The Worst Golden Banana in DK64

ah donkey kong 64. it's the seventh best-selling game for the system which means you can't make fun of me for talking about it when it came out it reviewed quite well people were like hey this game is pretty long that must mean it's good but nowadays the game has a somewhat different reputation it's often seen as a bloated mess of a game which exemplifies everything wrong with the collect-a-thon genre i'm not here to defend the game believe me that will become apparent soon enough but i did have this game as a kid and i did play it a lot i mean back in the day you get a new game you had to make it last you know you got to get your damn money's worth out of it i cherished every edition of my game collection even the shitty ones i didn't know i could just go online and download some [ __ ] rom sets or whatever i was just a dumb kid back then i remember spending hours playing the bare bones multiplayer mode with my neighbor like some sort of babies first golden eye this was the first game i would play just to go looking for new glitches believe me there were a ton to find like check it out you can just swim straight through the ground and under the island and you can find the room from the opening cut scene and actually walk around in it i don't know why but i thought that was so [ __ ] cool so i actually do have a fair amount of fond memories from this game just mostly from [ __ ] around and playing this shitty multiplayer despite the game suffering from severe slowdown and frame rate dips at times it actually doesn't feel that choppy or laggy to play in fact someone at rare had the brilliant idea to detect whenever the game was suffering from slowdown and simply speed up your character an inverse amount so it feels like you're still moving in normal speed i mean wow that's pretty wild these lads actually solve the concept of game slow down incredible hell using this method even the pal versions of the game which run at 50 hertz and 25 fps compared to the ntsc version of 60 and 30 the kongs basically move at the same speed between versions although everything else like menus cutscenes enemies are still slower on pal anyways this turns out to be very exploitable for glitches if you know how to generate lag which happens to be extremely easy to do since you can do it at any time by just throwing a bunch of oranges before i get on with the main topic of the video i just have one question that's been bothering me what exactly does it mean to be a collector's edition yellow game pack i thought the whole point of the term collector's edition was the implication that there's some sort of regular edition out there that your copy is superior to but literally every copy of dk64 was yellow what am i to believe they were all special editions does just having a colored cart automatically make your game a collector's edition or something you might be thinking hey i know gray dk-64 carts exist i've seen one before yes in pal and japanese territories it came on a grey card but i am just referring to the north american box art here of course you're also probably thinking actually there is an extremely rare ntsc version of the game with a gray card but as the demo kiosk copies clearly state they're not for resale so i don't think that can count as a regular copy okay okay let's just get to the actual point in the video so what is the worst golden banana in donkey kong 64. well gee there's just so many options to choose from where do i begin is it this horrible sliding beetle race is this annoying flying owl race is it this race against a stupid rabbit and i heard a lot of annoying races in this game huh there are also a lot of shitty minigames too like this one right i heard beavers into a hole crazy kong clamor wow kkk huh that's the acronym you want to go with [ __ ] british devs am i right anyways these are all worthy contenders but ultimately this decision is going to be a subjective choice so i just have to pick the one that was worst for me and in my personal experience the worst golden banana in the entire game is the mechanical fish one from gloomy galleon now some people watching this who have played the game might be thinking the mechanical fish what the [ __ ] i mean it was a little annoying sure but it wasn't that hard it's definitely not the worst in the game well what if i told you that as a child i was able to collect every single golden banana in the entire game except for this one but look i hear you say that save file clearly shows you 200 golden bananas and 101 percent well you [ __ ] you stupid [ __ ] claude everyone knows that dk 64 actually has 201 golden bananas and due to the way the game calculates game percent completion it's still showing up at 101 percent because i'm actually at 100.6 and it's rounding up or something so what's the deal with this fish huh well let me briefly walk you through what you needed to do first you have to use diddy's jetpack to fly to the top of the lighthouse so you can play your guitar on this pad which releases a giant mechanical fish somewhere else in the stage then you need to go find it within the time limit and swim into its mouth there's actually a warp pad which will banana port you straight to the area where he is but i didn't have it unlocked in this footage once inside the timer goes away and you're in a large room with a gigantic metal heart which has a large spinning fan on it and three targets there's also a b in here as soon as you shoot one of the targets another timer starts ticking down you need to shoot each target three times before the timer reaches zero you can only shoot a target once the fan blades have stopped moving completely it doesn't matter how much you spam your shots trying to fit them between the moving blades these targets can only be hit when the blades are not moving it alternates between these two positions which cover up some of the targets once all three targets are destroyed you're awarded the golden banana seems fairly straightforward right so what's the big [ __ ] deal i mean i just did it right there in the emulator well i'm telling you as a kid no matter how hard i tried no matter how many attempts i made i just couldn't do it i was always running out of time this left me very confused and frustrated i kept trying again and again but i just kept failing and unlike a lot of the dumb mini games in this game you don't get an option to immediately retry it it just boots you out underwater and if you go all the way back to the lighthouse play the guitar and go