Can you share the full story of the projects that you could predict could fail using maths?

Donkey Kong 64 is excellent, with amazing personality, great music, and great playable characters, but the minigames are sometimes a little janky and you have to love the characters, music, levels and aesthetics if you’re gonna be happy with all the backtracking.

So @CleoTheWizard as a “before you play” tip for Donkey Kong 64, know that there are five playable characters and you can switch at “tag barrels” and basically every collectible, item and action in a level only works for the right character. This keeps you engaged with all characters and the different ways they move but plenty of people understandably dislike the backtracking that comes with it. Most of all remember that less than half the collectibles are required to beat the game so don’t backtrack too much unless you want to, and consider playing the latest version of the "change kongs anywhere " romhack which lets you change characters with a button instead of a trip back to a tag barrel, it’s a very very well done romhack now.

Yooka-Laylee is clearly a spiritual successor but also clearly not as good as Banjo Kazooie. In many aspects it’s just slightly worse: There’s less personality, clunkier movement, less good music, the humour is less funny. Perhaps the largest downgrades are the collectibles placement and the world size. The positioning of collectibles is not so much beckoning you towards exploration and platforming challenges, as it was in BK, but instead it’s just putting things in arbitrary places. The world size is a downgrade in the sense that the worlds are larger, yes, MUCH larger, but also more empty and it simply means you spend more time holding forward on the stick waiting for the next bit of gameplay. Banjo Kazooie beats the other 3D platformers by this team because it’s comparatively fast-paced (not as in adrenaline but as in giving you lots of new things to do every minute and has very little backtracking), and it has the strongest music, theming and humour. As an N64 game, the controller had four directional buttons and most modern takes map these to an analogue stick which works very badly, but that’s not the game’s fault. I bought a controller for emulating N64 games that has enough buttons to avoid this. Yooka-Laylee wins on graphics. If anyone prefers YL to BK I’d love to hear why you feel that way.

By the way, fans of Zelda 2 may well adore Star Tropics. it has a similar feel. Although it’s prettier, linear, and has more story, it also has challenging, rewarding combat. Your movement (and some but not all enemy movement) is on a grid and you can only move up/down/left/right and you can only face in those directions too, enemies deal contact damage, and you have mostly melee attacks so combat is a question of mastering a grid-based dance as you attack whilst avoiding damage. The soundtrack is wonderful too.

You’re gitting gud. Keep going!

It’s obviously nothing like a modern title but I don’t think that’s quite fair - it holds up in the sense that it’s fun, it has good combat challenge and exploration, honestly it does. You do have to overlook lack of QoL features and the fact that you basically have to read the manual, but I don’t think it’s fair to mark a game down for lacking those things. It lacks the puzzles, NPCs and stories of later Zeldas but it doesn’t try to have those.

Zelda 2 siimilarly lacks QoL features but it has excellent combat that’s actually challenging, but fair, so yeah if you’re open to it you could have a good gaming experience there.

I did this too, on the GameCube collector’s edition. It’s hard but the difficulty didn’t feel unfair! It was so satisfying when I made progress. Honestly this is such an excellent game.