Donkey Konga: The Worst Rythm Game Ever Made

 

No genre is free from it's trash entries and rhythm games are no different.  If you had asked me what I thought was the worst rhythm game before playing Donkey Konga I might have said Parappa The Rapper.  But despite my extremely low opinion of Parappa as a rhythm game, I can appreciate it as being one of the first and the music absolutely fuckin SLAPS but then Donkey Konga comes along and shows me first hand what a really trash rhythm game looks like.

I'm not the kind of guy to get really hung up on UI.  Unless the UI in a game is particularly unreadable or badly made then its not the kind of thing that will even cause a blip on my critical radar.  But right out the gate, the first thing thats very noticable when you hit the start button is that Donkey Konga's menus feel cheap.  This is a first party Nintendo game, featuring one of the companies biggest mascots that's been around since 198 fucking 1 and it has a menu screen that looks like something you'd find on some shovelware bullshit that you'd find at the bottom of a bargain bin, thrice discounted to a dollar.  Zero effort put into these menus at all.  One of them is even called "DK City" or something, the area where you use coins to buy new music and stuff and I thought it make take me to a fun little jungle island interface but no, just the same shit garbage menu to buy nonsense.

But that's just the menus, in the actual rhythm game itself the UI is also trash.  There are 4 types of notes, a left hit, a right hit, a double hit and a clap.  The notes are an obnoxiously bright shade of red and yellow so when you're playing on the harder modes your eyes start to strain trying to read the chart.  There's also no options for speed mods which makes reading charts a pain in the cock but the only reason this isn't more of a problem is because the game is piss easy and even a newborn that's been dropped could clear the highest settings.  Even worse with the UI is that the feedback for successfully hit notes is fucking bullshit.  In literally every other rhythm game that exists there is some feedback for telling the player they hit a note.  Usually the note will vanish and you'll get a little mark that tells you your accuracy, like in DDR you get Marvellous or Perfect or whatever.  In Donkey Konga, though, when you hit a note you get get feedback mark but the note KEEPS FUCKING SCROLLING past the hit zone.  That's behaviour entirely reserved for missed notes, what the fuck.  Not that getting distracted matters even in the slightest because the game isn't tracking full combos anyway.  There are 3 ways to end a song.  Fail, which I have never seen, pass with a silver crown and pass with a gold crown.  The only difference is if your life bar at the end of the song was full or not.  You could go away from your bongos for 75% of a song, then play the last stretch perfectly and end on a gold crown.  It's like the complete opposite of IIDXs failing with a AA rank, it's fucking bullshit.

But all of this is just set dressing, the most important thing is the music right?  Well guess fuckin what? That sucks too.  Nursery rhymes that would even make its target demographic eye roll, terrible covers of pop songs including the worst versions I have ever heard of Another One Bites the Dust and All the Small Things and weird old shit for grandad.  The only good tracks on the game are the Pokemon Theme Song and the DK Rap.  When you're rhythm game has only 2 good tracks in it that is probably  more than any shitty UI and toddler grade peripheral will ever be.

The most frustrating thing about all this is that the template was done for them already.  Donkey Konga isn't even an original idea, it's a straight rip off of Taiko no Tatsujin just with the Japanese drums replaced with bongos

Taiko is great too, it's good good music, plays great, looks great, there's a reason that it's been around for so long and is a staple of basically every arcade, even the shit ones in shopping malls and sports centers, even to this day.  All Nintendo had to do was make it like that and instead we got this low effort, lazy, poorly thrown together dollar store knockoff.

Donkey Konga is bar far the worst rhythm game ever made.  Even the biggest arcade rhythm flops like Museca don't even come CLOSE to this level of shittiness.  An embarassing title from Nintendo that makes a good case for maybe not all video game preservation being a good thing. Fuck this game and fuck anyone who worked on it. 

Memories of Def Jam Fight for New York

It's 2004, I'm about 15 and in high school.  I have a friend at school who, for the sake of this story I'm going to call Mo.  Mo and I were two very different people who at first glance you probably would expect not to really get on.  He was a huge dude from the West Indies who played a ton of sports, liked to party and listened to hip hop, rap and all that stuff.  I on the other hand was a sheltered white kid from a suburb who spent almost 100% of his time playing video games and listening to the old cassettes of late 80s/90s pop music from my mothers old collection.  However at school I bonded with this guy over games like Megaman, anime like Dragon Ball Z and...Linkin Park of all weird things.

