/vr/ - Retro Games

It was always shit. Stop coping.

>>9177238
>It was always shit. Stop coping
You're the one coping.

It was a game that was considered way too long, and tedious, and was mostly ignored in favor of dreamcast games, and big PS1 titles. It was most notable for coming with an expansion pack and introducing that, since 99% of people had no idea it existed before.

>>9177234
I always wanted to play it. I never owned an N64, I had a SNES and played DKC2 and 3 and the GB with DKL so I knew the DK series a bit.
My friends all always had the newest consoles and games but only 1 had DK64. We played it for like 15 minutes and I had a blast, I think we played the multiplayer arena thing? Anyways he wanted to play some gay Star Wars pod racing shit and long story short we're not friends anymore.

>>9177234
As a fan of DKC and someone who had all of the original trilogy as a kid, when I saw the images of the game in gaming magazine, my interest for the game went to 0. I found it ugly[graphic-wise compared to SNES] and I never liked the move from 2D platformer to the 3D one. To this day I have not played the game and I have no idea if I'm missing a great game, I just have 0 interest. Meanwhile, the original trilogy I have played thousands of times.

>>9177234
Its fun to explore around and see everything. This was almost like an open world sandbox style game before gta. Play it for too long and it can feel tedious. Or if you’re in a hurry and dont feel like messing around. Thats what the game is really good for, screwing around. Not trying to get 101% just screwing around until you win and then going back amd getting 100% here and there.

I think I might have preferred a more linear DK64, i can imagine climbing pirate ships like in DKC2 in 3d or the hot air balloon lava level and so on. The lost vikings style gameplay can get tedious, but its not meant to be played in a rush. Dixie should have been in this game. Leaving kiddy out was the correct decision. They easily could have included DK Jr and 3 arcade games. I guess we got what we got.

The huge openness of it was awesome but the more I played it the more I just got a pit in my stomach from how tedious it all was. Hated that feeling as a kid, just knowing this new game you'd saved up for wasn't actually very good. Looking at it today I very much admire its scope and huge world but I can't be doin with it. Majora's Mask scratches that N64 big world feeling for me just fine. Banjo Tooie is good too but goes too far in some places.

Got this game when I was six or seven, one of the first games for the first console my siblings and I had. I remember really enjoying the world and the fact that you could change characters. The music has definitely stuck with me, and I remember thinking the game had sort of a spooky atmosphere

Multiplayer is the best part of the game.

Don’t think I’d ever really want to replay it for more than a little bit though.

For someone who grew up with a handful of games, DK64 had a lot of bang for your buck. Me and my brother wasn't cynical and jaded enough to compare it to Donkey Kong Country. Instead we treated the game as a new experience and enjoyed our time with it. The collectables were a little exhausting but it was fun unlocking stuff, collecting things and using the different weapons.

There was also two games bundled within DK64, the original Donkey Kong and Jetpac. That's a pretty good amount of value for one purchase. Everyone I knew loved it growing up. I didn't see a lot of hate for it until the youtube era.

I never heard anyone bring it up back then. It was mostly Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye at that point. I rented it, didn't beat it within that rental, and didn't have the urge to rent it again.

>>9177234
I always liked it as a kid, as an adult though it's more Banjo with monkeys than it is a DKC successor. Still not bad I guess

My cousin got it for Christmas back then, and we played the absolute shit out of it for weeks. It's one of my fondest memories with him. Many years later, I looked up and down for a copy since N64 emulators were absolute ass at emulating it at the time, and I just couldn't get very far. Having to switch kongs just to traverse the whole level over again for kong-specific collectibles was just tedious to me. Funnily enough, I spoke to him just last night about it, and he concurred.

>>9177462
Download the switch anywhere patch that works for both emulators and consoles. It streamlines the game and makes it much more playable by busy adult standards.

>>9177250
>reviews from an era where all journos were paid shills and most gamers were 12 year old retards

>>9177234
I never had an N64, but all the people I knew who owned it loved it. I only ever heard praise for the game until the mid 2010s when opinion turned sharply. I don't really have a horse in this race either btw, I still have never played it.

>>9177234
People didn't really hate it but it had the least hype of Rare's N64 platformers to that point. The criticisms were mostly aimed at the genre itself rather than the game. You never heard guys say things like BK was better, just generic remarks that they want to play something else.

>>9177234
>What did people think
Not much: wasn't hyped, rented it, it was like not-fun banjo with way more empty graphics (when the assumption would be there'd be more detail, at this later point) where you could really 'see the strings' more. Dunno if I even tried multiplayer (does it have multiplayer?) So the point is it was a non-starter.
0 hype because - Look at your op pic - when the box art looks like that and the game is a 2d game made with that actual art, you're doing good. It's a big, shocking, unacceptable step down to have your box art and be as-usual and the game graphics be this (when 3D gameplay was not novel at this point). So I took one look at this game and .. nah thanks.

>>9178048
(I also remember it was fun to jump in even the gameboy dk games i had, but i don't think it was fun to jump in this? Maybe it was but I when I see pics now I feel this sort of memory of like leaden, heavy slow control) could be false memory

>>9177250
This was also a 9/10 back then.

>>9177234
Honestly, it was good but it had the same things that made me like Banjo Tooie less than Banjo Kazooie. The game was chock full of back tracking. So much of the game was spent running through the same areas as different characters to get all the useless collectibles. There were so many areas you had to return to later simply because the game didn't feel like giving you the ability yet. Diddy having a specific ability to charge into gongs and having Donkey need to learn how to pull fucking switches is redundancy and padding. It was a really neat idea to have to use character abilities to access exclusive areas of the levels, but it was executed in a very shallow manner. Usually it's something very simple like Chunky creates a path to enter a small area, or Diddy hops into the cart to play a minigame, or lanky walks up a single incline to hit a switch. You're not really interacting with the levels in unique ways, you're kinda just doing the same shit with every character.

