I don't know what to think of Beaver Bother. It seemed incredibly irritating, yet it was difficult.

It's a minigame in DK64 that you need to beat to get a Golden Banana. It appears several times. When I played on FO's cart, I just gave up on it (I'm not sure how many golden bananas you'll need to beat the game, but at that point it was optional). On my cart, I've already beaten it twice, without too much trouble, so I thought I was getting better at it. I'm not sure if I really am not better at it, or if the minigame becomes harder further into the game (maybe you have to push more beavers in less time). I probably spent at least an hour trying to beat this game, and I'm not sure how many tries. Almost certainly more than twenty. This is one of the three most difficult parts of the game so far (the vast majority of the game, however, is extremely easy).

The idea of the game is that you're an alligator in a barrel with several beavers. The barrel has a hole in the middle, and you somehow have to make the beavers fall into the hole (This time, I had to push 15 in in 60 seconds; as you push beavers in, more respawn to take their place). Your only abilities are to bark (which is supposed to scare the beavers) and to jump.

What makes this game so annoying is that you can't really push the beavers into the hole. It's possible for a beaver to be right up against the hole, with you behind it, barking, and the beaver will act like the hole is a solid wall; it won't budge In any case, all the beaver has to do at any time is just turn away from you ... or the hole. Or both. It shouldn't be hard for the beaver. You can block some of the beaver's movement with your own body, but it still at any time has 270 degrees to turn through.

What you eventually realize is that the beavers pretty much have to be willing to let you push them into the hole for them to go in. If the beaver doesn't cooperate, it seems like there's nothing you can do.

Things like this aren't exactly unheard of in normal videogames. A suicidal invulnerable boss could never be destroyed if it didn't let you destroy it. But this case is particularly weird and artifical, because sometimes the beavers resist going into the hole, and sometimes they just fall right in.

I tried using some tricks to make it easier. First, it quickly becomes apparent that you can't directly push the beavers in; they'll just turn to the side. What I tried was spiralling them in, so if they'd turn away from me, they'd just turn closer to the hole. This works fairly well most of the time, but you still occasionally get uncooperative beavers. That alone isn't enough to reliably get all the beavers in under the time limit.

Well, anyway, I don't feel like discussing all the little strategy nuances I used. The point is, because the odds are in some ways stacked against you (uncooperative beavers), you'll either realize that you'll need a bit of luck to beat the minigame, or have to figure out some trick. But because the rules seem so arbitrary, any trick will be artificial. The result is that trying to figure any trick out is frustrating.

I know a lot of people consider "frustration" to be an inherently bad quality to be associated with videogames. That hasn't made too much sense to me; generally, any frustration experienced in a game is more than redeemed by the satisfaction of beating what was frustrating. Was it satisfying to beat this minigame? Well, sort of.

But I think another problem with this game is that it doesn't fit into a difficulty curve. It really can't, when you consider its play mechanics are totally different than almost the entire rest of the game. It's just something that comes out of nowhere.
I LOOOOOOVE Flying Omelette!!
Crawl and 1000