RetroPiece Theater Special: Ape-ril

Rolling out a new blog series this year that merges my recurring RetroAchievements rundowns with a retro game review format. I'm going to try and publish two of these a month, one exploring an old favorite while the other examines a game that's new to me.

Ape Escape / Saru Get You (SCE Japan, 1999)

The PlayStation released a number of Super Mario 64 competitors after that game quickly became the main reason to buy their system's primary competition, the Nintendo 64, with some coming close to the plumber cap crown (Spyro), others falling considerably short (Croc), and others still offering something completely different (the "2.5D" of Klonoa or Crash Bandicoot). Ape Escape—in which dopey shounen protagonist Spike/Kakeru chases hyperintelligent monkeys across time after their leader, Specter, robs a local scientist of his time machine and goes on a bender—is, to me, PlayStation's closest equivalent: not just in the sense of its high quality; not just in the sense that it was a major first-party affair; but also in the sense that Ape Escape could almost be considered a tech demonstration for a new controller layout. The DualShock 1 had been rolled out a little while prior as the successor to the prototypical Dual Analog Stick controller and Ape Escape was the first game to actually require one, rather than being a case where you might unlock some additional compatibility features. To really sell these things to the solo-stick stalwarts, Sony sought out a means to demonstrate the possibilities that came with having the ol' double-wagglers at your beck and call and thus we have Ape Escape: a game where the left stick moved the protag and the right stick had them attack in that direction with whichever gadget happened to be equipped (the face button diamond instead toggling between four of the eight gadgets that you could unlock and equip).

This poor ship survived multiple run-ins with pirates but couldn't handle Lake Mountain Dew.

Usual gameplay loop is to drop into a level based on some distant point in history, start looking for the errant anachronistic apes, either stun them temporarily with your electric baton and sweep them up with the time net or just use the net directly while sneaking up on them using the crawl (this stealth in some ways precipitating a distant collaboration with Metal Gear Solid), and then resume hunting for the others you need to make the stage quota. The stages are typically small 3D areas with multiple zone transitions to keep things somewhat manageable for the then-aging hardware (Ape Escape came out in mid-1999, just a few months before the PS2 launch) albeit still with some pretty dire draw distances, but the controls and personality do much to compensate for these technical shortcomings. Plus, you cannot really argue that it didn't accomplish its goal of establishing the dual-stick control scheme given we're all still using it today. My preference will always be for Ape Escape 2 with its many additions and fewer hardware limitations but the first still has that moxie powering its ambitious gadget ideas, its twisty level design that might have you moving through several zones to reach a high platform where you spotted an ape far earlier (either that or coming back way later on after acquiring the gadget needed to reach them), and a fantastic jungle/drum'n'bass soundtrack of the kind that used to be everywhere in the late '90s and early '00s such as Bomberman Hero and any number of hip (and usually futuristic) racing games. Ape Escape 1 remains my favorite PS1 platformer and therefore made for a compelling (and relatively brisk) choice for getting some more pre-trophies Sony games on my RA mastery list.

Did we ever make that concept page for "second-person shooter"? Got another addition to it.

Speaking of which, Ape Escape is also a game ready-made for achievement sets, as each of its small stages also have two additional "complete" states: the first involves going back and getting all the apes that can be caught there, rather than the fraction required to satisfy the completion requirements to progress the game, and that might involve using any or all of your gadgets (including the handy Monkey Radar) to make hunting for that last elusive primate that much simpler; the second is a time trial that lowers your ape catching requisite but also gives you a pretty strict timer in which to snag that number as well, with the gold medal requirements demanding full awareness of your surroundings as much as it does gadget expertise. Cap that off with three difficult mini-games you can unlock with a group of "Spector Coin" collectibles—while the skiing and the dual-stick shooter are challenging enough, the boxing game is particularly brutal—and the RA set pretty much comes fully formed. The only remaining achievements here include a joke one for hitting a monkey five times with your stun baton before catching it (dubbed "Shanking the Monkey") and beating your rival and the timer alike in a couple of obstacle course races; neither of which proved as precision-demanding as I'd feared. If anything, I struggled more with the mini-games than I did with any part of the core game and its time trials, with each of them presenting a similar experiment of the dual-stick format that almost feel like alternative game pitches in case the whole simian-snatching 3D platforming angle didn't work out.

She always sounds so surprised when I earn a gold medal. Yeah, well, screw you too, Natalie.