However, there are things that made the game great as well. For the time, the game looked great. The part with the Armadillo boss taking place during a rainstorm looked really good. All of the bosses were pretty decent actually. The levels themselves were pretty well designed, at least for the time. I don't remember any particular shitty levels like I do with Banjo Kazooie and Tooie. However, at the end of the day it just feels like a more tedious Tooie. It was always a 7/10 game for me, which back then was pretty good since a lot of early 3D games were actually really shitty in retrospect.

>>9178228
Back tracking can be great fun in well designed games.

>>9178312
I agree, but most of the time it's like "lol you don't know how to press a switch fuck off idiot". If you have new powers that let you interact with the previous areas in meaningful ways it can work great. But if it feels like something that I could have had when I first saw it but the game decided arbitrarily that I need to come back for it later because I don't have the ligma beam then it's just an illusion to make the game seem more substantial in content.

It's kind of weird to explain, but back in the day people didn't have as strong of a completionist mindset when it came to playing games like they do now. Hardly anyone actually 100% completed anything.

DK64 definitely got a lot of flak for just how absurd its collectibles were, from how many there were to how they were colour coded, but the usual response from people who still otherwise enjoyed the game was just "I'm not going to get every collectible". DK64 is definitely a game that didn't actually expect everyone to go out of their way to get everything, if anything the entire behind having so many collectibles was to to make them missable, not to pad out the game to get them all.

Honestly a modern equivalent for DK64 would be Breath of the Wild, and how its korok seed collectible system works. You can beat the game just fine without getting all of them, there's only so many of them because they want you to be able to miss a lot of them and still beat the game. Maybe it's a flawed system but it doesn't make the game unplayable. Remember that the next time you play DK64 and you see some coloured bananas you don't want to backtrack for, you don't actually have to backtrack for them.

>>9177234
I liked it and most kids who had an N64 had it and enjoyed it, but by the early 00s I was seeing people in forums using it to criticize "collect-a-thons" and all the other trends of that era of games like hub worlds and so on

>>9178064
that looks fun. way more than dk

>>9178327
>most kids who had an N64 had it
>27M 64's sold in the west
>2.3M dk64 carts sold
Just goes to show how our memory is absolutely unreliable. Not even unreliable so much as completely fantasy. Is that you christine blasey ford? in here testifying that its burned in your hippocampus that every kid had DK64? lmao

i thought it was gay and already was over banjo so i didn't think much to play this. it looked it like it was babies.

It was great, most people liked it
I completed it, but later found there were hidden bananas
I'm sure I had 102% or 101% not sure

>>9177234
>My brother had it when I was a kid. Previously we had played the SNES DK games.
DK64 was a favorite in our household. It was really cool that the arcade game was included on one of the levels too.

>>9178328
It's not fun compared to Rally games that were released 4 years earlier.

I thought it was too easy even for its genre and the backtracking got excessive, as people have mentioned. However I loved it and was happy I picked it up because Jet-Pac was so good.

>>9177234
I was a teenager. I thought Banjo Kazooie was a pretty good game (not as good as Mario 64). I thought DKC2 was one of the best platformers on SNES. I knew Rare had class, loved Blast Corps and Goldeneye and many of their NES titles. But I soon realised that DK64 was a cynical collect 'em up devoid of fun.

>>9177250
lol

>>9178380
hmm the other webm looks fun and kind of inviting whereas this one makes me stressed out with the close camera angle and rapid flashing sprite. but of course, such webms don't convey much about the feeling of playing

>>9177234
Country was one of my favorite games, so much so that I'd pull out the SNES even though I had an N64 set up. And when I was using the N64, I was probably banging out some Banjo around that time so when I heard about this I was really excited.
Kmart had it up on one of the demo kiosks, and it just wasn't fun to play. I think that was the first time I experienced what it was like to be let down by hype. I wasn't sad or angry, I just felt disappointed and walked away.

I remember as a kid it felt like there was too much to do. I was probably in middle school if I had to guess when I first played it and I didn't finish a file back then. If I wanted to replay a platformer on the n64 it was always Banjo

>>9177234

I had fun getting 201% as a kid, but I admit that it's gameplay isn't good. Most golden bananas consist of have to play the same regurgitated barrel minigames. Good soundtrack and visuals.

I was a kid so it was fucking incredible and fun as hell. I'm starting to think aiming games at adults was a mistake.

>>9177234
it was excellent, still is, I need to beat it 100% again some day

>>9177234
It had favorable reviews back in the day, and those who bought it generally thought it was better than Banjo Kazooie, but not quite as good as Mario 64.
>>9177474
>reviews from an era where all journos were paid shills
Maybe that was the case in American publications where reviews were a page long and read like an ad, but vidya magazines elsewhere were more critical. Top of my head, Kirby's Dreamland received a 65% aggregate score - a sensible score far lower than clueless fucks like you would give.
>and most gamers were 12 year old retards
No, they weren't. Half the Amiga and ST user base were adults. Zoom more.

>>9178764
>It had favorable reviews back in the day
The reviews were paid for. Yes, even back then.

>>9178764
>>9178804
it doesn't even matter if they were paid to write positively or not because they were given perks weren't level headed/mature or detached enough review things objectively. DK64 got high scores because young retarded game nerds couldn't wrap their heads around a Rare game not being that good. Whereas kirby was never a fanatical 'cool' IP so they could shit on that.

