Impressions: New Play Control! Donkey Kong Jungle Beat
While it’s easy to hate on Nintendo for rehashing the same — admittedly excellent — GameCube titles the Nintendo faithful have already blasted through years ago, you’ll have to realize that a lot of people who own a Wii nowadays never owned a GameCube. More aptly, a lot of people who own a Wii never owned any of the previous-generation consoles anyway.Heck, even I, filthy Ninthing and defender of all things waggle, did not own or care for the GameCube at all until around 2004.
The point I’m getting at is, you’re not at all required to buy any of these titles. If you loathe having fun and/or motion controls, by all means grab any of these titles on the GameCube, used. I, for one, see reason for each of these titles to exist. Metroid Prime and Pikmin are arguably enhanced significantly by pointer controls, for instance. Jungle Beat is a strange beast, however: the original pretty much required the GameCube bongos, infrequently seen and used in Donkey Konga and not much else. As evidenced by fellow bongo-requiring GameCube port-up Donkey Kong: Bongo Blast, waggle does not neccesarily supplant the physicality of banging on plastic bongos.
If you may (or more likely, may not) remember, Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat was an excellent, if not underappreciated platformer developed by EAD Tokyo (the Super Mario Galaxy gents). While traditional GameCube controls were supported, the best way to play Jungle Beat was to hook up the included pair of plastic bongos, and tap them accordingly. Hitting the left drum would cause Donkey Kong to move left, hitting the right drum caused him to move right, while hitting both drums at the same time caused our simian hero to jump. It’s a textbook case of something sounding awful on paper, but in practice, it was a really fun experience. The excellently-crafted platforming levels and challenges helped, sure, but there was just something satisfying about happily banging on the bongos like a drooling invalid to progress, whilst your peers and loved ones looked on, ever-so-puzzled at the futility of your actions. Little did they know that several years later, they’d be flapping their arms in the same fashion playing Warioware: Smooth Moves.
I guess that does it for the pretense; the real question as of right now is: does this Wii port admirably replicate the same satisfaction its GameCube predecessor provided? Well right now, I don’r know. Controlling with the stick and buttons, plus waggle replicating clapping, took some time to get used to; this default control scheme does kind of make sense (as opposed to replicating right and left bongo-taps with the nunchuck and Wiimote respectively), but chaining moves—which was a large part of the original’s charm—seems discombobulated.
That aside, the visuals still look great and hold up (the fur-shading or whatever you call it on Donkey Kong and his opposition is a sight to behold) for the most part; I’m still digging the soundtrack sans plastic bongo accompaniment (now replaced by the deafening silence of the nunchuck cord grazing my chest every so often), and I guess the level designs are still fun to play even compared to more sophisticated “new-gen” platformers such as Mario Galaxy.
As someone who still has the GameCube original and several bongos cluttering up his closet, I am, as of right now, still really iffy on the port—moreso that the GC game did not have the “Take a break!” nag screens Nintendo is wont on placing on its Wii titles nowadays. I would still highly recommend it to the Nintendo newbie, however: I’m sure everyone who’s understood the concept of a run n’ jump game post-Super Mario Bros. would appreciate Jungle Beat’s thinly-veiled platforming excellence.
How long did it take for you to get an opponent online? lol
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