Why did Donkey Kong 64's reputation do a complete 180 since

>>4124487
Youtube.

Collectathon isn't a pejorative term.

I remember even back then that DK64, despite its positive reception, was criticized for focusing too much on collecting widgets.

Keep in mind the game came out at the tail end of the Mario 64-like 3D platformer's heyday. I think people were mostly burned out on the formula by then.

>>4124487
>Why do people act like you have to collect every single thing in the game when you can reach the final boss with substantially less than half?

Because people want to feel like they got the most that they could out of their game, which means finding every secret and unlocking every bonus level / powerup.

It's the same reason most people try to get 96* in Super Mario World, or beat K. Rool in DKC2's Lost World.

Dk64 was awesome

>>4124487
People think it's bad? I didn't know that.

>>4124487
Time moves on and perspective changes. When open platform games about running around collecting shit were new it seemed like a breath of fresh air. So any that didn't outright suck was seen positively at the start. But now most people realize how boring those games are. So now looking at them that the novelty wore off it's a different story.

>>4124487
>Why do people act like you have to collect every single thing in the game when you can reach the final boss with substantially less than half?

That's like asking why people 1CC games if it gives you more than one life.

>>4124505
>or beat K. Rool in DKC2's Lost World.
to be fair, you need to do this to actually play all the levels.

>>4124487
I recall the perception being pretty mixed even back then.

>>4124553
DK64 has a 90% Metacritic

>>4124559
>Review scores

>>4124547
Yes, and the only way to get 96* in SMW is to beat all the levels in Star Road and Special World.

>>4124487
DK64 was never good.

I remember I barely unlocked all the kongs before quitting. I remember it being super fucking tedious and boring and I gave up.

Stars in Mario 64 basically acted as milestones for a challenge. You did the challenge in a level, and you got a star. That's it, no frills. Your progression was gated by stars, because it meant completing a certain amount of stars in the previous levels before moving onto later ones.

The Rare style, Banjo Kazooie, and DK64 didn't get that. They had the jiggies as the challenges, but they also gated you from progression with notes, and abilities, and all that other garbage that just made it a shitty experience.

>>4124569
>denying the wisdom of the masses
>implying the majority of vidya journalists have integrity or arent sell-outs themselves

>>4124589
>The Rare style, Banjo Kazooie
I don't recall a single level of Banjo Kazooie where you couldn't 100% it the first time you stepped in. You must be thinking of Tooie, which was nowhere near as good as BK. Boss battles are cliche horseshit.

>>4124664
The Ice level, you have to come back after getting a running shoes upgrade.

>>4124686
The really annoying part is you can technically do the desert level first for the running shoes.... but then there's a door to a pyramid you can't open without a move from the ice level. The game never does this at any other point, and it's really fucking stupid.

>>4124587
the point is you need to get all the secrets in DKC2 to get the lost world to unlock, ad thus access all the levels. you don't need all the secrets in SMW to get access to all of the levels as multiple levels have exits that don't go anywhere or just create alternate paths to the same levels.

>>4124487

I love DK 64. and I played it for the first time less than 10 years ago, so it's not nostalgia.

>>4124723
So some random person liking it makes it good? Candy Crush must be amazing then!

DK64 has always been a love it/hate it game. I was around the DK64 gamefaqs board around its release and since the start there was many who loved it but also a bunch of haters and 1/10 reviews. I think it's a great game and don't get the hate.

IMO, its not a bad game. The character locked items just makes it have bad pacing.

>>4124732
>implying games are objectively good or bad

>>4124746
>samefag

So OP is full of shit when he says it did a "complete 180 turn" and "butt of all jokes", as if that's something that's established, don't listen to that. But there might be a slight drop in opinion of it since it's release, as is normal for almost every game.

>>4124746
I never played it, but I remember it being used a lot in trolling arguments. There were debates back then about whether the N64 Zelda games were RPGs (some things never change eh?) and DK64 was brought up with people saying if OOT was an RPG then so was that.

