John's Mario Emporium

With the recent release of Donkey Kong 64 for Nintendo Switch Online, more players have discovered the Beaver Bother minigame and its infamous reputation for being unfairly difficult. The image in this post presents a method (the "60° Rule") used by Donkey Kong 64 speedrunners to consistently succeed at this minigame.

The object of Beaver Bother is to play as a Klaptrap crocodile enemy who needs to corral a preset number of Gnawty beaver enemies into a hole before time runs out. Pressing B makes the Klaptrap gnash its teeth and make the Gnawties run away briefly. During this scared state the Gnawties are able to fall into the hole.

However, the Gnawties often appear to run away unpredictably, giving the game its reputation. The image demonstrates how the Gnawty and Klaptrap need to be aligned for the scaring to work:

-drawing an imaginary line tangential to the hole parallel to the direction of the Klaptrap's travel, the Gnawty and Klaptrap need to be aligned so that they are both on the line that is at a 60° angle to the tangent line. -once they are aligned like this, and the Gnawty is close enough to the hole, pressing B at that moment will actually scare it away in the correct direction to make it fall into the hole.

Source: 2dos

The recently released Nintendo Switch Online version of Donkey Kong 64 applies some emulator-level patches to the game to make it more playable than the famously glitched Wii U Virtual Console version, including adding carefully calibrated lag to make the emulation as accurate as possible to the Nintendo 64 hardware, and other enhancements.

One inexplicable enhancement, however, is "conditional grape darkening" introduced in Lanky's shooting minigame in Hideout Helm. This is the only place in the game where the graphic for Lanky's grapes has been darkened considerably through a patch included in the NSO version. Note that this place features a lot of grape-shooting, but Lanky can shoot a lot of grapes literally everywhere else in the game as well if the player wishes, so singling out this one spot is particularly bizarre

Top: how the grapes appear during regular gameplay. Middle: how they appear during that one minigame. Bottom: a side-by-side comparison.

Extremely detailed high-quality 3D scan of an officially licensed 1996 Whomp pewter metal figurine from Japan.