>>9178804
https://archive.org/details/total-12/page/n131/mode/2up
A lot of big name IPs here receiving low scores. What's it like to be as clueless as you? It must be painful. Oh wait; stupid people don't they're stupid.

>>9178872
This is just your opinion. Post data.

https://archive.org/details/total-12/page/n131/mode/2up
A lot of big name IPs here receiving low scores. What's it like to be as clueless as you? It must be painful. Oh wait; stupid people don't know that they're stupid...

>>9178804
https://archive.org/details/total-12/page/n131/mode/2up
A lot of big name IPs here receiving low scores. What's it like to be as clueless as you? It must be painful.

>>9178895
i can't navigate that fucking site but from i did see this appears to be looking back at the previous generations titles more jadely which only enhances the claim that reviews of games at the time were shilling/giddy

>>9177234
I liked it a lot. I finished it twice with 201% completion both times. I fucking loved donkey kong. These days I have no idea how I had the patience to do someone those fucking hard as shit minigames.

>>9178910
Fucking kek. This smacks of desperation.

A lot of people I knew had it and/or played it, but I never met anyone that actually beat it.

>>9177234
DK64 is the peak performance of the N64 hardware. It's a grandiose experience that can give you a lot of playtime over the course of a week or two. It's fun to replay, it has some neato multiplayer modes, the characters are cool and the game encourages you to use all of them.

you only need half the game's main maguffin to beat the game, there's an additional final boss battle if you collect all 200 and beat both jetpack and donkey kong arcade for their coins. this wonderful game is what is known as a filter in this community.

>>9178912
>These days I have no idea how I had the patience to do someone those fucking hard as shit minigames.
Never underestimate a kid with unlimited free time outside of school and a small collection of games.

There was something hidden in a room on the ceiling requiring you to move your camera and look directly up in a place that you would not easily see.

And it's required for a coin to put into the arcade machine to play the emulated games.

That dumb thing made me sign up to Gamefaqs and ask on the message board if my game was glitched.

>>9177234
It came and went

>>9178764
Imagine being so childishly stupid that you think only American publications were paid. Jap shills boosted their games with paid reviews all the time, same with UK dogshit titles. But aside from that, in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, game reviewing as a whole was not as paid-for as it was in the 2000's and on.

>>9178048
Comparing box art to gameplay is just about the dumbest reason for a game being bad you could give it. It's not even false advertising because you can play as all the characters shown and there are rail-cart sections.

Your entire post is one big dooky-driven dog drivel retard slop of a thought.

>>9178064
Still is.

>>9177474
nothing changed then

>>9177234
I remember thinking, oh, they made a new Donkey Kong? Why doesn't the gameplay look anything like Donkey Kong? Is it just another Mario clone? What's with all these extra non-Donkey Kong apes? Why is Donkey Kong the protag? Why is the art style so soulless and cheap looking? God I hate 3D. Video games are dead.

>>9180275
>Why is Donkey Kong the protag?
Why wouldn't he be? Just because he wasn't in DKC2 and 3?

>>9180283
He wasn't in Donkey Kong.
Dunno what all this nu shit is.

>>9180291
Oh I get it. Go to bed, Cranky.

>>9177276
>Hated that feeling as a kid, just knowing this new game you'd saved up for wasn't actually very good.
Off topic but, I hate fucking krusty's fun house to this god damn day for this. Maybe its fun if you're a zoomer emulating shit for free. But no other game has topped that level of regret and I've owned some bad ones. What a pile of trash.

He's the leader of the bunch, you know him well

>>9180327
He-he-here we go!

So they're finally here, performing for you
If you know the words, you can join in too
Put your hands together, if you want to clap
As we take you through this monkey rap!
Huh!

[Chorus]
DK
Donkey Kong!

>>9179952
Just goes to show that "impressive" doesn't always make for a good game.

>>9177234
I didn't like the single player, but I was a dumb kid that never really figured out what I was supposed to be doing. Loved the multiplayer though.

>>9180343
except in this case, DK64 is a ton of fun to replay, and i'm down for some splitscreen multiplayer whenevers

>>9178895
That magazine was from 1992. Magazines weren't super biased in those days. When DK64 came out in 1999 there were already a few popular online review sites.

Take a look at this review, it's an obvious shill, https://web.archive.org/web/20000815085546/http://ign64.ign.com/reviews/607.html . It was the same thing then as it is now. Nintendo and other publishers give review copies, previews, news leaks, advertising revenue, etc to reviewers that gave them favourable reviews. DK64 was a major release for the N64 for Christmas 1999, so reviewers weren't going to take a shit on it for no reason.

>>9180318
Yeah, that game sucked.

HE

>>9177473
Faggot

>>9181081
HAS

>>9177234
I went in blind and eager for more Rare collecthon goodness but found it kind of shitty. Time has grown to support my opinion

Got it as a christmas gift, played it for what felt like an eternity, never did beat it.

>>9180275
>Is it just another Mario clone?
That's all country was desu

>>9177234
>"The game is too bloated and long"
>"Over-analyzed"

Seethe boomers. The game is overrated.

>>9181356
>mario invented the platform genre

>>9181392
Sort of, yeah.

>>9177234
We bought it and we played it, and I remember finishing it with a friend (we worked on the same cart file). It didn't feel like such a slog when we were kids, but now that you have other shit to do, a collecting game of its massive scope is a bit overwhelming.

