Donkey Konga (2004)
Looking back on a miserable 2020, I have to say it’s pretty impressive that my family and I were in lockdown for several months now and we never ended up killing each other. Now, I didn’t have it as bad as others; there were four of us living in the house and we all generally kept to ourselves anyway, until hostile lunchtimes and dinnertimes of course.
Continue reading “Beating the lockdown drum until there’s no more air in it”
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1992)
Every army needs its mainstay, that ever-present soldier who you can trust your life to, or that ultra-reliable piece of equipment that will never fail on you. You don’t bring undertakers out there on the battlefield – even if it would be a busman’s holiday for them, they’re the type of people who’ll always let you down. And if you had to trust your life to a machine, you’d be absolutely buggered if it was a printer, wouldn’t you?
Continue reading “Remember – switching on your Super Nintendo is always faster than loading screens”
Donkey Kong Country (1994)
Game design. The one thing that we’ve always wanted to do. Well, not all of us. Most young lads growing up wanted to be footballers or astronauts of course, but I was aware of my limitations early. As a result, even in my most wildly unrealistic fantasies, I was still essentially a no-name code monkey. Isn’t that sad?
Donkey Kong (1981)
I’m not destined to be a great Donkey Kong player. In fact I’m probably a bit of a disgrace to the name of Donkey Kong. My first bad high score came when I was playing through Donkey Kong 64 and it became apparent that in order to beat the game, I’d have to beat an arcade perfect Donkey Kong conversion. Not only that, but I’d actually have to beat it twice, with one life each time, and it was harder the second time round. This is where I recorded my second bad high score, and my third, all the way through to my seven hundred and fifth, after which I burst into tears of failure. And I honestly can’t remember any other game ever making me do that.
Continue reading “Billy Mitchell is the Machiavellian villain of our times”
6 of Gaming’s Most Depressing Game Over Screens (2014)
I don’t care how good a retro gamer you are, every single one of us has had to choke down the indignity of witnessing the Game Over screen in games – the more dull-witted gamers have probably had to suffer this embarrassment time and time again. NES-era Game Over screens tended to be simple white-text-on-black-background affairs and more often than not were plagued with some questionable grammar (even apart from “Game Over” itself, as if that phrase makes any sense).
But as games became more imaginative and interactive, the Game Over screens followed suit. Here are six of the more depressing retro Game Over screens that many of us have had to sit through before we could endeavour to try again. Whichever of the games on this list you’ve played, you’ve probably seen the Game Over screen to it at least a dozen times. Enjoy!
Continue reading “6 of Gaming’s Most Depressing Game Over Screens”
The Top 18 Fucker Donkey Kong Country Levels (2012)
Please be advised that this feature contains strong language.
Feature, 26/11/12
As if Mario and his travails weren’t enough to whet the appetite of SNES-owning platforming fans, up stepped Donkey Kong with his fantastic monogrammed tie. And he brought his buddies too! Actually, it’s well he did, since the big man (ape) is only playable in two of the four games we’ll be looking at in this feature. In fact you could easily argue that it’s Diddy Kong who’s the centre of the piece. But who likes Diddy Kong these days?
The difficulty involved in finding every single wee collectible that the games have to offer would be bad enough if some of the levels involved weren’t already ball-busting to get through by themselves. For all the joys brought by these games, they also were capable of ratcheting up some severe frustration. Here, we will look at the four Donkey Kong Country games (the SNES trilogy of Donkey Kong Country, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest, Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble! and the excellent Wii callback, Donkey Kong Country Returns). In particular, I’ll be going through some of the most difficult and aggravating levels they had to offer, from not-too-baddest to hardest. You could probably that I’d be looking at them from a disgruntled player’s point of view, seeing as how I’ve used ‘fucker’ as an adjective to describe these fucking dickcrushingly difficult levels. 18 levels in all, in fact. A level for every… Kong? Continue reading “The Top 18 Fucker Donkey Kong Country Levels (Feature) (2012)”
