When I slapped those bongos for Donkey Konga, I thought that while a clever bit of kit, they were somewhat gimmicky. Hitting bongos to the beat of the music, yeah, sure, it makes sense. Is it a system seller? Not really. Can you do much else with them? No. No, you can't.
Unless you're the mad developers of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, a platformer - yes, a platformer - that works best with the bongos.
What a world we lived in back in 2004...
Frustrations
Of all the components to own, I have the bloody bongos but not a copy of Jungle Beat. What's my go-to in that scenario? Emulation, of course. What can't I hook up to the PC right now (if at all)? The bongos.
So here I am, emulating a game with three inputs, and struggling.
Dolphin is currently set up to map an Xbox controller to a GameCube one, and now I need to work out how a GameCube controller would interpret the inputs of a bongo controller. Why I didn't look this up before playing, I do not know. Suffice it to say, something to do with waggling the analogue sticks claps.
There is a short introduction sequence where you can practice your bongo drumming to move left and right and jump, apparently, but that's not how this absurd set up of mine is working. Instead, I am slowly, painfully, crawling across the screen by holding the left stick to the right and hoping that it registers as movement.
At some point, pressing the B button started running, but that wasn't terribly consistent. Eventually, I was lead to a big barrel stuck in a tree and prompted to get violent.
To be fair, waggling sticks to punch a tree felt alright. It looks rather graphic, certainly. In any case, I was as ready as I'd ever be to get this thing going.
The game is indeed a platformer designed to be navigated through drumming. When you can't drum, it's awful. It's tedious, it's uninspiring, and it just isn't fun. A massive barrel and bigger Donkey Kong take up a chunk of the screen for reasons unknown.
Well, one is to count bananas, the other is just to get a close up of the action, but you don't tend to look at the massive ape at any point, because you're trying to see the little one in the context of the level. It's just weird.
Eventually, all sorts just exploded into action, and I was flung about the stage almost as fast as a Sonic title. Monkeys grabbed and chucked me around, I was bouncing off trees... Jungle Beat had gone from 0 to 60 mighty quick, and I'd no idea how I'd done it other than waggle some analogue sticks.
The action continued as I walloped a defenceless... thing... that was blocking my progress through the stage, and before long, I was looking at the end of the level.
Inching my way closer to the bunchiest of banana bunches, it was almost time to end the stage and see how well I did - but not before being allowed to drum like a madman in the pursuit of some final few points.
Make some noise...
Final Word
Oh, am I glad that's over with. Never again. Don't emulate Jungle Beat with an Xbox controller unless it's set up correctly. In fact, go one step further. Don't emulate Jungle Beat at all. Try and find it on the original hardware and bash those bongos. Failing that, it got a Wii release a few years later. I don't know how that plays. More fruitless waggling, I suspect.
I'm going to have to play this one as it was intended to get a sense of it all. I can't really judge it on what I've slogged through here. I can say the graphics are alright and the music was a thing that was there. I've already forgotten it. Probably had a lot of bongos in it.
It's not a cheap-looking game, is what I'm saying, but then you'll need to splash out on bongos to get the most out of it. And would you want to splash out on a Donkey Kong title that doesn't really have all that Donkey Kong goodness that you probably hope it does?
I'm not sure what future stages will bring in terms of gameplay, but it seems to be a lot of moving, punching, and waiting for monkeys to finish hurling you around the screen. You might like it, I don't know.
I'm not desperate to find out what it's all about, put it that way. Credit to the developers for trying to get more use from those bongos, but have they done enough? I just can't say one way or another. Not right now, at least.
Fun Facts
The game began as a regular Donkey Kong title before the developers were shown the bongo controllers. They took a set back and got to work simplifying the gameplay to work with them.
Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, developed by Nintendo EAD Tokyo, first released in 2004.
Version played: GameCube, 2005, via emulation.