Subjecting myself to Donkey Kong Country Returns again tonight. This game and I have a bit of history.
I'd played Returns on real hardware near when it came out originally, and I sort of hated it. The game felt prohibitively sluggish to me. Some of that is due to Donkey Kong himself, which is made to feel big and heavy like a 300lb gorilla ought to. But some of that was also just, like, a strange problem with latency. The game did not feel responsive, like I'd push the jump button and it'd take a frame or two for Donkey Kong to actually jump. Made platforming very difficult. Never figured out if I imagined it or if it was a real problem.
Though, for the record, playing Rayman Origins on that same Wii also felt sluggish in the same way as DKCR, leading me to believe it might have been a hardware problem. Either way, DKCR makes me so mad I don't even finish the second world, I don't think.
Tropical Freeze, the sequel to DKCR comes, and I receive it for review on TSSZ. I'm thinking I'm going to savage this game's controls because of the way I felt with DKCR. Instead, I fall in love with it. Whatever problems I had with the Wii game don't exist in Tropical Freeze. It controls well and plays great. An awesome game.
So I start to wonder: everybody else loved DKCR. Was it really just a hardware problem for me? Could I play DKCR somewhere else and have a better experience? Nintendo runs a program where you get a free 3DS game as some kind of reward for a thing they're doing, like if you buy a certain amount of games in a short length of time you'd get something? I forget. Point is, for my free game, I picked the 3DS port of Donkey Kong Country Returns.
Same problem there. The game just feels sluggish and unresponsive and hard to control in a way I don't enjoy. I guess it's probably better than it was on the Wii? But not much. I play through over half the game on the 3DS, getting up to the dinosaur/cliff world, but struggle to muster up the energy to finish the game.
Which brings us here. I don't know why, but I booted DKCR in Dolphin up a couple nights ago and actually spent kind of a long time setting up the controls so that it felt comfortable. It's worth mentioning that when I played DKCR on real hardware, I did so with the Gecko Cheat Code to enable Classic Controller Pro support because I refused to waggle. DKCR's waggle was maybe one of the most egregious "this really should have been a button" things ever, to me. Something Tropical Freeze fixed and was much better for!
Obviously the Classic Controller support isn't needed on Dolphin, so I just set controller binds so that the R trigger grabs things and the L trigger waggles. Setting up the latter was tricky, because DKCR actually looks for you waggling both the remote and nunchuk at the same time in order to register a proper ground pound.
But it feels... better? Actually? More responsive than it did on real hardware. Which makes me wonder if the Classic Controller code was the source of the dreaded latency -- but then, that wouldn't explain Rayman Origins or the 3DS version of DKCR.
But I also discovered some of these Gecko cheats just don't work. I've turned on a few -- Diddy has infinite glide now, for instance, making him feel more like Dixie does in Tropical Freeze. And the clock is stopped during bonus rooms, because those never needed time pressure. Truth be told, I did try to turn on cheats to remap the waggle actions to the Wii remote's B button, but all that ever did was completely break the controls for Diddy's glide. Thus, I was forced to figure out how to properly bind waggle to my Dualshock 4's trigger.
I don't know if I'll finish it. Even with the controls feeling "right," the game teeters on the edge of feeling ever so slightly unfriendly. Not much, but the game is weirdly adversarial, like it's trying to trick me into hurting myself. It's a hard thing to describe, and I don't even think everybody picks up on it, but there's a vibe with some retro games where it feels like you're fighting against the game designer themselves, you know?
In the modern context it's something like Kaizo Mario or I Wanna Be The Guy, I guess. Games where you can feel the creator watching you die and laughing at your misfortune, like "I GOT YOU, LOSER!" Back in the NES and SNES era, there used to be a time where many more games had a little bit of that feeling in it (though it is exaggerated to the extreme in Kaizo Mario and IWBTG).
I never got that vibe from the original Donkey Kong Country games, but DKCR has just a teeny tiny itty bitty sliver of that feel. You reach the third form of the first boss and it's like, "Really? Isn't this a little bit too much for the first boss?"
Who knows if I'll stick with it, but I've already played two sessions already, so it wasn't some kind of one-and-done sort of deal.
I'm surprised how nice it looks in Dolphin even just at 720p. It wouldn't take much work to put this out on the Switch; just clean up some of the GUI. It scales to higher resolutions remarkably well.