2. donkey kong country returns hd
i bought this game on one of the single worst days of my life and played it to completion in 2 sessions.
as a kid i didn't manage to finish the original dkc returns. it's hard. like, weirdly harder than the original dkc trilogy, i want to say? but definitely crazy hard if you're a kid and your main platformers are like, sonic and mario. i wasn't good at games yet, like i am now. i always wanted to go back to this game, but then the 3ds version was kind of lame, people said, or something, so i didn't bite on that.
eventually i did try to play the original game again, on the wii, doing the multiplayer with my partner at the time. i didn't really like playing co-op games with people very much but we'd just moved in together and she voiced an unusually-high-for-her interest in the game, so we started it. she was really bad at it and i, i suppose, was really bad at explaining the motion controls? she was really stuck on the motion controls. really just couldn't get a grip on those motion controls. and she got mad at me. and that was that.
then much later we broke up and she physically assaulted me so i flew back home with nowhere to stay and bought the switch version, the version i'm reviewing now, figuring that i'd heard it had problems but i didn't care and was probably going to kill myself soon anyway because i'd just been assaulted and lost my job and didn't have anywhere to go and really i just wanted to play something and donkey kong tickled me in the moment.
the game is really good! the platforming challenges are interesting and, compared to the original trilogy, i love the weightiness to dk's movements. you feel like a big lumbering gorilla. i was also cruising through the game. i don't know how far i got as a kid - world 5 or so, maybe? - but as an adult the game was no match for me, even when i would repeatedly kill myself whenever i missed a KONG letter so i could go back to the checkpoint.
but it wasn't too easy or anything, i'm just good at games. i felt like the difficulty was honestly really a smooth uphill ramp, slowly engaging me more and more while never being frustrating up until maybe the second half of the last main world. it did start frustrating me then. the bonus world, too, i thought was awful. that last level was completely unenjoyable for me. the precision platforming there combined with the slippery, heavy nature of dk just worked to piss me off. i can't be that mad at it, though, looking back. it's the bonus level after all.
you can play as dixie in the hd version. i think it was an update they added or something. i tried to avoid her, only grab diddy from the barrels so as to have an experience as close to the wii version as possible, but i thought, maybe if dixie had been in the wii version, with her double-jump-type hair helicopter situation, i'd have gotten further through the game with that ex. she called me on both of the nights i spent playing dkc returns to make sure i hadn't killed myself or become homeless or whatever. at the time i was still largely blaming myself for how it all went down. in retrospect that was stupid of me, obviously, because only one of us got assaulted and it was me, but i just wanted to be in her good graces again. i remember, even then, that i knew she had assaulted me, and all i wanted her to do was acknowledge it. show some kind of remorse. she has, as far as i know, never admitted it. it's been just a few month shy of a year since it happened now but i still have these panic attacks every day. my therapist actually says they're not technically panic attacks but my body "re-experiencing trauma." i'll tell you what they Technically Are: not fun!
i used to think retro studios basically could do no wrong. they made metroid prime, metroid prime 2, and those donkey kong country games. prime 4 kinda sucked, which wasn't really their fault i think, but prime 3 kinda sucks too and that probably was more their fault, and they're located in texas, the physical abuser manufacturing plant, but i still like them, and i like their games. ultimately i wish there was a more objectively "definitive" way to play dkc returns. the co-op is busted in the switch version or something, i don't know if they ever fixed it.
even if they did fix the co-op, dixie kong brings another problem for me. i touched on this briefly earlier, but basically, the way it works in singleplayer is you're donkey kong and you pick up a barrel with diddy in it. it's like a power-up. except now, dixie can also be in it, and she has different abilities. and you have to wait a second or so for the barrel to swap from diddy to dixie. it's an elegant system, but if you're like me and only want to use diddy (the way the original wii game was) you're constantly being forced to wait a second before grabbing the barrel so it'll swap from dixie to diddy. did i explain that in a way that makes sense? well, those seconds of waiting add up! especially towards the end of the game, where you're dying a lot, having to grab the barrel again and again, having to wait for it to spin around from dixie to diddy again and again - i wish you could just disable her in the options or something.
all of those complaints are far from deal-breakers, though. this is still the version of the game i'd recommend someone play, mostly because the 3ds version is ugly and the wii version has those annoying motion controls she couldn't wrap her head around even though she had no problem motion controlling her arms forward and throwing me into a wall full-force like i was a wii remote (wrist strap untethered) and she was a particularly excited and poorly supervised child playing donkey kong country returns with greasy fingers.