dev, computing and games

Finished Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest. This was a co-operative gameplay I finished with a couple friends as a follow up to our completion of Donkey Kong Country 1.

Completion time: about a year, since we played in small increments once in a while.

Game is longer and a lot spicier than 1. Some levels gave us a very hard time. Yeah I am a big fan of the minecart autoscroller.

Time and time again I am really impressed by how much graphics can be fit on a SNES cart. The levels are all full of lush, irregularly-shaped (non-tiled-looking) elements without a lot of repetition; sprites are big with lots of animations, lots of frames in each one; backgrounds have a lot of variety. At the same time, it also doesn't appear they got too fancy with storage of graphics. I looked at the ROM and could spot at least some 4bpp graphics data stored plain, uncompressed. They just used a big cartridge-- 32mb, big for this console.

The technical high points for this game are offline rather than online of course. These are pre-rendered 3D models rendered with Silicon Graphics software, likely on CPU, baked into a bunch of 2D sprites. Everyone likes this. I can't think of a single fourth-console-generation game which does this and looks bad. More games would have surely done it if it wasn't so expensive back then, in terms of money.

Only criticism is I was disappointed with the final boss fight. The fight from DKC1 established a pretty high bar, to be fair- it had that cool "fake credits then surprise there's more". Not saying DKC2 had to replicate that, but maybe the final boss could have had something else cool. Nope. You fight King K Rool on a pirate ship. He throws projectiles. Pretty standard stuff. Maybe they thought no one would get far enough to see that, due to Windy H̶e̶l̶l̶ Well.

February 8th, 2020 at 6:23 am