We would often go to each others houses to play video games, usually an overnight stay so we could just play into the wee hours of the morning.  I remember going to his place and spending a LARGE amount of a day just playing Wind Waker and REMake when those came out and he would come over and we'd play stuff like Megaman X, Dragonball games or one of the obscure RPGs from my collection.

There was one time though he brought a game round to my place, which was Def Jam Fight for New York.  I didn't know anything about Def Jam other than the fact it was a rap label and therefore didn't want anything to do with it.  I called him a piece of shit for having garbage taste in games and didn't want to play it.  However he was twice my size and a lot more assertive than me so we ended up playing it anyway.

The game fired up and I scoffed at him for all the features in the game that I perceived as pointless and stupid.  All this heavy bass and emphasis on buying bling for your custom fighter in a story mode that was some cliché garbage about thugs fighting over territory or something.  Then we started getting into fights and the game is essentially a wrestling game that plays sort of similar to the old WWF games or whatever.  You pick a fighting style and that fighting style dictates how you KO people in each level.  If your a street fighter then getting their health low and clocking them in the head with a powerful haymaker will win you the fight.  If you were into grappling you'd have to make your opponent submit by putting them in various holds.

The first thing that really caught my attention however was the games blazin' moves.  When you fill up a meter you can enter a "blazin" state.  In this state, if you grab the guy and push the right stick you'll do a special attack.  These attacks are INSANE, gravity defying, multi hit combo, earth shattering attacks that really make you feel like you REALLY just ruined a guys day.  There's one in particular that I think Ice T does where he punches you twice in the gut, and flips you over his shoulder so that you got your head down and your ass up.  He then winds and essentially rugby punts the opponent right into the goddamn Shadowrealm and everything about these attacks and the combat in general is incredibly satisfying.

What really got me into the game though is when you get to the 3rd fight venue or so and you get to fight Sean Paul. Sean Paul I don't particularly dislike, even back then, but I always perceived him in my teenage ignorance as just some fuck who rapped about doing drugs, fuckin' bitches and drinking copious amounts of alcohol so I really started paying attention when I found out one could beat the shit out of him with a custom character.  So we wailed on him and the grabbed him and slammed his face so hard into a jukebox that he lay defeated as a twitching mess on the floor and I fucking loved it.

I loved it so much in fact, that I ended up buying the game for myself, playing through the story mode multiple times and unlocking basically everything there was to get.  One thing that I also started to warm up to though was the soundtrack.  The soundtrack is comprised of different songs composed by people from the label and I actually found myself really enjoying them, thus broadening my horizons with my music tastes.  The solid gameplay, the bumpin' soundtrack and the performances from the rappers themselves, despite being in a corny gang war story, are actually quite entertaining and even pretty hilarious at times.

So not only is this is a long winded way of me saying that Def Jam Fight for NY is a fantastic game that you should try if you have not already but I also, in case he reads it, wanted to thank my dude Mo for not only introducing me to a great game but for also heavily broadening my music tastes.

Tl;dr; This game is sick and you should play it POST HASTE

The New Resident Evil Is a Little Pointless

One game that was released recently was something that I have dubbed ReREMake and while I'm not entirely complaining about it's release I can't help but feel that this is another pointless re-do of a game that didn't really need remaking/porting anymore.

For those that don't know, back in 2002 Capcom released a remake of Resident Evil 1 for the Nintendo Gamecube and it wasn't just a straight up port of the original game, oh god no.  Resident Evil on the Gamecube, which people used to called REMake was Resident Evil 1 on fucking steroids.  The graphics were overhauled like crazy and looked fucking beautiful and they tweaked the game play a little bit for the new version.  On top of that they added a bunch of extra shit to the game so even veterans of the PS1 classic had something new to experience, it was awesome.

So then ReREMake comes along and while I'm not particularly angry about it like I was with The Last of Us Remastered, it still seems completely fucking pointless.  It's not too expensive but on Steam ReREMake will set you back £15 which is a fair price I guess for a game like this.  That said, Amazon UK have the Gamecube version going for prices as low as £6.50 and nearly every motherfucker I ever met had a Gamecube so why not just go dust that off and save yourself £10.  For me in Japan, I can walk round the corner and get the PS1 version in any used game shop ever for 100 fucking yen so trying to justify a £15 purchase for a game I've already played a million times is kind of hard.

