Also known as the argument that lets you know they got bodied by SMB3.
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Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze |OT| Donkey's Got a Brand New Funk
- Thread starter TheMoon
- Start date
Just make sure that your daughter learns how to roll-jump and she'll be fine.
Oh, I totally agree. I think of them as different beasts as well. I generally prefer an exploration based game (which is why BotW and Mario Odyssey are my favorite games in their respective series) to an action based one, but I also like to get that adrenaline fill from pure platforming games like TF. Both are A++ as far as I'm concerned though.
I doubly cheated by using Funky and a green balloon. But I felt justified because as you said, K levels appear to be assholes. Not looking forward to doing it again with DK.
Still loving this game, even though it is kicking my ass on classic mode. Died so many times on that owl boss.
Diddy's glide has some very slight advantages over Dixie's boost in certain situations, and in water levels his jetpack is faster than Dixie's hair-rotor.
Well, it's true that the levels are more linear, but if you're going for 100% (or 200%) completion, there's absolutely exploration to be done. You have to search every nook and cranny of every level for the puzzle pieces, and some of them will take you a while.
Though yeah, I loved Celeste, but Tropical Freeze is the better game by a mile.
It sucks, but this game is worth it, at least if you haven't played it on Wii U. I recommend investing in an Amazon Prime or Best Buy Gamers Unlocked membership and $60 games are $47 at that point. I don't foresee Nintendo backing down from the $60 price tag with many of it's Wii U ports at this point.
Did you have the game on Wii U? Get the game if it has value to you, don't get it if it doesn't. I'm usually an advocate for voting with your wallet, but this game is absolutely a $60 game, and given that it more than doubled first week sales in Japan, it's already on track to sell far better than it's predecessor.
I'm glad to see some proper appreciation for Yoshi's Woolly World in this thread. This is how you know you're among people who take their platformers seriously.
This video gets it:
It's truly one of the unsung achievements of the game. Perhaps it was there in DKCR too, but that game didn't have the benefit of built-in speed-run replays to show this off. You can rank DKCTF against other platformers this way or that, but one respect in which it stands out like no other game for me is that it's probably the best introduction to speed-running that I've ever seen, a gateway into thinking about momentum and using enemies/obstacles in your favour. Almost every instance I can think of where an environmental effect squashes an enemy without you doing anything—sometimes played for comedy, sometimes there as a teaching tool to signal how a new hazard works—serves the additional purpose of cluing you in to a potential skip.
I didn't really think about this when I first played the game in 2014, as I put the game down after 200% and didn't go for Time Attack medals, but this time around I was more attentive to it, taking a lot of deaths to figure out roll-jump shortcuts and gauge distances on my own. The one that stood out for me must be that massive, precipitous dive you can take at the end of 6-1 (Homecoming Hijinxs) without collapsing the columns of ice, which is suggested by the placement of the G.
As much as I liked what MercurySteam did with Samus Returns, it's this kind of attentiveness to overlaying different paths and styles of play that makes me wish Retro was working on a 2D Metroid, because DKCTF exhibits exactly the kind of mindset that should go into deliberately designing to accommodate skips and sequence breaks while concealing them with the visual grammar of "standard" play.
I haven't done any kind of rigorous test, but I was going to raise this as well, as I played this extensively on battery earlier in the week and was on track to squeeze about four hours of this game on a full charge, whereas with most first-party Switch releases (including Wii U ports like BotW and MK8) the outer limit would be three.
I vastly prefer Diddy in 6-K (Slippy Spikes) because there are so many parts of the stage where you want horizontal adjustment, but gaining height is a liability. The whole stage is laid out to make you think you should take Cranky in to traverse the spikes, but Diddy is the safest pick.
This video gets it:
It's truly one of the unsung achievements of the game. Perhaps it was there in DKCR too, but that game didn't have the benefit of built-in speed-run replays to show this off. You can rank DKCTF against other platformers this way or that, but one respect in which it stands out like no other game for me is that it's probably the best introduction to speed-running that I've ever seen, a gateway into thinking about momentum and using enemies/obstacles in your favour. Almost every instance I can think of where an environmental effect squashes an enemy without you doing anything—sometimes played for comedy, sometimes there as a teaching tool to signal how a new hazard works—serves the additional purpose of cluing you in to a potential skip.