My bro also played this as well as heavily playing the banjo games, and his opinion has been that banjo-kazooie was the perfect game for this because while they were all well-made, he can get the urge to play the game, start a new file, and get it to 100% in about 10 hours. For the working adult and parent, that's more than enough to scratch an itch. He still has never finished Banjo-Tooie, and the simple reason is that "it's too time-consuming, and after a while I'd just rather play Kazooie instead".

I think that's the general gist; If you're a kid with infinite time to waste, then DK64 is fine. If you're an adult just trying to get the kick, then it may drag on too long for you. It's kind of like watching shounen anime. It's fine to have your "one show", the one that you obsessed over as a kid, but to keep watching these 400+ episode epics when you're an adult with better freedom of choice and higher demand on time just seems like time better spent on something else.

>>9178064
sega rally was better

>>9180318
this but for escape from camp deadly, what a goddamn pile of shit that was

>>9181408
Not even close.

>>9181323
CHLAMYDIA

>>9177234
I liked it as a kid. I can't play it now because the framerate is so terrible.

>>9181424
No shit.

>>9181449
Then who did?

>>9181471
I get used to bad framerate in like 20 minutes

>>9181471
It's better if you emulate it, but ironically enough, the game is programmed to make your character move faster and jump farther the more it lags, so in a way, improving the framerate may actually slow the game down. It also makes some glitches and sequence breaks impossible, if you're into that sort of thing.

>>9179952

>>9177234
It's got issues but it's still a fun game to play and I loved it as a kid but yeah too goddamn long, overall it's fine.

>>9181449
They certainly popularized it and it's trends. If you don't think that the DKC guys looked at Mario 3 / World at all as a source of inspiration / influence then you might be a special kind of retard

>>9181668
They may have got the world map idea from Mario which I doubt originated it but DKC plays more like Battletoads than Mario.

>>9181672
...have you played Battletoads? Actual question here. Also just no. They're both linear 2D platformers

Banjo, croc, spyro, gex 3d, conkur, rayman 2, mario 64. All the 3d platformers from this generation were the same. If you like one you’ll like them all if you hate one you’ll hate them all. Fight the controls to land lava jump and scour the earth for gems. I don’t get the appeal. It’s like if GTA was empty with no people, no cars, and no police.

>>9177234
DKC is one of my favorite franchises. this game was tedious. it's almost like revisionist history to see people say otherwise.

>>9181471
as far as i understand it objects of interest including navigational geometry are only rendered when a very short distance away, and rather than lod there's just nothing when you look from further. I can't say I remember this but I can say with certainty that would not have been acceptable to me at that time. I believe there is some pop in in banjo but not of fucking things that you need to traverse.
>look to the north, a clearly impassable canyon
>umm you need to walk up and see if a bridge appears

>>9180112
>Imagine being so childishly stupid that you think only American publications were paid.
Never said that, but keep putting words in my mouth like you keep putting your tranny father's dick in yours, faggot.
>Jap shills boosted their games with paid reviews all the time
That's nice, spastic. Relevance? Talking about vidya rags that matter. Nips don't even look at games the same way as the west.
>same with UK dogshit titles
...And everything you've just vomited has just been completely disregarded. Kill yourself, arrested development mutt.

>>9177234
I liked it, but preferred Banjo anyday.

>>9178321
This is a good take.

>>9179952
You don't need all 200 bananas for the final boss, just the arcade coins.

>>9181714
Not sure how to put into words how retarded comparing GTA and a collect-a-thon game is so I'll just call you a tard and be done with it

>>9181108
Sorry, buddy. I have a family and a job. I can't spend all my free time playing a game I beat 20 years ago wall to wall just so some loser from the internet will question my "gamer cred". Have (straight) sex.

>>9182227

>>9182361
Bad filter even if that guy above you is an idiot

>>9177473
And it's STILL slow as hell between glacial walking speeds, long-ass corridors between areas, and the actual areas being gigantic mostly empty fields.

>>9182361
Totally valid and intelligent rebuttal. Thanks.
>>9182371
>nooooo he plays video games how he wants to and not by the standards of a 13 year old in 2001 ahhhh!

Mind your business, geek.

I think DK64 is a great game. Had just as much fun playing it as I did Banjo Kazooie and Tooie. If anything, it's better than Tooie and maybe just as good as Kazooie.

>>9182539
What a trash bait take

>>9177234
I have one CIB, it can be your for just 1000USD, callme

>>9177234
I think it was pretty popular. I remember thinking it was too repetitive and I never beat it. I think all the characters, and having to go through each level a bunch of times with them, really burned me out.

>>9177234
Bought it for a fuckload of my dad's money when I was like 12, at launch.
It was kind of fun until you had to redo every stage with every kong. Too much shit to collect too. Uninspired stages.
Graphics and music were good for the time. Just not what I expected from a DKC grame.

>>9183482
>graphics were good for the time
Heres a game released at the same time. Yoshis Island a game I dislike looks much prettier.

>>9177234
I beat this game many times as a kid.
The game does some stuff alright such as the player control, boss fights, and soundtrack.
Collecting is easily the worst issue, but is mitigated by not having to collect everything.
The worst offender is how bland the objective design is, usually it's doing stuff like matching puzzles or going to an area to find a bonus barrel to play the same minigame yet again.
The game does have a lot of issues, and overall feels like it had barely any testing. It's a strange game where the scope went over the developer's head.

>>9177234

After SM64 and then Banjo Kazooie, I just didn't care anymore. Banjo already did the collect a thon thing to death by the end state with the seasons and tree. I was already a good gamer, and that tried my patience. I didn't finish the game 100% and was burned out. DK64 looked like more of the same, but without the simplistic charm of SM64, or the nice colorful aesthetic of BK. The 64 graphics were starting to look tired at that point and it didn't look appealing.

