Whoops. Kinda neglected the website for a bit again, but I have been working on stuff. And after a bit of thought I decided to tinker with the website layout a bit, figured my regular posts should be the focus on the homepage instead of the Driving Nowhere comic. I only update that comic every few months… so if you’re visiting the website you might just think nothing is happening here. Stuff happens here. Sometimes!
It’s still something I’m working on, so keep an eye on this section of the website, and speaking of Driving Nowhere I illustrated a little artsy thing I’d like to print. If you’d be interested in getting a copy of this you can reach me through my socials and e-mail in the Stalker Corner.
I like how it turned out. Just Layne chilling on his bed in his room.
Anyway other than that I’ve been occasionally uploading random stuff on Instagram and recently I drew this. The thought of Ned reopening The Leftorium because of the newfound enthusiasm for radical lefties amused me.
I’d like to make this shirt for real, but I’m a little afraid of getting sued by Disney who owns The Simpsons now for copyright infringement… or by the guy who started this whole hate campaign for left handed people and coined the term. Not sure if parody law will save me. I don’t have a good legal team. I don’t have a legal team.
A new Pokerman game came out! When picking up my copy of Z-A with my brother, this little comic came to mind:
This started as a doodle after hearing about that old tamale lady getting taken down, literally, by ICE. Then that South Park episode came out and the Kristi Noem face seemed like a rather appropriate addition. Put in a bit more effort in it, and ha. Even I can see the temptation in being a Nazi for a $50k sign on bonus. Damn my empathy and general caring about other human beings…
No worries though, this soapbox won’t come out too often. I’m not really interested in doing political cartoons, there’s folks more passionate about covering those subjects and I’d be fuckin’ depressed if that’s all I did… but this one hit a bit close to home. As a California kid I grew up with an old mexican lady who would sell tamales in our neighborhood every year. It was great. We’d buy a ton of em and load up our freezer. I’d throw a tamale in the microwave after school in the corn shell and it was amazing. I still crave them decades later.
The idea of her being hurt in anyway for any reason is appalling. I hope her family is okay.
You can have your political opinions, but if you don’t see this for what it is, absurd and cruel, than you’ve lost your humanity.
I really did enjoy Donkey Kong Bananza and would recommend it to anybody interested in the Switch 2, but I do think there was a bit of a overreaction to it. I think honestly it’s down to the fact that folks are so desperate for another 3D platformer from Nintendo, that pretty much anything would get rave reviews. Similarly I wasn’t blown away by Bowser’s Fury like everybody else was, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
I’d rate Bananza as a solid 9/10 game. It’s amazing. Do not get me wrong on that, but the 10/10 reviews are a bit suspect to me. For one, the game is shockingly easy. Like I’m a scrub and I hardly had any challenge that I couldn’t overcome pretty quickly. And there’s an assist mode on top of that to make it even easier! Two, the performance issues really are a problem. Not in standard play, the game feels/runs great most of the time when wrecking your way through the world, but on certain bosses I feel like they overreached what the Switch 2 is capable of. Like the CPU just can’t handle certain situations… which I honestly can’t blame it for… as when the FPS tanks to single digits, yes it’s that bad, it’s usually down to a billion things happening at once on screen. Astro Bot had similar moments of physics chaos, but it was on a PS5. The Switch 2 is powerful… but it’s not THAT powerful.
Digital Foundry’s review has a pretty good take on it and actually talks about the performance issues.
So while I really enjoyed my time with Bananza, I feel like it’d be a disservice to the consumer to say the game is a perfect 10/10. And the game only becomes a 9/10 after halfway through the game. Honestly the first hour felt rather mid to me and I only gave it another hour because I was trying to understand why folks loved the game so much… and because I didn’t wanna feel like I wasted my money. It does get tremendously better after a few hours, as it’s basically teaching you the game mechanics and slowly introducing you to Bananzas (the animal transformations) that you later use interchangeably in really clever ways. And the deeper you go into the skill tree additional mechanics are unlocked as well. But yeah.. the game starts out kinda… boring.
It actually makes me excited about the potential of a sequel. Where they don’t have to teach the player as much and can make it more polished in the performance department. A bit more experience with the Switch 2 hardware capabilities would be nice. I believe it started out development as a Switch 1 title, but I think when the development shifted to Switch 2 they just misjudged what the performance ceiling was and certain situations just overreached what the CPU was capable of. With a sequel I’d imagine they’d reel that back a bit and we wouldn’t see such dramatic FPS drops.
With the criticisms outta the way, I LOVED everything else. The gameplay was a super refreshing take on platforming and plays like a delightfully weird Red Faction / Mario 64 / Minecraft hybrid… with a dash of Spiderman in the climbing up nearly anything department… The skill tree is unlike anything Nintendo has done before (even the outfits have stat bonuses!) and is something I actually quite enjoyed playing with. And speaking of ‘unlike Nintendo’ the story and voice acting was fantastic! It’s not a typical Nintendo game where the story/characters don’t really matter and the focus is only on the gameplay. I was genuinely surprised by this. The relationship with DK and Pauline was cute and the overarching story was actually decent, for this sorta game I mean. The voice actor for Pauline nailed it and she has a ton of lines, every time you take a nap at a little rest spot you get a unique little dialogue from her. Oddly enough she’s pretty much the only voice acting, everything else is text you read with grunts. I guess it makes sense as they’re animals… but I guess this makes Pauline a sorta Dr. Dolittle type as she has no issue understanding them… ANYWAY the Bananza transformations are slick and once you get em all and can juggle between em, it’s super fun! Even minor stuff like the 3D map was really well done. I haven’t delved too deeply into the DK Artist mode, but it’s neat that it’s there. I can imagine it was a tool the devs were messing around with and were like “hey this is kinda fun.. why not let the player screw around with it too?” The co-op and gameshare capability is nice to have, but I haven’t tried it myself.
