Kongs of Note

So I managed to rent DK returns on the week my brother went abroad on holiday. In 4 days of play (together with other activities :P), I could reach world 6 (canyon of skeletton dinosaurs) with some help of Super Kong in Tidal Terror. A few boss fights put some stress on me, but with a stock of ~200 golden coins, there's not much I really fear.

The game is globally great, and I love how it comes with a lot of new (imho) ways to hide secrets in the levels, with breakable items, flowers to blow over and funny things like "keep bouncing and the bananas keep flowing. Keep collecting bananas and Something Good Will Happen (tm).

A la base, Donkey Kong Returns n'avait pas franchement attiré mon attention. Les tonneaux octogonaux dû à un manque de polygone, moi, ça m'a toujours laissé froid. Mais en croisant par hasard des vidéos de "long run" sur Internet, j'ai commencé à m'intéresser à la richesse des décors, puis au nombre de bonnes idées de gameplay que l'on retrouve. Si bien que quand mon frère m'a annoncé les dates de ses congés, j'ai filé à la médiathèque voir si je n'y trouvais pas ce petit bijou simiesque.

Comme d'habitude dans un DKC, il y aura des objets spéciaux à trouver dans le niveau pour accéder au monde caché. Comme d'habitude, aussi, il y a des vies et des gamelles à la pelle. Pas mal de phase d'escalades, aussi, pourvu que le terrain s'y prête. Par rapport aux précédents épisodes sur SuperNES, par contre, la quasi totalité des tonneaux a disparu. Fini de "sonder" les murs un baril en main ou de sauter par-dessus les Kremlins pour parvenir à ouvrir un passage secret. Pour son retour, notre Kong préféré a deux nouvelles actions d'exploration: cogner le sol ou souffler, chacune nécessitant de secouer la wiimoote. Le trait de génie de Retro Studio, c'est de profiter du décor particulièrement foisonnant du jeu pour "cacher" les objets inter-actifs et changer régulièrement (à chaque monde) leur apparence. Très réussi, selon moi.

Diddy's jetpack is somehow a curious replacement to Dixies haircopter, but well, here it is and it's gonna be useful. If anything, I suffered the use of controller-shaking for triggering the ROLL mechanic. ROLL is essential in my gameplay of DK series, as it allows ROLL+JUMP to clear larger jumps with less precision, including gathering of special things.

Clearly, Retro Studio did a wonderful job of packing the background with spectacular environment for the action. Rather pleasing, although it serves no useful purpose. You'll see it e.g. in L2-7 : Infini Tsunami - L2-5 : Mer Tentaculaire - L4-2 : wagon & gazon, but also in many others.

I do have a major complain about the game, though:

unlimited stock of lives.

Let's think about it for a couple of seconds: what is the purpose of 1UPs in a game ? For the player, it's a way to ensure he can keep going forward, despite the difficulty of the game. For the level designer, it's an ultimate motivation that should push the player into trying harder to beat a challenge. Several 1-UPs in SMB3, SMB and even SMW were place such that you'd have to rush to another part of the level to grab it after you released it.

Now, this all work because you've got the pressure of "having to re-do everything" if you run out of lives in a level. As technology progressed, game developers have reduced the amount of "everything" you'd have to re-do so that they can keep growing the amount of time you'd invest in one game. In DKC Returns, it is brought to a new extreme: as far as "reaching the end" of the game is concerned, you'll never have to visit levels several time:

• there is plenty of (respawning) golden coins in the levels and you can trade them for 1UPs at Cranky's house.
• there's no such thing as "a level that's too hard": at most you'll spend 8 lives in there, after which Super Kong can get you out.
• you can always save automatically at any level in the game (compare this to e.g. NSMB where you'd have to "buy" save slots by unlocking mushroom houses with your (much rarer) golden coins.
• there are tons of bananas in the levels. It's not rare to lose ~6 lives on a level and still end up with more lives than you started with. Compare that to SMB and SML where the first bonus box you encounter at a "mid-level checkpoint" would be empty when you're re-spawning after a failure.
  