Great game, the DK rap would play every time in my household and everyone knew the lyrics by heart.
Hard to say I had any criticisms, perhaps the levels felt a bit too long. The boss fights and minigames could get frustrating. Collecting all the things was a chore and a half.

>>9183638
aside from the draw distance and having a high quality player model that doesn't really look much better than DK64

>>9177234
I got it christmas 1999. Was just 11 years old. I liked it but not nearly as much as Banjo-Kazooie or Tooie. The "collect-a-thon" aspect didn't bother me, but having to constantly backtrack and shift between characters did.

Nevertheless I got stuck on this boss as I was (and still am) terrible at vidya. After a few frustrating experiences I gave up. Never progressed past this point.

DK64 was well received when it came out.
It was many years later that people starting doing history revisionism about it.
According to Google trends, the word "collectathon" appeared on the internet in the year 2008, that's almost a decade after DK64 came out.

>>9183668
>Sega blue skies vs euro jank vomit brown and green nothingness

>>9183964
stop console warring, zoomer. I love Sega but they didn't invent blue skies, that meme never made sense.
Also Crazy Taxi is fun as fuck but it's also a lot of grey streets... see? anyone can be cynic.

>>9183979
>console warring
I just gave props to a snes game, so nice try there. And What colour should a street be?

>>9183983
>a game I dislike
Eh.
Anyway, what color should a jungle be?
Really though, of course a Dreamcast game is going to look better than a N64 game, but DK64 still looks pretty good, especially in motion with all the dynamic lighting. The graphics were praised at the time, even a local magazine in my country which was heavily anti-Nintendo (and hyped DC a lot) gave DK64 a very high score and praised its graphics and effects.

Shit

Only good DK was the original arcade game

Rare actually didn't ever make a great game

Like naughty dog, they are only really good at pushing tricks on systems

>>9183990
I don't like the gameplay no, but it uses the snes to the Max and pulls it off even if is all Sunshine rainbows and lollipops.
>what colour should a jungle be?

>>9177234
This was back before your brain was fried of all its dopamine from having infinite entertainment at your fingertips. We got maybe 2 games a year, and thats was only for birthdays/christmas. We liked the completionist content, it wasnt busy work. It was still fun and novel to explore 3D worlds. The multiple characters were fun. The music and environments had “soul”.

>>9184002
>we liked the completionist aspect
You're right about having 2 games a year but these n64 collectathons sucked for finding all those extras. Master System Sonic had hidden chaos emeralds and I actually enjoyed searching for those.

>>9184000
>>what colour should a jungle be?
I could be cynic and say Crash is eurojank vomit green and shit brown, no biggie.
And to be frank, Crash has nothing on pic related's atmosphere.

>>9183947
>It was many years later that people starting doing history revisionism about it.

Not true. It was known as a collect 'em up when it came out, any contemporaneous review will comment on that. They may not use the word "collectathon" but they noticed the problem.

>>9177234
blockbuster had the fucking gall to have this game for a fucking 2 day rental. aint NO FUCKING WAY any kid was beating it in that time and the saves saved the the cart, and not your memory pak, so you were basically fucked taking it back and renting it again.

>>9178064
This looks like fun, what game?

>>9177250
Reviews back then were even more worthless then now. Gaming magazines were shameless advertisements, any reviews for a major release would be paid off.

>>9184000
I want to like Crash Bandicoot but those sections where you're running towards the camera are fucking awful platformer design

I'm 37 and some of my favorite games on the SNES included DKC 1-3. I bought each the month they came back and got 100% on each. Probably beat each of them at least a dozen times.

I didn't even bother playing DKC 64 at all. It was immediately obvious to me that it was barely "Donkey Kong Country." I got 100% on Mario 64 a couple times, which I enjoyed, but that totally burned me out on collectathons. I saw a friend play Banjo Kazooie and it looked boring as shit. When I knew DKC 64 was like that, I knew it wasn't even worth playing.

DKC is supposed to be about racing through the levels and blasting through bonus games. DKC 64 looks like a slow, boring coin-collecting slog. The gameplay is totally different. They should've called it something else entirely.

>>9184053
You'd be lying though. Grass and leaves look much nicer in crash than dk64.

>>9177234
Mario and Banjo were both way way better than it, so even back then I knew it was an inferior product but it was fun enough to be worth a play through.

>What did people think of this game before YouTubers
The fact that this has to be asked nowadays is pretty crazy.

>>9185402
I honestly wouldn't look into it too much. It's a huge established cope that people only dislike something because they were told to instead of just naturally, over time, realizing that something wasn't very good or aged poorly now that we have the benefit of retrospect.
You see it in Zelda 2 threads a lot. People whining about AVGN when anyone with two brain cells can tell you that it was always the black sheep of the series and that obviously people who like the norm have a higher than average chance of disliking something so different.

It was fun but frustrating as a kid. Looking back as a grown ass man who's played a lot more games it's easy to see why I felt that way.

>>9185437
I don't know that Zelda 2 was "always" considered the black sheep, but I can tell you I remember that term being lobbed around by the time OoT was out. By that point it was pretty clear Zelda games would be mostly taking after ALttP's mold, which in its time took after the original, so it's understandable why, in retrospect, it came to be seen as such.

>>9178764
>>amiga users

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

>>9185586
>I don't know that Zelda 2 was "always" considered the black sheep
Once we got more than a handful of games and it became obvious they were never going to revisit the style of it. There's a reason the 2D games are top down like Zelda 1 instead of the side platforming thing that 2 does outside of a few sections in LAs

>>9177238
35 year old here. OP's question is perfectly valid. I don't think Donkey Kong 64 was ever a very popular game, but back in 1999/2000 the reasons it was disliked were somewhat more simple and basic. There was a bit of collect-a-thon fatigue by that point, and the game was too complicated. There. Done. It's a lot simpler than the 10,000,000 reasons YouTube analysts would give in 2022.