Donkey Kong (Nintendo/Pax Softnica, 1994)

1994 was a pretty big year for Nintendo's own prominent primate, perhaps the biggest since his 1981 debut in the arcades, with Rare presenting the pre-rendered visuals and irreverent attitude of official reboot Donkey Kong Country for the SNES. However, a few months prior DK would receive a dark horse candidate for the series' highlight from Nintendo and their frequent partners Pax Softnica (which also worked with the Big N on their visual novels and Mother ports, to name a few). Simply titled Donkey Kong, the straightforward title is an effective smokescreen for the game's biggest twist: after dropping Donkey Kong from the scaffolding after the familiar four levels that comprise the arcade experience, the game suddenly transforms into a much larger, deeper, and varied puzzle-platformer that takes you all across the world. It's also where we saw a lot of "Mario tech" debut, some of which would make its way into the upcoming Super Mario 64 (particularly the 180 flip, triggered by jumping the moment after Mario spins on his heels), and others like the protective if slow handstand that would stay exclusive to this game. Each of DK'94's nine worlds offer something new, whether that was a new type of switch, obstacle, hazard, enemy type, or DK Jr. showing up to randomly hit buttons to keep Mario flummoxed. It's one of the most elaborate and technical 2D platformers ever made, and it remains an incredible feat that they were able to pull all of this ingenuity out of a humble Game Boy cartridge. You've probably heard Grubb go on about some weird Game Boy-only Donkey Kong port in the past, and while he does like his jokes (Metroid Prime 2 and 3 remakes?!) he is absolutely in the right here.

The handstand is the ultimate defensive move. Weird that Mario never brought it back.

DK'94 is set up in such a manner where you're expected to complete four stages at a time, after which your times are tallied with bonus lives for every 100 seconds remaining and you get the opportunity to save. At the end of each world, which may come after 7, 11, or 15 normal levels, you're tasked with fighting off DK by tossing back the barrels he throws at you. Sometimes it'll be enemies you need to throw back at him, or you'll have some other way of harming him, but even these climactic duels keep finding ways to keep you guessing. On that note, Mario can: flip backwards; walk on his hands; do a high jump from a handstand (and a third if you jump again just as he lands); duck; climb across tightropes; swing himself up a great height from tightropes; pick up and throw certain enemies SMB2-style along with barrels, boxes, garbage cans, and the keys needed to open the exit; push and pull levers that typically change the direction of moving platforms, conveyor belts, and elevators; activate special floor and ladder switches that let him place those items in the environment temporarily; break things and defeat enemies with a hammer; and also throw that same hammer upwards then climb or jump up to the next floor and catch the hammer as it comes back down (which is sick, by the way). That you can beat the very first level by backflipping your way up those girders in seconds is incredibly satisfying on a replay. Heck, the game's engine is in-depth enough that you have four different fall damage responses: normal, a quick roll, a prone stunned state that lasts a few seconds, and death. For as often as some traps and puzzles and enemy hitboxes can feel a bit arbitrary, the game more than makes up for it with how good it feels to control Mario here and the complexity of its systems.

DK Jr. loves those levers of his. Unfortunately, his capriciousness when pulling them (which creates a bridge up top I can cross) has killed more than a few time trial attempts.

In the achievement set there's a few groupings that are best pursued independently. Like grabbing all three of Pauline's leftover items in each stage—which also grants you into a bonus game where you can earn some 1-Ups—or time trials that take into consideration those four-stage composite times to give you the freedom to optimize the ones you're best at in order to compensate for those that you might struggle with. Not really feasible to go for both of those goals at once though, given Pauline often drops her shit in the most remote places. The one big challenge in this set is completing all nine stages of World 9—which includes the final boss encounter—without ever losing a life: an endurance challenge that begins by feeling insurmountable but gradually becomes eminently doable once you've figured out the fastest (and safest) routes and can anticipate the dangers in your path, or at least do your best given the bizarre amount of RNG involved with this game (though I suppose that could be another compliment to its complexity). Curiously, this no-deaths sprint is not even the achievement with the lowest completion rate despite being the most nerve-wracking: the latter half of the time trials are all rarer, with some very demanding requirements as the stages get ever tougher to complete in a speedy fashion. It's certainly not an easy set but that's pretty much par for the course when it comes to Donkey Kong: the only ongoing Nintendo property (along with maybe F-Zero and Pilotwings) that never pulls its punches. Anyone who's played the Wii Punch-Out!! to its conclusion probably knows what I'm talking about.

This just seems irresponsibly dangerous. Also, whose plane is this?

(I have video of this one for some reason, featuring some of those World 9 levels. Please excuse the deaths; fortunately, I'd already accomplished the relevant achievements for that part of the game.)