• I spotted tricky places that featured a bonus room next to the check point, and a 1UP balloon *at the start* of the tricky track: you can re-do as much as you want. (Typical design in '90s was to place the 1UP *at the end* of the tricky part).
  
• If you had less than 3 lives when resuming a game, Cranky will give you some for free.
• Of course, you can instantaneously hop to any level on the map, in order to re-fill your stock of 1UPs in a more cosy place (you could do that in SMW as well, but that'd take you up to 5 minutes to travel through the world).
  
• If you were unlucky enough to run out of lives, that's really due to poor planning (entering a tricky level with less than 8 balloons). Don't worry too much: you'll just re-start the level you were stuck on.

Many of those bullets have a good side, but put them altogether, and you get a game that is no longer making you strong enough to beat it "with a minimum amount of failure". And needless to say that the über-marvel of bonus world of my childhood (the CONTINUE) is a long extinct species. The trick RARE used on the first Donkey Kong Country (were you'd have to progress significantly in a world so that you'd unlock Funky's Flight and be allowed to move to another world of the island) was imho brilliant in the way it added thrill to the game. I'm now a grown-up with dish-washing and other duties to fullfill, so I'm looking for entertainment more than thrill when I pick up the paddle, but I wonder how the kids of today would react if they were presented such a challenge after being used to the care-free wandering of modern platformers ...

Dans Donkey Kong Return, on joue pour ainsi dire avec les vies illimitées dès le départ. Ce n'est pas un évènement isolé, c'est une tendance générale dans les jeux de plate-forme de ces dernières années (au point qu'il n'y a même plus de compteur de vies dans certains d'entre-eux).
Non seulement il y a de nombreuses vies à gagner, mais on peut carrément en acheter à la cabane de Cranky contre des pièces d'or relativement courantes dans les niveaux (et qui réapparaissent à chaque fois que l'on recommence le niveau).

Comprenons-nous bien: la difficulté est à mon sens bien dosée, et toutes ces vies sont clairement les bienvenues. C'est rigolo de collectionner les ballons etc.

Par contre le frisson de voir sa partie interrompue par un game over, lui, a à mon avis disparu. Par l'introduction de Super Kong, tout niveau commencé avec au moins 9 vies peut être passé: si vous êtes Game Over, ce n'est donc pas que vous êtes mauvais au jeu, mais tout simplement que vous n'avez pas lorgné suffisamment souvent sur votre compte de vies. En plus de celà, entre deux niveaux, vous pouvez retourner instantanément à n'importe quel niveau du jeu pour refaire le plein. Voilà qui tranche assez sérieusement avec les mécanismes de DKC et DKC2 ou sauvegardes et voyages dans l'île ne devenait possible qu'après avoir complété un certain nombre de niveaux dans le monde en cours.

Et si malgré tout vous êtes game over ? Eh bien consolez vous: Cranky vous offrira tout simplement quelques ballons gratuits et vous reprendrez le niveau perdu depuis le début. Oui,
vous avez bien lu: "le niveau". C'est tout. Ça peut déjà être long dans DKC Returns, mais c'est risible par rapport au "recommence au monde 1-1 et cherche plus de vies cachées/ramasse plus de bananes pour être mieux armé quand tu arriveras dans le monde des glaces, mon coco. Là, t'as pas encore le niveau."
Il faudra que je trouve mieux pour "Bilou: nuts'n'bolts" et "Bilou's Adventure".

More suprising: I'm simultaneously playing a game of "Mickey Magical Quest" on the GBA (initially a SNES game), and they did the very same: if you're game over, you'll restart from the very same level, effectively providing you with an infinite number of 1UPs. Even the amount of "cash" you had collected (which you can trade for permanent power-ups in hidden stores) is preserved, allowing you to collect an unbounded amount of money by just failing over and over 0_o. The only thing that is re-set is your score ... does anybody care ?