Generally, Millennials and Gen Xers had simpler views on gaming than Zoomers do. Nowadays, when talking about "fair" game design, there's a list of 200 different criteria that videogames need to adhere to. Back in my day we just operated by a more vague, intuitive, "We know when a game's bullshit or too difficult to have fun" level. We didn't hyperfixate too much on things like leaps of faith or enemies that appear too suddenly unless we lost our last life on something like that and got sent back to the title screen.

>>9185601
Some have begun drawing the comparison between Zelda 2 and OoT's focus on combat (the latter was originally going to have more spells, too, including the Fairy spell), but the overall structure of OoT unmistakably takes after ALttP, so it's a bit of a stretch.

>>9185615
>There was a bit of collect-a-thon fatigue by that point
Mor than the "collect" aspect, the fatigue was that 3D platformers seemed to be the obvious next thing in 3D games, since Mario 64 was that big. Banjo was pretty successful, and when DK64 arrived, it felt like it was more of the same - and yeah it is, but it's still a good game. Also I know most people here didn't grow up with friends but the multiplayer was pretty addictive. Rare had the multiplayer element figured out.
The funny thing is that, in retrospect, 3D platformers are a genre that didn't actually expand much, turns out making actually good, precise controls and ingenuous obstacle-based level design for it is a lot of work. 6th gen got some 3D platformers but the norm wasn't it, like we thought it'd continue back in 5th gen, instead 6th gen onwards gave us open-world, sandbox stuff with simpler controls that didn't require that much precision and flat maps.

>>9185615
You're a pretty obvious 15 year old larping as a Xennial.

Don't let this thread distract you from the fact that Diddy Kong Racing exists and is 100x better DK64

>>9177234
It was fine, but as a kid I never really got all that far into it. It was so big that I kinda just got lost with no idea where to go or what to do. I mostly stuck with the multiplayer, and had most of my fun there.

>>9177234
well i liked it… so did my homies.

>>9177250
who cares about reviewers man fuckin that's just paid youtubers, especially in the age of early 3d
i mean i guess some youtubers get paid but it's the same shit really
actually defend it instead of saying "sure people like it, oh reviewers are people btw"
ftr the boxing match was cool

>>9177234

Why did they make the number of coins actually needed for everything you can buy so insanly low?
These things are everywhere, I'm not talking about 80*% or so, but at least make like 50% of them neccessary so that they actually feel worth collecting.

>>9188381
I think the original idea was that every Kong had to go to buy their own upgrades. Since the game is already a lot of back and forth they probably scrapped this very late in development, making it that one Kong can buy the upgrades for all. That's why you end up with like 100 useless coins for each Kong at the end of the game.

>>9177234
Me and my friends liked it, we used to play the multiplayer a lot.
i wasnt a completionist or anything so the collectible bloat never bothered me. genuinely didnt even know people hated the game until a few years ago, i considered it one of the better games on the 64

>>9178321
>It's kind of weird to explain, but back in the day people didn't have as strong of a completionist mindset when it came to playing games like they do now.
Speak for yourself, for me it was quite the opposite. My family was poor and I was lucky if I got access to 3 or 4 new games a year (most of which were borrowed from friends), the limited availability of games and the large amounts of free time meant I squeezed the fuck out of each one as much as I could, so yes, I did use to 100% most of them, plus, many of them rewarded you with cool stuff for doing so, like unlockables or secret endings.
These days is the opposite but sometimes feels like it isn't just because achievement hunting autists are a vocal minority.

>>9183869
I couldn’t beat the toy factory as a kid. I loved this game though!

My cousin rage quit after being cheated out of a coin from the jet pack game. Threw his copy into the River.

Mostly just played the multiplayer with friends because it's fun. Only really played the single player when I was bored. I don't think I ever finished it.

I played it twice as a child and I remember liking it a lot.

>>9177474
maybe they should have started looking in to ethics in game journalism.

>>9177234
I literally thought it might be the best game that was ever made when I replayed it as a kid during the 6th gen
but that faded away
it's still a good game and the points these YouTubers make are really retarded, like claiming you have to play through the whole level 5 times which is blatantly false, most areas get cleared by 2 dongs and you move onto the next part of the level

>>9177234
I was 12 when it came out. Everyone loved it. We didn't sit around nonstop talking about games though. I didn't see anything negative about the game until around 2010.

>>9189663
>We didn't sit around nonstop talking about games though.
Fake as fuck. We talked about OOT and MM a shit load.

>>9177234
I have never seen a review of this game nor have I talked to anyone about it. But here goes.

I thought it was a really weird game, it had virtually none of the platforming or mechanics that I loved with DKC.
I was amazed by how absolutely HUGE the game was... felt very epic in scale and content.
I remember it also being the very first glitch me and my friends figured out. By having lanky punch a warpgate that the clock guy was standing in front of, you could get into that world without having the requisite bananas. We felt like leet hackermen. Really cool stuff.
But overall the game really felt padded with unnecessary bullshit via the collecting. That you could only get whatever blueprint or banana or coin if you happened to have whatever kong at that point... felt so fucking tedious.
But the actually gameplay in the game overshadowed it. Getting diddy's jetpack on the egyptian level or opening up a new unseen area on the overworld or getting a really cool ability upgrade - really cool stuff for me as a kid.