I never knew how much it was trolling and how much it was serious, I didn't care those semantic debates are always pretty dumb to me. But certainly there were a lot of people who had a very low opinion of DK64, that was my main take away from it all.

If DK64 had 10 additional FPS it would be twice as good of a game

>>4124732
>Candy Crush must be amazing then!
Candy Crush is just a bejeweled clone, right? Bejeweled is casual as fuck but it's fun and addictive.

>>4124487
but what if I don't really WANT all the golden bananas? why the fuck do the kongs need a mountain of fucking bananas when they can never finish eating them all and they have no economy to even use the ones made of precious metal for anything? how am I suppose to care about the narrative subtext of the games when both the protagonist and villain are inherently unrelatable megalomaniacs who just want to steal shit and horde it for no reason?

>>4124664
>you must be thinking of Tooie, which was nowhere near as good as BK.
I'll never understand the praise that BK still gets. Tooie was better in every way. The backtracking and the connections between the levels, far from being tedious, took what was a relatively simple game in BK and turned it into something really unique and interesting.

>>4124805
It's actually better than Bejeweled. Looks like ass but many interesting mechanics.

>>4124487

It sounds like this reviewer is defending quantity over quality. Nothing he's talking about sounds even remotely appealing.

>>4124848
He's not. You just don't get it. The point is that DK64 has such a wealth of content that you have the freedom to choose exactly what content you want to do. You only need to do a fraction of the content to beat the game.

The quality comes from the player's freedom to do what they want to do no matter which direction they walk in.

>>4125016
But all the content is just going around collecting shit.

>>4125016
I don't know guy, I always thought it was kind of mandatory to get 101% which I have done at least three times.

>>4125016

>Muh freedom to choose between a Giant Douche or a Turd Sandwich

Echoing what others said, the audience reception back in the 90s was pretty mixed. The critics liked it, yeah, but people who liked DKC hated how slow it was and people who played other 3D platformers before it thought it was tedious and excessively gated.

I remember thinking around 2002 that the only good thing about DK64, was that it got me the expansion pak to play Majora's Mask with.

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This game did Donkey Kong 64 right

DK64 was not well liked at release. I LOVED the DKC series and owned a N64 and I wanted nothing to do with DK64. You could tell it sucked by how little word of mouth there was....NOBODY was talking about it.

I don't know man, people are fucking idiots. 64 is still one of my favorite titles from Rare

>>4124807
>megalomaniacs who just want to steal shit and horde it for no reason?
What are retro gaming collectors?

I think that by that point reviewers were just rating the game based on Nintendo's and Rare's reputation. Everyone considered everything they did gold because of Mario 64, OoT, and Banjo Kazooie.

>>4126382
And if a reviwer didn't give it a high score he'd be crucified and he knew it.

>>4126268
>people who liked DKC hated how slow it was and people who played other 3D platformers before it thought it was tedious and excessively gated.
[citation required]
>>4126351
>DK64 was not well liked at release
[citation required]

I hated beaver bother before it was cool.

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>>4124487
the game had mixed opinions even back then.
imagine playing any other donkey kong game and then try dk64 for the first time. its a completely different game with a lot of backtracking to collect a shitload of color coded items and copy pasted minigames.

i like the game but its the extreme of the collectathon genre

>>4126452
they could make a donkey kong game in this day and age with these level of graphics, but they won't, and that makes me sad.

>>4126452
>the game had mixed opinions even back then
if you don't provide citations you are engaging in historical revision

>>4126462
Hmm, most old reviews on gamefaqs seem positive. The only negative ones are from 2003-2004.
https://www.gamefaqs.com/n64/191702-donkey-kong-64/reviews

>>4126459
Donkey Kong Country Returns?

>>4125195
Le epic south park meme dude!

>>4126474
Returns looks cartoonish, not like the classic CGI at all.

I never liked it beyond the theme song even back then. The levels were empty and artificial looking and the movement was slow and clunky. Plus backtracking is always awful.

>>4126713
t. millennial who obviously wasn't there at the time

>>4126483
even DK himself doesn't quite look like Rare's DK

>>4124487
I didn't like it back then (actually did like the multiplayer but I liked any multiplayer) and I still don't like it today.

