trying my best to be a big girl about it but the takes were honestly so bad. like super kiwi 64 fucks actually but go off. oh no i'm vaguechosting again help
going to take this time to remind everyone, especially myself, that you can just unfollow people that put bad opinions on your website. you won't see that gunk anymore! with any luck their incorrectness will fade into the background discourse radiation. and if you are using cohost correctly you are already following too many pages, so this will only make scrolling easier.
weak ramble about why super kiwi 64 is good under the cut. if you want more or better arguments, you will have to wait for the toree chost that i am cooking.
my conception of rareware is "responsible for star fox adventures" and not "beloved for banjo and conker and dk64" so i'm not especially nostalgic. i am fascinated by small games and just how little you need in assets and code to make a fun game, and kiwi hits a lot of good buttons for me there. it rewards study by analysis or comparison, while also making that analysis accessible through its size, straightforward influences, and its partial adherence to the facets of the nostalgia it references.
it's a bag of design tricks employed to sketch out a game, and ramp you up very quickly into an aesthetic and gameplay mode and then let you spend some time there. there is a level for climbing a large structure; a level for tearing through a jungle; a level for puzzling out an alienating maze. there's the keys level, the adjustable lava level, the environmental storytelling level. it's playing the hits and you can be rid of it, 100%, in less than an hour if you were so inclined. but also you can also just vibe out. the game wants you to go wherever you want and do whatever you want, so it is more than happy to let you do that once you have a handle on the controls.
the focus thus turns on the world itself, especially with the implicit goal of 100% collectibles looming over kiwi as it does every other collectathon. you can put your searching energy and your gamer instincts to use making short work of the level, but in a way you are invited also to savour its simple construction, to really imagine how it was made.
maybe that's a little too gamey and maybe it's not intentional, but it seems quite poetic to me, in a way that people with nostalgia really picked up on as an exemplar of the era and genre of games it gestures at.