Donkey Kong 64 is arriving on Nintendo Switch Online after a long wait. The game has faced widespread criticism and jokes, but its reception at launch was mostly excellent, and it became the best-selling game of 1999. It was praised for its ambition, using large DK Isles filled with secrets and borrowing ideas from earlier 3D platformers while scaling them up. Boss battles and puzzles were noted for cleverness, and the character cast was described as funny and memorable. Personal experiences include repeated attempts to progress through the game, using guides when stuck, and reaching the final fight without completing it due to a neighbor moving away.
"Donkey Kong 64 is at last coming to Nintendo Switch Online, a grueling four-and-a-half years after Nintendo first put N64 games on the service, and a whole year after Nintendo seemingly inadvertently teased it. This has been met with plenty of eyerolling and monkey jokes from the populace because, as we all know, Donkey Kong 64 isn't a very good game and is tedious to play in 2026, and no one in their right mind would pick it up on NSO, right?"
"First off, this weird DK64 hatred hasn't always existed. It received mostly excellent reviews when it launched and was the best-selling game of 1999, beating even Pokémon Red/Blue, according to Circana director Mat Piscatella. It was praised (rightfully!) at the time for its ambition; though it borrowed a lot from games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, it did so on a scale we hadn't seen before with the massive-at-the-time DK Isles and all the secrets they hid. People loved its cleverness, too, in both boss battles and puzzles, and its cast of characters was funny and quite memorable."
"Donkey Kong 64 is a bit of a white whale for me. I never owned an N64 growing up, but my neighbor did, and we spent countless weekends passing the controller back and forth trying to finish it. I was the older of the two of us and had access to a printer, so eventually I started printing off pages of GameFAQs guides to help us when we got stuck. We finally made it to the final fight against King K. Rool, but my neighbor sadly moved away before we could land the final blow, so I never finished the game."
Read at Kotaku
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