Mario 64, you'll like this one, perhaps a little more because Banjo and Kazooie have personality that Mario otherwise lacks.

The gameplay: Banjo and Kazooie start off not knowing very many of their moves, so you go through a training "garden" learning them. Along the way, each new item you pick up explains what it does, so you really don't even need to open the manual to get the hang of the game. It's one of the best training grounds in my experience, and it's a strong point of Banjo-Kazooie. Once you've learned the basics, Goggles will let you into Grunty's lair, and he exists in most of the levels, able to teach you a new move as soon as you encounter his molehill.

Banjo and Kazooie control very nicely, and they have a serviceable set of moves. Banjo can punch, Kazooie can peck, they have a crouch-lunge, a crouch-jump, a double jump, and the ever popular butt stomp. Given this variety, I'm surprised that the two weren't included in Super Smash Brothers; they would translate very nicely to a fighting game. You eventually learn how to shoot eggs, fly, become invincible, and use different shoes, which are more or less equivalent to the different caps in Mario 64. All of the later moves require you to pick up items, which again, is the first of a downward spiral that Rare took. Here, however, the items aren't so bad, and with only three types of "ammo" type items, it's not an obnoxious pick-em-up fest.

The different lairs are fun, if not a little predictable. There's a grassland level, a desert level, a swamp level, an ice level, all standard fare in platformers, and I won't fault B-K for using them. There's also a few more novel ones, including a haunted mansion, a shipping harbor, an odd toxic waste disposal sewer and a forest which goes through all four seasons and changes over time. Each of the levels have 10 jiggies, 100 notes, and 5 jinjoes you have to collect. The jiggies are obviously the focus of the game, since you need them to unlock other lands, and so they bear some explanation.

You typically get a jiggy for learning a new move; once you learn how to do something, there's often a very simple puzzle near by that you get a jiggy for. An example is when you first learn how to do the beak-lunge while flying, there's a snowman in the stage with three, jolly, candy-like buttons on his torso. Spear the buttons with your beak, and a jiggy pops out from between his legs. Other jiggies are guarded by monsters, who you have to kill, or held by other characters in the lands, for which you have to do various tasks. In fact, that's actually sort of the fun of the game; the little tasks they have you do are often pretty fun, and not as obnoxious as they could have been. In the same stage as the snowman, as you're wandering around, you find a giant Christmas tree, with a pathway on it. At the end of the pathway is a box, which is rattling and bumping. When you approach the box, a sentient light bulb pops out, identifies itself as a Twinkly, and asks you to help them get to the tree. As it walks along the path, however, a monster sticks its head out of the obvious holes in the path and gobbles it up. You have to stomp on their heads and knock them back into their holes while 10 of the Twinklies make it safely down the path. Or, you can just hang around and watch them die, but you won't get a jiggy for that.

In addition to the task and monster related jiggies, there's also jiggies you get for stepping on Witch Switches, which open up a jiggy-containing area in the main hub world. Also, there's the jinjoes, cute little colored guys who exist, usually in remote corners of the level, and once you find all 5, they give you a jiggy. They figure rather prominently in the ending of the game, but I won't spoil it.

Lest you think you get away with just finding jiggies, you also need to find music notes. In addition to the puzzles, there are areas of Grunty's lair that are blocked by Note Doors, and you have to have a combined note total from all the levels you've visited higher than the value on the door. Sadly, the game does not memorize when you've picked up any given note, so if you die on the level or leave the stage, you get that amount as your high total for that level, and all the notes respawn. You don't need 100 on each level, but you do need the vast majority (I think you need a minimum of 80, and that would make the final boss fight with Grunty very difficult indeed) to continue the game.

On several of the levels is a shaman who lives in a skull named Mumbo-Jumbo. He's amusing, and when you give him enough skull tokens, he'll transform you into a monster specific to that stage. Most of the forms are downright insulting (in the haunted level, you get turned into a pumpkin, which has no special abilities other than being small enough to fit into holes, including a toilet!), but you need to do this in order to get at least one jiggy.

You get a good sense of Grunty's personality from her own lair, and I think it makes her a charming, if incompetant, villainess. Her spellbook, Cheato, is hiding in very remote portions of her lair, and if you can find him, he'll give you a code for holding double your supply of eggs or feathers, items which you use in some of your moves. Brentilda, Gruntilda's good sister, is also hanging around in the lair, and she'll tell you some randomly generated secrets about Grunty's embarassing personal habits. At first, these seem irrelevant, but trust me, you'll want to write them down, because Grunty's lair has a very cool surprise waiting for you once you've gotten to all of the stages: A game show about the game!

