Stephen Bobbett – Page 3 – Stephen Bobbett

Donkey Kong Bananza Review

A screen capture of Donkey Kong Bananza. Donkey Kong and Pauline discover the location of the Exploritone, a blue crystal with eyes surrounded by carved tablet.

Since the dawn of video games, one question has plagued both critics and philosophers alike: what if big ape like banana and punch good? Only one game has ventured to answer it.

There’s a primal appeal to Donkey Kong Bananza. One is the simple motivation of its protagonist: one day, ape find shiny banana in cave, so ape punch holes in ground until ape find all shiny bananas.

The other is the raw catharsis of its control scheme. Press X? Ape punch up. Press B? Ape punch down. Press Y? Ape punch walls and faces.

Press A? Ape jump. Ah, see? Ape not just punch. Ape have layers.

And what layers there are. What’s surprising about the game is the weird depth it achieves—narratively, sure, but mostly literally. DK meets Pauline, a young girl with a magical voice but paralyzing stage fright. After a catastrophic cave-in perpetrated by a trio of simian miners known as Void Co., DK and Pauline’s only hope of reaching the surface again is tunneling to the center of the planet. There, a mythical MacGuffin called the Banandium Root will grant Pauline her wish to go home—and DK his wish to decimate the Chiquita supply chain.

The world-building here is whimsical but rich. DK and Pauline encounter myriad subterranean cultures, from arctic-dwelling zebras to light-carving serpents. Present in every layer are the Fractones, a race of sentient, regenerating crystals. In what feels like a nod to Journey to the Center of the Earth, you can read the history of these cavernous worlds along the way in journals chiseled by the intrepid Exploritone. A chip off the old Jules Verne block.

It’s easy to compare this game to Super Mario Odyssey, since it’s by the same dev team and has a similar aesthetic and collect-a-thon mission style. But whereas Odyssey leans heavily into platforming, Bananza goes all-in on the smash-and-grab dopamine rush of combat and terrain destruction. In the early stages of the game, I worried this meant any fight or puzzle could be circumvented by punching your way through it. Fortunately the fights and puzzles ramp up in difficulty. Yes, you’re still punching your way through them. But you’re punching thoughtfully.

All this culminates in a lengthy finale that’s too good to spoil (if YouTube hasn’t done that for you already). But what I loved most were the simple character arcs that pluck the heart strings as DK and Pauline forge their friendship. Pauline transforming DK through song grows her confidence in her innate gifts, the kind of journey we all wish for the young people in our lives. And DK learns that maybe, just maybe, there is more to ape than just banana.

There’s probably a good lesson in that, too.

Consider the Angler Fish

The steeple of North Church on Congress Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire against a blue sky with a few trees below. — North Church on Congress Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Oct. 18, 2026

Listen, I’m bad at protesting. It’s not that I lack conviction. In fact, I’m prone to one-on-one rants, as most of my friends can attest. But I’m bad at going to organized protests. I feel awkward in large gatherings, and I don’t plan far enough ahead to craft any clever signage. But last Saturday I determined to go to the nearest No Kings rally—not because I was eager to be part of the crowd, but because man, I love not having a king.

Seriously, not having a monarchy is one of the few things I get absurdly patriotic about. I like teasing my Canadian friends about still having the queen on their money. I like telling my English friends that yes, Meghan Markle was an American conspiracy to dismantle the Royal Family. Sure, they can quip back about how they enjoy literally every social service the United States can’t seem to muster, from universal healthcare to The Mighty Boosh. Does that stop me from wanting to throw a handful of tea bags into the closest harbor when I hear Jonathan Groff sing “You’ll Be Back” in Hamilton? No, it does not.

If you’re an American, it’s your right and privilege to regard monarchies with irreverence, loathing, and outright nausea. There are no divine coronations or inherited rights to rule here. We’re a slapdash, rough-and-tumble democratic republic, electing people from among us to represent us. Albeit, it’s a laughably imperfect system, like a third-grade playground bully trying to paint the Mona Lisa from memory. But it’s a democratic republic nonetheless. And for the sake of its continued perfection, sometimes even introverts have to leave their sanctuaries to put up a stink in the streets.

Before the No Kings rally, I put on the only star-spangled attire I have: a 2023 Major League Rugby grey championship hoodie for the New England Free Jacks. The logo, appropriately, is the lantern from Paul Revere’s midnight ride. To spice up the ensemble, I went to Walmart to buy a big-ass American flag but unfortunately failed to find one among the mounds of Halloween candy and plastic jack-o-lanterns. A brief traffic jam brought me to a parking spot just outside downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I squeezed through the crowd, which occupied the whole of Congress Street, until I reached Market Square and planted myself across from North Church, empty handed but full of heart.

The gathering was similar to the others across the country: a lively mixture of protest and street party. Like the emblematic frogs of Portland, Oregon, there were a few jesters in bright inflatable costumes, in this case lobsters and (to my delight as a deep sea fanatic) angler fish to give it some maritime New England flare. There was a tidal wave of signs, declarations of civic pride and pictures depicting the would-be king in every unflattering caricature you could imagine. There was a man hawking free copies of the U.S. Constitution like beer at a baseball game. And the couple of detractors—monarchists, I can only assume—driving down Congress in their oversized trucks and hastily scribbled, bigoted poster boards were mostly ignored by the crowd.