Bazaru de Gozaru no Game de Gozaru (Game Freak, 1996)

Whoa, look what else I dug up for Ape Week. I mean, uh, Aperil? Well, whatever it is we're doing here, let's first try to unpack this game's title with my limited Japanese: Bazaru means bazaar, like a marketplace, but is also the name of the monkey protagonist—I guess because whenever you picture the bazaars at Cairo or Marrakesh there's usually some macaque chomping on dates nearby. "De gozaru" is a vocal tic placed at the end of sentences that's used to indicate a sort of stuffy, old-fashioned way of talking akin to samurai; it's used by the deferential robot ninja Sasuke from the Goemon games as well as the chivalrous Cyan Garamonde from Final Fantasy VI (Kazama Iroha too, for any Hololive fans out there). A translated title might then read something like "It's Bazaar's Game, I Dare Say". As to what the "Bazaru de Gozaru" license is all about, it was an advertising campaign used by consumer electronics company NEC (the manufacturers of the TurboGrafx-CD system and publishers of this game) in which their monkey character would comically keep getting distracted or waylaid whenever it went out to the NEC store to buy a PC-FX bundled with a bunch of porno mahjong games, or whatever else that system had. That makes this an advergame like Yo! Noid or Cool Spot, so I guess a content warning here for rampant corporate capitalism. That's not even the weirdest part: just check out who developed this game (and when)! For clarification, this was released four months after Game Freak's Pokémon Red/Green hit the Game Boy in Japan and was almost certainly already in the works when Pokémon was being invented elsewhere in the studio. Talk about a lucky break for that ad team: the contract developers for your monkey mascot's cheap tie-in game suddenly became household names overnight.

Some of Bazaru's more advanced techniques. I think I barely ever used the handstand here, unlike in DK'94.

Moving on to what this game's actually about, well, it's one of those programmable puzzle-platformer types where you give your protag a set of commands and then send them on their way as they do their best to fulfill your instructions to the letter. You're aiming to get Bazaru to the end of each stage but a bonus incentive is to grab all the bags of cash along the way with which you can furnish your monkey apartment with luxury brand goods. It's similar to other critter-wrangler games like Lemmings or Pikmin or Mario and Wario, except you can't intervene after the instructions have been set so you might have to anticipate some revisions if poor old Bazaru doesn't quite pass the finish line. Maybe Frozen Synapse or The Incredible Machine is closer to describing what we have here. The game's also notable for its distinctive art style, created by minimalist graphic artist Sato Masahiko for the original Bazaru commercials and reproduced in video game form here. There's probably some strange correlation I could draw between this video game monkey and Salsa from Mother 3, designed by another creative figure famous in the advertising world: Shigesato Itoi (whose studio when making the Mother series was originally called Ape, probably coincidentally). Truly, Aperil is the most mysterious of months.

I don't actually need this spring, but pushing it causes me to move too slowly for these fish to bite my head. Sometimes just messing around is as vital for solving these puzzles as thinking them carefully through.

The achievement set is fairly basic, owing to the fact that this is a pretty obscure JP-only game on a mostly JP-only platform (of the PC Engine CD-ROM's full library of around 400 games, only about 10% of them ever saw an official localization). Besides standard completion milestones there's also one each for collecting all the money bags from each world and several for the bonus furniture purchases they facilitate. You're not required to get all the cash in one run—it might theoretically be possible, though perhaps not without the extra commands you unlock as you make progress—but you at least need to reach an exit to bank any of them, as it were. The complexity builds with an expanding command menu (you start with nine but will eventually have sixteen by the end, including a few dances) and more command prompts per stage: each "action square" will activate each instruction in rotation, with some levels offering more of these squares than you have prompts in which case it'll cycle back around to your first command. There's also Bazaru's stamina, represented (and refilled) by bananas, so he might also run out of juice before reaching the end if you play it too safe (by tiptoeing everywhere, for instance). Plenty of trial and error and some degree of incidental comedy as you fall afoul of one trap or another—you'll typically hit every trap at least once before you'll have some inkling of which commands you need to use to avoid them—but it's not a game looking to punish your monkey too much, with it auto-saving after every stage and there being no lives to worry about. I suppose it is made for kids at the end of the day. Suffice it to say, with the few cases where I had to backtrack with more commands to get an elusive sack of lucre or two, it's not too difficult to get through all its levels though one that's still satisfying in how it rewards lateral thinking and forward thinking alike. Definitely a hidden gem, for the platform and the developer alike and, much like the majestic Araucaria araucana of South America, is a fine example of a monkey-puzzle.

This is the kind of ending I can get on board with. "My quality of life has been slightly improved." It's all most of us can hope for these days.

(Since a verbal explanation of how this plays might not suffice, here's another video clip. Been real busy this month.)