Rare completely bastardized this concept in the sequel, and it made me really sad, because Grunty's Furnace Fun was such an amusing concept in B-K. Essentially, it's a game show, emceed by everybody's favorite witch, and if you win (i.e., survive), you win Tooty back. It's a required part of the game, and it does force you to pay some attention to the scenery around you, so it's unlikely you'll do very well your first time on it. As I hinted, some of the questions are about Grunty, and the only way you'll know the answer is if you talk to Brentilda in enough locations of the lair. Once you defeat Grunty here, you need only track her down a few more rooms, and you get to fight her in a final fight � very nicely done, and it requires you to use all of your skills.

Boss fights in general are uncommon in the game, and pretty simple. You fight a giant hermit crab on the beach, a pack of frogs in the swamp, a pack of bees in the forest, etc. etc. None of them are particularly threatening once you know your moves, and you sort of breeze right through them after a while. It's an element that Rare did improve upon in their later games.

The aesthetics: Graphics-wise, the N64 was hardly being pushed to its limits. There wasn't any pop up of far-off objects, but the rather poor textures looked pretty cheap on closer inspection, and a lot of objects were low polygon numbers. The items you pick up were animated sprites, so it didn't matter which direction you faced them with, they were always in full view. That said, it doesn't detract from the game very much, but the graphics were really just "sufficient." They did what they needed to do, but no level really stood out as a real stunner. Mario 64 was superior in its graphics, but Mario was the first game out for a new system; it NEEDED to be impressive looking in order to wow people. Less so for B-K.

The sound is where B-K really shone, and it�s the best use of midi I think I've ever heard. Each of the levels have their own sound track, as you'd expect, but they also have their own "voice" � the desert world has a sort of bombastic Indiana Jones trumpet theme interlaced with a whiny voiced snake charmer flute, the haunted manor has a creepy pipe organ and xylophone riff. The richness of the instrument bank really pans out as you approach the entry point to the levels from the main world hub � Grunty's theme, which plays continuously throughout her lair, has a more or less mellow sound to it, but the closer you get to a level hub, the more that level's musical "voice" takes over. The result is a hybrid of the Grunty theme and the instruments that play that level's music � the pipe organ version near the haunted manor, the snake flute near the desert. It works incredibly well, and turns an otherwise forgettable tune into a catchy symphony. I still pause a little near the warp point to the game show zone to hear the cheesy game-show version of the Grunty theme.

None of the characters speak per se, but all the characters, and I mean ALL of them (including the pick-up sprites "talk" when you first pick up one of their type) have their own voice. Each character has three or four sound effects, that play randomly and in random pitches and speeds, whenever they're speaking. Banjo has sort of a "Hyuk" sound, Kazooie a muted squawk. Gruntilda's voice is sort of a scrawly "Hehhh!" sound, and it works very well to lighten up the mood of the game. The real stand out, of course, would be Loggo the Toilet, who speaks in a symphony of farts. Characters don't need to be speaking to make noise, monsters make plenty of growls and snarls when they're attacking, a few of the characters whine and sob when they're in need of some kindly bear and bird to do a task for them. The effect is comedic, and it gave the game a lot of character it would have lacked without the lavish attention to funny voices. Kudos to the design staff who figured a way to hide the limitations of sound storage on the cartridge.

The final nod to aesthetics, and again part of the charm of the lead villain, is Grunty's insults. Whenever you're in the hub world, Gruntilda's head will occasionally pop up on the bottom of the screen in a speaking bubble, and croon out (again, in her hehhh-herrrrh-hraaaa voice) a rhyming insult to Banjo or Kazooie. None of the insults are particularly offensive (at her worst, she says, "That rotten pile of feathers you've brung, useless like a heap of dung!"), and a few of them are more or less mocking herself as much as the pair of heroes ("When I become thin once more, burgers, hot dogs and chips galore!"). The inclusion of her snide remarks do keep you reminded that yes, Gruntilda is watching you and she's out to make your life miserable. It's a very clever device and it gives an otherwise unknown villain a running start on becoming memorable. When was the last time Bowser ever called up Mario just to say, "Hey, Linguini breath, you'd probably jump a whole lot higher if you laid off the rigatoni!"? Of course, Bowser doesn't need to, we know who he is. But when you're trying to carve a niche with new characters, it never hurts to make them charming.