By Makes a change from climbing up and down trees
- by PJ O’Reilly
Cast your minds back to the year of our lord 2017, and you may remember we reported on how a certain Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto liked to play a pre-release version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild by climbing up and down trees repeatedly for treats that the devs would leave for him. No, this isn’t a wind-up, and he can do what he wants. He created the series. Jeez.
Now, as revealed in The Guardian‘s interview with Bananza’s producer, Kenta Motokura, (thanks, GamesRadar), it seems “Shiggy” has an equally unique and stylish way of playing Donkey Kong Bananza, which involved simply smashing and digging instead of doing anything that would further the campaign along whilst playing a pre-release version of the game.
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Motokura let slip (thanks) that whilst the team had the legendary creator check the unfinished adventure occasionally:
“Instead of progressing through the game, he just stuck to one point, smashing and digging around a lot. It was a good thing to see him playing that way … it proved that there are a lot of things that players could potentially be curious about in the game.”
Hmmm. We’re gonna be honest, this is how we play, too. Not quite sure what the issue is.
Of course, by having the man transfixed like this on one spot, the Super Mario Odyssey team was able to ascertain that they were onto something good with the basic mechanics at the very least, which, with something as freeform as Bananza and all the voxel-based destruction presented therein, could be a challenge to keep track of.
As Kazuya Takahashi, the game’s director, explained in the same interview:
“For this sort of game, where you can destroy anything, there was no precedent…So in that sense, we did struggle with various things. Developing the levels was quite challenging. For each stage, we wanted to make sure that the level would be fun even without that destruction element.”
Even when he’s just messing around, it seems, Miyamoto can’t help but be useful.
Enjoying Donkey Kong Bananza so far? Got a unique style of playing it you want to admit to? Let us know.
[source theguardian.com, via gamesradar.com]
PJ is a staff writer across Hookshot Media. He’s been playing video games pretty much nonstop since the early 1980s, which is ages ago. Favourite genres include RPGs, puzzle games and lovely big single player adventures of all kinds. The weirder the better.