2.5/5 tried to play it again but never really committed as an adult because it's so tedious.

>>9177234
>YouTubers over-analyzed it to death
They did? I wasn't aware.
The thing I always know is "I don't like having to switch characters to get bananas" being the common sentiment

>>9190020
Well you see, a youtuber they dislike said something that a lot of people already thought so now they're solely to blame for anyone else having an opinion that anon disagrees with.
That's how this place works

>>9190023
No I mean I didn't even know youtubers talked about DK64, especially compared to other Rare games

>>9190020
To be fair, it's not really modern youtubers, well probably a lot of them trash older games just for the sake of it, but hating on DK64 (and 3D platformers in general) was a very late 2000s thing, the era of "that game you liked as a kid SUCKSS" cynic type "angry" or "jaded" review that was so prevalent in those years, with figures like AVGN and Yahtzee (and dumb /v/tards taking them seriously).
I remember somewhere around the early to mid 2010s, 3D platformers were sort of cherished again, I remember DK64 release on virtual console being well received and celebrated, but there were still a group of people who relentlessly hated the game. Of course there's people who don't like it or have criticism about certain things, but it got to the point people treated DK64 as if it was an actual bad game, while it still is one of the better 3D platformers ever made. The genre just never got much room to grow, it proved to be a difficult genre to make in 3D, but DK64 did it well in its mechanical execution -not as good as SM64 though, that one was mystical shinto magic at work-, but people have some understandable complaints about the design of the game, the structure such as changing kongs and the like - I don't think it's that big of a deal, it's a game to be played at your own pace, and you don't need to collect every single thing to see the ending, but whatever.
So nowadays there's the 2 different sides, people who like it, and also a big number of people who hate it, and I guess some people in between, like me. Not among my favs but I had fun with it and think it has a lot of quality.

>>9190030
What I don't get is people who say it "ruins" the game to play with the mod that lets you change kongs on the fly.

>>9190032
Autism.

>>9190032
Why not just use action replay and get all the bananas and collectibles unlocked instantly? You guys obviously don't want to actually play the game.

>>9177234
I was a kid, but I really liked it. Was one of my favorite N64 games.

>>9177234
I didn't care. Had a Genesis. Many kids of the era like me just had one or the other.

>>9177234
I remember really liking that it had 5 characters, but that the game was way harder than banjo kazooie because of the size and layouts of the levels. I would regularly get lost or not know what to do next. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad now that I have an adult brain but I haven't gotten to try the game again since then.

>>9177234
I had a Playstation. I passed on N64 when I learned it was to be cart based. Turned out to be a good decision. I did get a GC when they released and loved it.

>>9177234
I got it when I was around 11ish, 6 months ish after release? I played all DKC titles before. I personally loved it at the time. Got everything except a few random bananas in some levels I could never find (especially the big water level, where the fuck are those bananas?) but that didn't matter, was able to unlock the extra clip after the last boss
I was too young and not able to get the general feel at the time and I got Internet like a year after or something
I kinda want to play it again

>>9177234
Fuckhuge challenging collect-a-thon.
Lackluster multiplayer. Would rather play SSB.
Having to clear Donkey Kong on a single life to get the N64 Coin was an absolute bitch.
But not a bad game.

t. memories from when I was 9-10 in 2000.

>>9190020
>>9190023
referencing youtubers is almost always cope. Sonicfags do the same thing even though negative sentiment existed well before that.

>>9192218
Zelda 2fags as well

>>9177234
Leagues superior to the banjo games

>>9177234
>What did people think of this game
I always thought that it did the whole big worlds thing better than Tooie did. It's standard theming for DK games but there's something about waddling around as one of the Kongs through the levels in DK64 that felt really great compared to Tooie.

>>9177234
even as a kid I would just rather play Banjo Kazooie for the 15th time than playing this garbage

>>9178064
>Oh wow anon's doing pretty g-

>>9185615
>There was a bit of collect-a-thon fatigue by that point, and the game was too complicated. There. Done.
This is actually what all these "anal ytical" videos amount to, they just stretch it out over the course of 2+ hours and shove in a bunch of fast-moving, flashing images everywhere so that the algorithm will pick their video up.

>>9177234
I hated it. It was too easy and too kiddish, even for Nintendo. The "Wellll doooooone!" tutorials for doing fuck-all were like what the fuck. Such a huge disappointment after the SNES games.

>>9179952
>you only need half the game's main maguffin to beat the game, there's an additional final boss battle if you collect all 200 and beat both jetpack and donkey kong arcade for their coins.
>if i call the final boss optional, that makes the requirements sound better!

Absolutely hated it when it came out. I thought I was going to get something that felt as good to play as the first two SNES donkey Kongs and that's not what this game is. Also for the record, hated both banjo games at the time.

Only recently did I go back and replay DK64 and appreciate it for the gameplay it does offer.

>>9177234
>>9188438
Same, DK64 was a popular game and one of the typical multiplayer games that were back then very fun to play. I still enjoy the aesthetics of the N64 games of that era with the colors, the water...
https://youtu.be/xIRsYSeSJ94?t=199
Now the low framerate would make it difficult for me to enjoy the game. I only played it at friends and I always thought of it playing the story on an emulator but I'm reading other peoples' experiences and am afraid that I won't enjoy it that much.

>>9178321
>It's kind of weird to explain, but back in the day people didn't have as strong of a completionist mindset when it came to playing games like they do now. Hardly anyone actually 100% completed anything.
Good post. That completionist nonsense started with the Gamerscore stuff on the Xbox 360. I remember friends just buying/borrowing and playing games for gamerscore...I did it as well for some time desu. It was a very successful tool for making people buy (shitty) games, to the point that latter Xbox 360 license/shovelware games had very easy ways to get a lot of points - which were not useful for anything. Even though people were aware that there was no value in getting the points people wanted to have them.