all the way back to the stupid fish just to try and fail again i remember i asked my neighbor about it and he said he didn't have any trouble with this particular golden banana eventually i simply gave up because it was just really boring doing the same thing over and over again just to fail every single time like i would boot up dk64 just to do this get pissed and then turn it off and so i had to live the rest of my life without just weighing on my conscience like seriously think about that for a second how many people out there have 200 out of 201 in golden bananas and then stop playing i mean it's [ __ ] psychotic i mean really how many people out there could there actually be like that what kind of loser stops at 200 i might be the only person on the entire goddamn planet to get that close to finishing and then quit i mean that's like stopping one meter away from the finish line pathetic i mean imagine if you went to your friend's house and he told you he got 119 stars in super mario 64 and then quit playing could you honestly even be friends with a person like that it's like the origin story of a serial killer or something recently i decided i could no longer bear the weight of this shame i had to get some sort of closure on this so i decided to do some research online most of the first results that showed up were decade old game facts topics apparently it turns out i wasn't the only one who had trouble with this golden banana that was a huge relief to find out first thing i noticed was that there seemed to be two camps of people those who claimed it wasn't that difficult and they finished with time to spare and another who seemed to insist that this was actually impossible so what's up eventually after comparing enough stories and anecdotal evidence it became clear the common denominator among people who were saying it was impossible where they were the ones who did not get the banana their first time through the level it was only affecting people who were going back through the game after completing it trying to get the rest of the golden bananas they missed their first time around so why did this happen exactly that's so peculiar could it actually be real that it's harder if you're later in the game i decided to bust out my own copy of dk64 to check it out for myself i know i know filming the tv screen directly what the hell is this 2013 era dark side fill well i could use direct capture but somehow filming the crt screen directly makes this part of the video feel even more real i know that technically that doesn't make any sense but also at the same time part of you knows that i'm right by the way just for the record filming directly off the crt screen is going to be seen as totally cool and retro in a few years so i'm just ahead of the curve as usual so as you can see in this footage even though i'm not missing my shots i'm firing as soon as the blades stop and actually even pre-firing as best i can but i just do not have enough time to finish the challenge i mean is it just me do i just suck ass at video games is it just like lag related to playing an actual hardware or something well i painstakingly played through the game on a new file just to get up to this point to see if it really was easier when you first visit the level and sure enough to my surprise it actually was i finished the challenge easily on my first try with nearly 20 seconds left on the timer look at the footage side by side you can see the timer in the top right stay synced at all times but i'm just getting more cycles to shoot on the new file the blades are clearly just spinning a little bit faster so at least i know i'm not completely crazy but why why does this happen what is the actual cause of the slowdown here what's different between these two attempts well i mean obviously in the late game footage on the right you can see i have the sniper scope upgrade but it's just like a simple black texture overlay on top of the string to emulate the look of binoculars there's no way that could actually be the source of the lag okay so guess what the stupid-ass [ __ ] binocular overlay actually is the source of the lag i can understand if you were using the zoom function or something but just having this upgrade at all is enough to cause the slight slowdown and it turns out by simply deactivating it between shots or strategically looking away from the fan at the right times you can literally reduce the lag enough to allow you to easily finish the mission all that time i spent trying as a kid and it never ever would have occurred to me to turn off the aiming reticle or to look away from the fan i was sitting there thinking pre-aiming and getting things lined up was the most important part since the screen is all shaky and here's something even more stupid i discovered while making this video it turns out you can actually beat it without even having to turn the scope off in the first place because the game just lies to you in this clip i almost managed to do it but i don't quite make it in time the failure music place and the timer disappears after reaching zero but if you keep spamming the peanuts there's a brief period of time where you can still destroy the target and complete the mini-game stupid child version of me would just hear the failure sound and go oh well that's the failure sound i guess i failed the mission the game wouldn't play the failure sound if i didn't fail the mission right but no there's still time to shoot the thing and get the golden banana well it only took me two decades but i finally actually 101 percentage donkey kong 64. and okay yes before some [ __ ] genius bothers to point this out in the comments no i didn't actually get all 500 colored bananas for each world i only collected enough to get the banana medals which is all that counts for 101 completion even the game devs thought that asking you to collect all 500 was a bit excessive the game developers of donkey kong 64 thought it was too much collecting think about that so yes technically i didn't absolutely positively 100 complete the game in the sense i didn't collect every possible collectible but i did get 101 whatever [ __ ] close enough so yeah i'm sure most of you probably have no idea what the [ __ ] i'm talking about or why the hell i would make a video about such an obscure and specific glitch in a game that nobody cares about or even likes anymore but this video goes out to you all my fellow long-suffering comrades who had their balls busted by that fish we did it bros we finally beat that stupid fish

