Same Country, Different Province

Well it's been a few months now since the suicide of my youngest brother. You would think this heavy subject would be what I want to talk about more than anything - to open a vein and pour red, wet words across a white page. Frankly, it's the last thing I want to talk about. The impact of it makes me feel malformed with grief and it has overall been a confusing and terrible experience. The whole world is a darker, grayer place, with fewer points of light in between. The geography of every day life has shifted - some thing matter more, other things less or not at all. It's hard to trust yourself to be okay all the time anymore - some days you move through life as if nothing has changed and other days you sit down and your heart cracks open with grief and all you can do is try and hold the pieces together until you can breathe again.

We were four brothers, a Four-Temperament Ensemble. We were Ninja Turtles, Pizza Cats, Ghostbusters. Now we're staggered down to three and trying to share what's left and made haggard with the cold mathematics of tragedy.

When I think of Tommy I think of holidays, of Christmas, and of lumbering down to the rec-room and splaying out on the big leather couches with Mike and John and lording over our youngest brother as he diligently set up game-system after game-system. Four brothers, four controller-ports, all plugged in to each other. We hit each other with shells or won more stars or fought over golden guns or collaborated in a scrambling, dysfunctional sort of way (usually over each others backs) to get all the Star Coins in Mario. Now there's an empty slot, a CPU, a bot.

I think regression is the common trope of grief, and so I occasionally find myself doing nothing but watching Game Grumps' Let's Plays or SNES retrospectives or fiddle-fucking around with emulated classics and sometimes wishing my HTC One-M8 was a Gameboy. Occasionally there is some heavy, emotional significance - like orchestrated Squaresoft music- but not always. The first time I played Donkey Kong Country for the SNES was at my dentist's office in Winnipeg. The man was a genius - had installed several then-gen Sega and Nintendo gaming consoles in his office waiting room to mesmerize whiny, bored kids and keep their minds off the hooks and drills and fluoride. Sonic 2, Aladdin, oh boy!

Something struck me about Donkey Kong Country, though - which, despite being stellar platforming games and some of the best Wii titles, is missing from the Returns and Tropical Freeze sequels. For a pixelated 2-D game about monkeys jumping on crocodiles DKC managed, through sheer mechanics and decoration, to convey genuine atmosphere.

Granted, this is owed to David Wise's outstanding soundtrack - but also to aesthetic. Again, despite being a game about anthropomorphic gorillas beating up alligators to steal back floating bananas something about DKC's design aesthetic conveys realism and grit. Something about the weight and jump mechanics while platforming - about your Kong's constant vulnerability to the enemies and level design around them - something about the awesome worlds you explore. That latter bit may be a big piece of it - there is a grain of fantasy, of cartoon, planted in an otherwise realistic world of chasms and pitfalls and pastoral landscapes. Yep, cartoon animals. Gotcha, floating barrels. But there is no... cartoon vegetation... or bizarre and childishly drawn mountains. Pine trees, icy grottos, coral reefs, and oh - Kremlins, beat those guys up. The minimalism does a lot for the aesthetic - like the original Crash Bandicoot for the PSX.

I'm a firm believer that the medium should dictate the message, ultimately, and in the case of Donkey Kong Country realism is conveyed rather than directly experienced through game design. If Super Mario Bros. is an absolutely enjoyable game to play, then Donkey Kong Country is an absolutely perilous one. The first game (unlike it's successors) lacks some serious balance gameplay-wise. You can cheerfully coast through the first three worlds and hoard lives like nobody's business and then WHAM Gorilla Glacier will stonewall your progress and every level will see you test the tensile flexibility of your SNES controller a little more as you grind your teeth watching Diddy Kong get barrel-blasted right into a Zinger or miss than one last bloody jump. The difficulty is immersive - pattern recognition, obstacle memorization, timing and dexterity. You're paying attention when you play Donkey Kong, fuck the doorbell. 

There is an interesting thematic arrangement in the world-design as the lush jungles and forests and natural environments give way to the toxic, industrialized wastelands of K. Rool's mines and factories:

Which does a lot to magnify the theme of increasing peril and difficulty. If it were up to me, I would have reversed the play-order for Kremco Inc. and Monkey Mines (to end with the factory), but whatever. The Gameboy port followed suit - moving from the jungle to an abandoned urban center. All of this is completely absent of the new Wii games (again, despite their brilliance), which feel like Mario games with alternate game mechanics. They are most definitely missing from the big, fat, galumphing collect-a-thon that was Donkey Kong 64 - with its monkey rapping, coconut bazookas, barren polygonal environments and lumbering Banjo-Kazooie soundtrack (which worked in Banjo but feels out of place after the Country series). 

Me and John finally sat down and two-playered the shit out of Diddy Kong's Quest, the rarely disputed pinnacle of the trilogy. The sequel branches off from the pure Country of the original, featuring pirate ships, bayou boardwalks, haunted forests and castle parapets - but again the mechanics still convey that gritty, realistic edge to the platforming. 

I'll say it, though - Donkey Kong Country 2 is tough as nails. 

You are given a short grace period to familiarize yourself with the mechanics but by the time you reach Kremland the gloves are off, and with still half a game left to play including the insanely difficult Lost World levels. For a second-hand sample, watch the Game Grumps fruitlessly attempt to beat it before rage-quitting in frustration. John and me don't fuck around though. We've sunk dozens of hours into the bloody thing on the Wii Classic Console - we've climbed the rigging on bog-sunk pirate ships, jumped across lava flows, wrestled with giant (motherfucking) wasps and hugged doomed rollercoasters up and down ludicrously unsafe tracks. At the present time we've stalled - having squandered most of our lives in Gloomy Gulch - with one foot in the final world slipping around submerged ice shelves at the base of K. Rool's castle. I play as Diddy, because I'm better and can use his acrobatics, and John plays as Dixie, because he's worst and needs the hair-float handicap (admit it, John). 

You wouldn't expect that to co-op a side-scrolling 2-D platformer short of New Super Mario Bros. would be much fun or immersive, but DKC's switch-over gameplay is far more palatable than the my-turn-your-turn Mario-Luigi concept. It's great. It's hard; it's mind-blowingly, give-me-another-beer-I-need-a-fucking-cigarette-fuck-this-game hard - but it's also a blast to make progress and hoot and holler like idiots when you've accomplished something together. Like I said, we're in a tight spot; with three lives at the entrance to one of the final worlds - we've exhausted all the Swanky Bonus Bonanzas and there is no Kong College in sight to save and we don't have any goddamn banana coins to pay off Funky and score more lives in another world but dammit we're not done yet. We're just going to have to stick this one through until the end.

It's all you can do, really.