>>9177234
On early /v/ circa 2005 DK64 was considered absolute garbage. I grew up in Sony country, so I barely knew the N64 even existed back when the game came out.

>it was actually a great game until youtubers ruined it u guise
>no, I haven't played it. Why?
Every time.

Got it for Christmas '99 and dropped it around Frantic Factory

The main issue of DK64 is that the movement isn't fun and the levels aren't interesting. In Mario 64 you can triple jump and move around like crazy in much smaller levels. In Donkey Kong 64 you are slow and the levels are huge. Mario 64 is about doing neat little platforming and adventure challenges. DK64 is about collecting 50 million things in elaborate ways in levels 10x bigger than anything in Mario 64. In short, my basic thesis is that platformers should ideally have good movement and levels, and DK64 doesn't really do this.

I enjoyed it because I generally liked exploring 3D worlds back then, the changes in atmosphere (coupled with a dynamic OST) were also cool. But deep down everyone knew it was Banjo 1.5 and not a proper DK game

it's a good game but it's arguably the first true misfire of golden age Rare. the pressure to deliver something bigger than banjo got to the developers big time, so they stuffed the game with a load of superfluous crap and focused more on production values than core game design.

as a (stupid) kid i thought DK64 made Mario 64 look like a complete joke, with 5 playable characters, fully voiced cutscenes, far better visuals and amazing bosses. but today I only find myself going back to SM64, it's just the better game overall and has stood the test of time as a genre defining classic.

>>9194628
>they stuffed the game with a load of superfluous crap

Nail on the head. What the fuck was with the projectile weapons, musical instruments, and orange grenades? Why did you have to collect film in order to use the camera to photograph banana fairies?

>>9177234
Decided to start a playthrough because of this thread after not having seriously played it since I was a kid. Gotta say, I'm having more fun than I expected, though already with just two Dongs I'm already a bit annoyed with the color-coded collectibles. At least teleportation spots makes traversing the levels a bit more bearable.

Also, have a 4K LOOKIN' GOOD. Can't believe it made it into this game as well.

>>9177234
I always like it, i easily enjoy games, the only thing i really didn't care is blunt games. And this isn't one. Love the little music at the beginning, with the island reveal, then the main enemy appears, the music change, was very well done for a platformer. I didn't have a ps1 until much later, so n64 really impressed me

>>9190032
Because the challenge of the game is in routing, and it takes all the routing out of the game and unironically turns it into the "herr durr I see a colored banana I gotta pick it up" chorefest that everybody complains it is. If you play efficiently you don't have to pick up every colored item the first time you see it, you know you're going back to that room as a different kong later so you pick it up then, but the mod discourages that style of mapping/routing.

>>9177234
I was a kid when this game came out and my takeaway was always that it was worse then mario 64 or spyro and that it was bullshit I couldn't finish the game because I was a stupid kid that couldn't beat the original arcade donkey kong game twice without continues in order to unlock a single door

multiplayer mode was pretty fun

>>9194745

I fucking loathed it on release and did not understand the critical success, still don't. It's painfully fucking dull. If I want to play a Donkey Kong game I'll take any of the SNES titles, and if I want a 3D platformer there's at least half a dozen better ones on the 64. I don't know what ecelebs are saying about it because I don't watch that shit but if they're saying DK64 is bad I agree with them.

>>9177234
I had it as a kid but didn't really enjoy it, desu.

WALNUTS

>>9177234
I borrowed a friends copy for a few weeks, I let them play Banjo and they gave me this. They really liked DK64 but I never got along with it. Always felt like a worse Banjo-Kazooie to me.
Loved K.Rool and the music and the designs, just didn't find the game very fun to play.

>>9178312
Is that Wonder Boy?

>>9199672
Yes, the Dragon's Trap.

rented it from hollywood video, found it really boring even before switching became a problem, dropped it in a few hours. A few years later I discovered emulation and felt the same way about banjo tooie after missing out on it when it was new.

>>9177234
there are people still uninfluenced by the opinions of youtubers.

>>9177234
Played it back then and thought it was boring as shit, same as all the other virtual playpen "go collect random bullshit" games like Banjo Kazooie. I'm convinced nobody liked these sorts of game until youtubers started shilling them like jontron. Every time I ask a person if they like Banjo Kazooie and they say "yes" they admit to having never played the game before, and also watched youtube videos circa 2010s about a chubby guy and his funny bird friend.

>>9177256
>and was mostly ignored in favor of dreamcast games
holy shit, really? i thought that thing was a flop.

>>9177256
>mostly ignored in favor of dreamcast games, and big PS1 titles.
Weird way to say Super Mario 64, but alright.

>>9200021
>muh youtubers
you're just as retarded as the people saying people only hate DK64 due to youtubers.

>>9200031
It was a flop but if you were a gamer with money you weren't going back to N64 if you had access to dreamcast.

>>9184053

The sky has to be an illusion here, right?
You go through a cavern to get to that.
That always bugged me.
I guess they wanted DK Isle to be as big as it was in country but its not.

>>9201139
I was just sharing my personal experience. Obviously lots of normies opinions are going to be influenced by people the see online. You forget that not everyone is based and can think for themselves. If you like these games, that's fine and I'm not saying you are a youtube drone, but that doesn't change my personal interactions with people who claim to "like" these games having never actually played them.

>>9177234
as a kid, I thought this was decent enough I guess, but it was no Tonic Trouble