Channel: Cybershell

Views: 320,589

Keywords: Cybershell, Cybershell13, DK64, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong 64, Golden Banana, Worst Golden Banana, Worst Banana, Nintendo 64, N64

Id: wQspd_6ppO8

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

The idea that players would be split 50/50 on the difficulty of this mission with no immediate explanation feels like something out of a Nick Robinson video. Just the mystery that there was something causing people to have 2 different experiences.

[u/MayhemMessiah]

That’s actually amazing.

That game was so formative for me that it backwards warped my idea of collectathons to the point I still enjoy it to this day, beating it every couple of years. It sure doesn’t hold out well but I can’t overstate how much I still just like collectathons, even if by now the game is mostly pretty easy. Never would have imagined the fish being an issue since I always 100% every stage before moving on, barring situations where you’re forced to go back with upgrades.

So for me the last beaver barrel is still the hardest banana, because that shit is straight broken and doesn’t work, the beavers will commonly slam into the edge of the hole like it were a wall and just slide around it, I think they have to be almost perfectly looking into the hole’s center to fall in.

[u/bodyturnedup]

Soon as I saw that fan, I had flashbacks of frustration. I don't remember ever finishing this one, either.

[u/MemeGeneOkerlund]

Its insane to think just like 6 months ago I was googling to make sure Cybershell hadn't died or anything now here is a ton of content. Good stuff too

[u/Dovlaa]

I can't believe this. I had the exact same experience as a kid and I remember being so confused and pissed off. I spent so much time getting everything and then this one shitty banana was impossible to get. I even wrote to Rare through their old website and asked for help and all I got was some confusing reply not acknowledging the bug and making fun of me.

[u/Whitewind617]

It's the robot fish isn't it.

Watches video.

Yup. Fish. This bug is kind of notorious, I was baffled by it as a kid as well.

[u/SageOfTheWise]

Now that's a DK64 bug I have never heard of before. Maybe not that surprising, the game is nothing but bugs.

I guess the funny thing is the game was generally developed with the lag in mind (which causes its own host of bugs and glitches), and then makes a completely different set of banana's near impossible in the later VC ports of the game, as the game now tries to compensate for the lag that doesn't exist.

"Don't look at the fan" reminds me of the N64 speedruns of this game, where not looking at what you were doing was one of the most common tricks to make it all go faster.

[u/_salt86]

This YouTuber has a ton of Sonic content, but it's nice to see him branch out. He definitely has character.

I had submitted this earlier, but it looks like it's already been done. Thanks for sharing.