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Comment by brink | Hacker News Reader

I hear it was an insane collectathon; colored bananas that you could only pick up with specific characters. People complained that parts of the game were more tedious than fun.

I never owned it, but I did play it at my friend's house whenever I got the opportunity. I loved it.

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I've been playing it on and off lately (on a real n64 no less) and I honestly think it's more of a level design problem than the actual collect a ton.

I've really enjoyed some levels (the factory level is nice!), while I despised others, such as the water one with a sunken ship. I specially hate when levels over rely on kong changes just to unlock things. They make you do four or five round trips just to hit all switches and pads related to each kong. This just seems lazy...

The factory level is nice because it has plenty of platforming (which in my opinion could use some more!) and they require each Kong platforming abilities to reach different places. That's the king of thing they should have focused more trough out the game. Miyamoto even said that climbing mountains is the thing that inspired SM64 levels, so I wished they had took that to hart in DK64.

I thought that the best levels were the first three - Jungle Japes, Angry Aztec, and Frantic Factory.

Fungi Forest and Crystal Caves are okay, but have way too much switching between characters.

Gloomy Galleon and Creepy Castle are tedious grinds no matter how you slice it.

The one that really drove me mad was the mandatory coin you got by playing the original DK arcade game, in order to face King Kruel. I never beat that as a child -- it was just too hard -- and only finally saw the credits when I played through it again after finishing my PhD on the Wii U's emulator. The save states were very useful!

I loved this game, and Banjo Kazooie / Banjo Tooie. So many happy memories.

Indeed, those three original DK levels are perhaps the most memorable part of the game from my childhood on account of how difficult they were for me.

There were 5 different banana colors, 100each per level, and i think 5 coins each per level. Then there were two banana fairies to photograph per level, and 5 golden bananas per kong per level.

To beat the game you don’t need collect anywhere near all of them, and it felt reasonably balanced to actually beat the game.

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