I didn't really think about this when I first played the game in 2014, as I put the game down after 200% and didn't go for Time Attack medals, but this time around I was more attentive to it, taking a lot of deaths to figure out roll-jump shortcuts and gauge distances on my own. The one that stood out for me must be that massive, precipitous dive you can take at the end of 6-1 (Homecoming Hijinxs) without collapsing the columns of ice, which is suggested by the placement of the G.
As much as I liked what MercurySteam did with Samus Returns, it's this kind of attentiveness to overlaying different paths and styles of play that makes me wish Retro was working on a 2D Metroid, because DKCTF exhibits exactly the kind of mindset that should go into deliberately designing to accommodate skips and sequence breaks while concealing them with the visual grammar of "standard" play.
I haven't done any kind of rigorous test, but I was going to raise this as well, as I played this extensively on battery earlier in the week and was on track to squeeze about four hours of this game on a full charge, whereas with most first-party Switch releases (including Wii U ports like BotW and MK8) the outer limit would be three.
I vastly prefer Diddy in 6-K (Slippy Spikes) because there are so many parts of the stage where you want horizontal adjustment, but gaining height is a liability. The whole stage is laid out to make you think you should take Cranky in to traverse the spikes, but Diddy is the safest pick.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the Prime discount. Guess it's too late to use now, though. :/
I have few questions before I buy the game:
1. I'm not that great at 2d games but I was able to finish Rayman Legends/origins, how does the difficulty compared to the latter levels of those games where they were tough but satisfying? I finished Celeste main path and found it a little brutal so how does it compare to that?
2. Can I switch to Funky mode between levels or do I have to restart the game to switch?
3. Can I have multiple save files?
4. Is their a timer on missions?
5. How is the Joy Con thumb-stick with the game? I really disliked it with Celeste and thought it was inadequate for that type of game. it was hard for me to do accurate directional jumps with it.
1. I'm not that great at 2d games but I was able to finish Rayman Legends/origins, how does the difficulty compared to the latter levels of those games where they were tough but satisfying? I finished Celeste main path and found it a little brutal so how does it compare to that?
2. Can I switch to Funky mode between levels or do I have to restart the game to switch?
3. Can I have multiple save files?
4. Is their a timer on missions?
5. How is the Joy Con thumb-stick with the game? I really disliked it with Celeste and thought it was inadequate for that type of game. it was hard for me to do accurate directional jumps with it.
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1. It's a tough game, not gonna lie, but if you're adept at SNES-era 2D platformers you'll be fine, and you'll never get a game over since the game showers you with lives.
2. No. You have to pick whether or not to activate Funky Mode at the start of the game.
3. Yes.
4. Only in Time Attack.
Thanks for answering!! So what happens when you do get a game over? just restart a level instead of a checkpoint? Can I farm lives in earlier levels?
You restart the level, yeah. And you can farm if you need to but lives are abundant in nigh every level and you can buy them at the item shop. I never dipped below 20.
Lives are dirt cheap at the shop, and you'll get many many lives just playing normally. I'd be surprised if the number of lives goes below 20
Time trial! You can choose Time Trial mode before entering a level you've already completed. The DK emblem will turn into a shiny gold, gold, silver or bronce medal if you do good enough. They are pretty tough but is the mode where the level design shines the most, if you are into that kind of things.
I'm sitting here a couple days after finishing the game again on Switch, with my arms crossed, wondering why the hell we don't have DKC Returns on Switch.
It ain't right, I tell ya.
It ain't right, I tell ya.
I'm absolutely thrilled. This is my first Donkey Kong game and I didn't realise how much I enjoyed 2D platformers. Just beat the 1-K level and what an incredible rush I got finally doing it! LOVE this game, and can't wait for more 2D platformers coming to Switch, eagerly anticipating Yoshi.
I didn't own a Wii or Wii U or any Nintendo console in general so it's fantastic to finally experience these great games.
I didn't own a Wii or Wii U or any Nintendo console in general so it's fantastic to finally experience these great games.
Whee, 100%. All figurines are in the bag, though not all puzzle pieces, but those should be easy to mop up. Not sure if I'll dive into Hard Mode right away (and finish off my puzzle pieces along the way) or fool around with a Funky Mode file just to see how Funky plays. Everything went much more smoothly than I remembered, and I'm apparently a much better player now than I used to be, but it may just be that this time around I had the roll jump and the bounce timing completely down and made the most of them all over the place, whereas in my first run to 100% (and maybe even on my way to 200%) I didn't really practice them until the unlockable stages. The neat thing about the speed paths in this game is that once you spot some of the placements and timings, they are actually easier to reliably execute than traversing the "normal" path of hitting every platform.