It's technically impressive and there is a lot of content and good aesthetics but the core gameplay is pretty lame imo so I think with time people look down on it.

We all know the argument as to where or not games or other media age. This is usually not the case, with time people can see what was actually good and what was just renowned for other reasons like budget/marketing/cultural conditions.

>>4124501
This is exactly how I remember it.

DK64 hate only came around when the normal consumerbase was changed by the Wii era. Also, kdis were starting to become born that would later say the same shit. Gamecube also played homage to the most autist playerbase ever since everyone moved on from the N64 to PS or Dreamcast at the time. Not to mention, Gamecube lacked so many games that were currently on the PS.

Anyway DK64 was great for what it was which is why whenever I hear people say they dont like it, they're just parroting what their favorite reviewer said. Most people like myself are glad for the fun it gave and don't need to tell the world anymore they we like it or hate it.

revisionism is stupid 'cause everyone is gonna recall their own take on the past.

>>4124487
Because Viceland and Kotaku are prolific liars that pander to the lowest common denominator of Millennials and the like.

>>4126420
>>4126462

you dumb nigger, he's not "engaging in historical revision", he's just telling you what it was like. If you want to find the sources for that it's up to you. This is not the sort of thing you rudely ask for citations for, not like that anyway.

>>4129953

>make up a bunch of untrue shit to use as your point in a topic of debate
>get THIS MAD when people ask you to back up what you're saying

>>4126715
>I don't know what a millennial is

>>4129975
I'm not him, but I was around back then and beat the game and everything he is completely accurate. Including about a lot of DKC fans being disappointed because it was not all action, a point often missed. We don't care if you believe it or not, but stop shitting up the board for everyone else.

I think not everyone hate this game, you're just looking at a small, vocal part of the internet. A lot of times it's trolls, a lot of times it's kids who say games "age", a lot of times it's people that maybe genuinely played it and didn't like it, but a lot of people also liked it.
It's a divisive game, but in general you can't really say it's a bad game, it might have things that could be criticized, but it's still definitely a functional game that many people enjoy.
It's not one of my favorite N64 games, far from that, but I remember getting into it and doing a 101%, I had fun with the levels and backtracking, it didn't seem like a chore to me or else I would have stopped playing.
Only part that I didn't like was the mini-games like the beaver one, everyone hates that one.
I love that the original arcade DK is in the game and that they force you to at least finish the 1st loop without getting a game over in order to obtain one of the collectibles required for beating the game. I remember a lot of people complaining about that, but it's like... you can't even do the first loop in DK? might as well not play video games.

A similar thing happened to me with the Space Harrier level in Bayonetta. I loved it, but a lot of people complained about it. Kids that never played SH and don't know how to play it by heart.

>>4124487

You should not be taking those that hate on games like these or any other platformer seriously in the first place. All it does is reveal their power level and how late they got into gaming/young they are.

>>4125020

that's not true, there are also unpleasant minigames

>>4130401

Or... the opposite of that. If you're old then you've had time to get tired of repetitive busywork, whereas kids can still have fun with it sometimes.

Many people, I'm sure, were too old and jaded for DK64 even when it came out. Think of the adventure game elitists who thought, a decade or more before then, that all action games were for simpletons and kids, or the fighting game experts who had had a year or two with Street Fighter III when this game came out. Should they have wanted to go back from that sort of refinement to this sort of bland sprawl?

It surprises me more when an older gamer DOES want to play something as long and slow and shallow as this. Kids have more of an excuse.

>>4124496

Ehh it is and it isn't, just as much as say "JRPG" is (and isn't). Both are tedious, grindy sorts of games that are easy for people to get bored with to the point of hatred, yet rightly beloved by those who happen to resonate with them for whatever reason. These are games that rub in your face the fact that you're basically just pouring your life into a sinkhole as you play them. It takes a special kind of person to enjoy that.

But if they do enjoy it, then yeah the games can be very very good, for them. So it's not automatically a negative thing to say a game belongs to one of these categories.