Still though, while it seems a little pointless I'm not mad about it for a few reasons.  First, even if every motherfucker did have a Gamecube that doesn't mean they kept it so those who are lamenting their stupid decision finally have a chance to give REMake another go, the game IS 13 years old to be fair.   The second reason I'm not angry is that if ReREMake does well, I hope it sends a message to Capcom about the kind of Resident Evil people want. 

Capcom have had a bad habit for a good while of just taking Resident Evil and making it progressively worse by releasing shitty versions of Resident Evil 4.  I'm hoping that this will send a message not only to Capcom but to other developers is that the kind of survival horror games that real fans of the genre want is shit like this.  None of this Amnesia-esque no combat bullshit, real survival horror games like we had back in the day.

Admittedly I'm going to buy it because my Gamecube and copy are stuck at my family home and I'm halfway across the world so thanks, I guess.  Still though, it does feel a little like a shitty cashgrab by playing on nostalgia but I guess I'll forgive you this time.

A Free Idea to Nintendo

I had a rant planned for today, but I'm in a stupidly good mood so I'm going to write something that's probably really stupid instead.

Right, if you owned a Gamecube then you may remember that piece of gear in the above picture.  For those that didn't own the system or for anyone who hasn't seen that before, that thing is the Game Boy Player.  It would fit to the bottom of your gamecube system and would allow you to play Game Boy Advance games on your TV, it was pretty cool.

So while I was taking a shower today, I had this stupid idea that I thought might help boost WiiU sales.  I don't know how viable this would be but a DS/3DS player seems like it would be an awesome idea to me.

Think about it, your TV would act as the top screen and the WiiU controller.  Maybe you could put some kind of support to have split screen on your TV and manipulate the touch from the pad if you didn't want to stare at that thing all the time.  Hell, if the game had a focus on the bottom screen (Trauma Centre for example) you could just swap em round too because obviously you want to the most interesting part of the game put on your big TV, staring at stats or timers wouldn't be fun.

The only reason I made this stupid post is because I would love to do a play through of The World Ends With You, but maybe if they could actually pull something like that off it would boost sales, who knows?

Someone send this to Nintendo because if something like this did become a reality I'd be so down for buying a WiiU ASAP

Killer7

I was browsing youtube to kill some time when I see that someone that I subscribed to covered this game as a part of their Halloween scare-fest thing.  This instantly prompted all the awesome memories I have of what is, to me, one of the best games (quite possibly THE best) game on the Gamecube, so I thought I'd have a little gush about it right here.

So, unless you've been living under a rock, you are probably aware of who Suda51 one is.  In case you do live under a rock, or you don't game as much as everyone else, Suda51 is the guy behind the No More Heroes games and the more recent Shadows of the Damned.  Now people loved stuff like No More Heroes, but I was quite disappointed with it, because I was comparing it to this thing.

So, Killer7 follows a group of assassins as they try to take down a terrorist organisation known as Heavens Smile.  The 7 assassins aren't actually real though, they are all different personalities in some guys psyche that are given form somehow.  Basically, the plot is the fucking strangest thing I've ever played through, but it's actually really good.  There is a big story arc about relations between Japan and the US and government conspiracy and stuff, but some of the chapters seemingly have no link to that, but then they actually do, and....oh god, shit's nuts.  Just play it, it's really hard to explain.

The only real way to describe the gameplay, along with pretty much everything else in this game, is unique.  You are on rails all the time, but you still have freedom to choose where you want to go at junctions in the level, and the levels get more sprawly and complicated as you go.  You have to stop and go into this first person mode to fire your weapon, but before you can shoot anything you have to scan the environment since the enemies all come with built in stealth.  Combat aside, it has those kind of survival-horror esque puzzles of finding weird shit to use as keys to open various things.  On top of that, each personality has it's own ability, which you have to make use of in order to progress.

The other big thing about this game is the art style, and it's really pretty but still retains a sort of bleak atmosphere.

It's cel-shading out the arse, but it's done in this really masterful way and the game looks really good as a result.

I could probably fill up about a weeks worth of posts just talking about each individual aspect of this game and why it's just so damn good.  But instead of me yapping on, I recommend that you hop on e-bay or amazon or something and fucking find a copy.  Gamecube version is better than the PS2 version, but whatever version you play, you won't regret it.