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.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: Ballaam, Zorulda