I'm reminded of what bugs me about some of the bosses, though. Other than DKCR itself, there really isn't much of a precedent for 2D platformers with fluidly animated 3D enemies at all scales, some of which have spots that you can and cannot hit along the same plane. In the NSMB series, for instance, boss vulnerability is very clear at all times—either you can hit them or you can't, and if you approach from above while they're open, you'll always hit—and in cases where the bosses scale up to something much larger than the standard grid, it's usually in situations like a Bowser pursuit where you can't bop the boss on the head with a normal jump at all.
But here, you have bosses like the ones in Worlds 1 and 6, which are not only moving targets but which are divided, on the horizontal axis, between hazardous half and a vulnerable half—and the demarcation is not visually exact. So you're not only tracking a slippery moving target but aiming for the back half while having to get vertical clearance over the front half. Yes, you can time it out and make it manageable, but I don't think this concept works in the sense that it simply isn't fun. There's a pervasive sense that the hazard zone is larger than it looks (exacerbated by how horned enemies tilt their heads up to gore you), and the cognitive challenge of wrapping your head around simultaneously jumping over and landing on a single contiguous object without a hard boundary in the middle just throws off your expectation of whether you'll land a hit, such that your reading of your own trajectory isn't reliable. Usually, in a platformer (and indeed, everywhere else in this platformer), you know whether you'll stick a landing on target a split-second before you actually connect, but with the final boss in particular, this isn't always so. And amidst all this there is an arbitrary rule that you take damage for rolling into bosses while they're standing, not because there's any visual indication of a counter like spikes on their armour, but just because.
I don't even mind the platforming segments in the final boss even though the last phase transition is likely to kill you the first time around if you don't know what to expect. They're at least easy to reliably execute once you figure them out; they feel within your control. Actually hitting the damned thing in the right place is a different story.
I might just clear all the bosses first in my Hard Mode run to get them out of the way and not deal with them (and I'm not sure I'll bother with Time Attack medals for them at all).
I'm reminded of what bugs me about some of the bosses, though. Other than DKCR itself, there really isn't much of a precedent for 2D platformers with fluidly animated 3D enemies at all scales, some of which have spots that you can and cannot hit along the same plane. In the NSMB series, for instance, boss vulnerability is very clear at all times—either you can hit them or you can't, and if you approach from above while they're open, you'll always hit—and in cases where the bosses scale up to something much larger than the standard grid, it's usually in situations like a Bowser pursuit where you can't bop the boss on the head with a normal jump at all.
But here, you have bosses like the ones in Worlds 1 and 6, which are not only moving targets but which are divided, on the horizontal axis, between hazardous half and a vulnerable half—and the demarcation is not visually exact. So you're not only tracking a slippery moving target but aiming for the back half while having to get vertical clearance over the front half. Yes, you can time it out and make it manageable, but I don't think this concept works in the sense that it simply isn't fun. There's a pervasive sense that the hazard zone is larger than it looks (exacerbated by how horned enemies tilt their heads up to gore you), and the cognitive challenge of wrapping your head around simultaneously jumping over and landing on a single contiguous object without a hard boundary in the middle just throws off your expectation of whether you'll land a hit, such that your reading of your own trajectory isn't reliable. Usually, in a platformer (and indeed, everywhere else in this platformer), you know whether you'll stick a landing on target a split-second before you actually connect, but with the final boss in particular, this isn't always so. And amidst all this there is an arbitrary rule that you take damage for rolling into bosses while they're standing, not because there's any visual indication of a counter like spikes on their armour, but just because.
I don't even mind the platforming segments in the final boss even though the last phase transition is likely to kill you the first time around if you don't know what to expect. They're at least easy to reliably execute once you figure them out; they feel within your control. Actually hitting the damned thing in the right place is a different story.
I might just clear all the bosses first in my Hard Mode run to get them out of the way and not deal with them (and I'm not sure I'll bother with Time Attack medals for them at all).
Yes there is definitely some poking around required to get the puzzle pieces (the worst feeling is finishing a bonus room only to see that you have already collected that piece!). But still, I remember a few levels in Celeste where you are just spat out into a huge room with multiple possible exits and paths forward.. almost like a Metroid game or SteamWorld Dig. For a platformer, I much prefer the straight-ahead, bite-sized level based approach of DKCTF. Sure there are secrets to find, but there aren't branching optional paths or anything like that really.
Switch your first Nintendo console? Man, you got a lot of masterpieces to play for the first time.