But what stood out most to me were the people who didn’t stand out at all. People without signs or costumes, maybe clapping or cheering sometimes, but mostly just soaking in the camaraderie with quiet smiles. Maybe they were like me, treading the 9-to-5 waters at work, sick and fucking tired of watching technocrats, oligarchs, and ideologues spending those same waking hours tearing our country apart for scraps. Just regular people who have this silly notion that government for the people, by the people shouldn’t perish from the earth.

Look, I didn’t go to the protest because I think we’re actually living in a monarchy. But when enough power is concentrated in the hands of one person, it might as well be. Right now, the ruling party of Congress has all but abdicated its responsibility to legislate or even represent their state constituencies. Instead, they’ve blithely relinquished the power of the purse like someone being knowingly pickpocketed. The White House has opened a floodgate of executive orders, no more law than a doodle on the back of a bar napkin, but treated by some as royal proclamation. Meanwhile the Supreme Court, three members of which are the President’s own appointees, are rubber stamping his agenda, at a time when both the judicial and legislative branches should be stalwart checks on executive power.

As of this writing, the East Wing of the White House is being demolished to make way for a lavish $250 million ballroom, a steady creep of gilded opulence—the curse of Midas’s touch on what was once the People’s House. It might not be the home of a monarch yet. But as the President teases a third and very illegal term, things are certainly monarch-flavored.

Chances are, we’ll all have more opportunities to become better protesters. As for me, I might buy one of those angler fish costumes for next time.

At least the angler fish is a queen I can respect.

Peacemaker Season 2 Review

Promo artwork from the Peacemaker series.

I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for James Gunn. Yeah, there’s some valid criticism of his cinematic crutches: his reliance on licensed music, the gratuitous shock factor he employs, and the repeated trope of mercenaries and their found families. But his movies and TV shows often have strong character arcs and lots of emotional fidelity—the meat and potatoes of a satisfying narrative, which most superhero properties fail to bring to the table.

That said, Peacemaker Season 2 left me a little malnourished.

It’s a bummer, because Season 1 was fun and poignant in a lot of unexpected ways. I love stories about lesser known comic book characters. Peacemaker is unencumbered by any preexisting fandom, which lets Gunn tell an original story, with a nuanced take on masculinity and generational trauma—that is, in between alien butterflies hollowing out people’s brains and piloting them like undead meat mechs.

On that note, it’s interesting how often Gunn’s stuff centers on angry, zombified masses—a reasonable obsession for someone who became the internet’s Villain of the Month, exiling him from Marvel and forcing him to wander the DC deserts for a while. From Starro commandeering the Corto Maltese army in The Suicide Squad, to Lex Luthor’s brigade of shitposting monkeys in Superman, the man is understandably getting some catharsis after tangling with the terminally online mob.

Anyway, in comparison to Season 1, Peacemaker Season 2 felt very uneven. Half of the episodes felt interstitial at best, the characters slowly ambling towards the next plot device while volleying some very hit-or-miss barbs. The action sequences were energizing but also very sparse for a superhero story.

I will say, the multiverse angle of Season 2 had more pathos than anything Marvel has done with its entire Multiverse Saga (save perhaps Loki). Early in the season, Peacemaker gets swept into an adjacent dimension where his father and brother are still alive and they’re a trio of celebrated, kaiju-slaying saviors. In some ways, it’s James Gunn continuing to digest the perils of internet culture: the idea that if you just walk through the right portal, you can live in a small but perfect world where nothing is wrong and you’re always the hero.

Of course, nothing in a Gunn story is that clean. Peacemaker’s perfect world turns out to be one in which the Axis powers won the war, and he’s the unwitting beneficiary of a Nazi-run America. But this big reveal is a blip on the radar, glazed over with a single flurry of heartbreaking violence that Peacemaker is forced to flee. The show never burdens him with processing what it meant to feel at home in that world, a missed opportunity given that Peacemaker’s entire arc is about him escaping the legacy of his white supremacist dad. In a show about taking a macho douchebag through a journey of emotional complexity, what did it mean to Peacemaker that his alternate universe dad was not a Nazi but unwilling to fight it with the full force of his heroism? Guess we’ll never know.

All that said, I could’ve watched a supercut of Freddie Stroma’s trivia-loving psychopath Vigilante and still gleaned the best parts of the season.

Does Peacemaker need a Season 3? Probably not. But as long as the Gunn keeps aiming for the heart, I don’t mind if he misses now and then.

Skellyfish

This October’s drawing obsession: drawing skeletons for things that don’t actually have them. I think it’s inspired by wandering through a Spirit Halloween one year and seeing a plastic figuring of an octopus skeleton. If you have non-skeletal skeletons you’d like drawn, just leave them in the comments or join me for the FancySchmancy Creature Feature.

Skeleton Tavern Keeper

This month I’m drawing spooky, scary skeletons for the FancySchmancy Creature. This is the first, a skeleton tavern keeper requested by my Twitch mod Harukio. From here on out, I think we’re going to draw the skeletons of things that don’t usually have skeletons. It reminds me of seeing an octopus skeleton figure at a Spirit Halloween: biologically unfeasible, but seasonally awesome. More to come!