Updated: Thu Aug 28, 2025

In Donkey Kong Country, if Diddy Kong is taken to the end of the Orang-utan Gang level while riding Expresso the Ostrich, a color glitch can occur if Expresso is made to jump over the top of the last palm tree and dismounted off-screen mid-jump.

Diddy Kong will take on a light palette as seen at the end of the footage.

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Like some other romance games you may have heard of, the Red Entertainment/Hudson created Kita e: White Illumination begins with legend: Two lovers who kiss during Sapporo’s White Illumination countdown on New Year’s Eve will be granted eternal happiness.

The hopefully amorous adventure that unfolds during my renameable teen stand-in’s two week Hokkaido holiday is told using a beautiful combination of hand-drawn character art and pre-rendered or photographed backgrounds. The cast don’t interact with their setting quite as seamlessly or believably as those in the visually similar Fuuraiki series—there’s a lot of standing in front of things, rather than leaning on them or looking directly at them—but the scenery’s often stunning and the cast are expressive, enough to make me wish I was there myself.

This is intentional. Kita e is part romantic adventure, part promotional tourist drive. The in-game guidebook includes accurate real-world opening times and contact details for many of the places I can visit, and rarely a moment goes by without the cast pointing out how incredible the local hotels and parks are and how delicious the food is. 

This adver-gaming should be as irritating as it is obvious, but in all honesty I find it hard to dislike. My character (and I) really are new to the island, and Kotori, the first girl I meet, is an enthusiastic ambassador for the region and really brings the places she takes me to life. I’ve learned things I didn’t know before thanks to her cheery chatter and it did feel like taking a holiday, going somewhere new and seeing the sights with a friend who knew all the best spots.

It’s a good thing I like her, as the game does a poor job of encouraging me to spend time with anyone else. She meets me at the airport and then happily welcomes me into her home for the duration of my stay on the island. Her mum is often present and equally delightful. We usually eat dinner together (local produce, of course) and I have a fantastic time with the perfect host. A few other characters are encountered during our trips, but in my experience only for a few sentences in a single scene. Most of them are then never seen or mentioned again (there are a few I wouldn’t be aware of at all if they weren’t mentioned in the manual) unless I choose to deliberately derail the expected course of my holiday.

So it’s a pleasant way to spend some time, but this setting is not the neutral base needed for a game packed with date-related shenanigans, and the game would have benefitted from a narratively convenient bland uncle for me to stay with. Someone that would have made it just as easy to meet up with Kotori if I wanted to, without breaking away from her in the opening days (a requirement if I want to experience some other storylines) feeling awkward, unnatural, and frankly a little ungrateful.

Luckily for those that don’t want to deliberately shove Kotori away there’s a clear chance to take a different path when she goes away for a few days on tennis-related matters with a friend, and at her mum’s suggestion I can stay (and help out on) the Aida family farm with another girl, Megumi, while she’s gone. 

I had such a great time while I was there amongst the lavender fields, dairy farming, and hot air balloon rides I ended up locking myself into Megumi’s route without even thinking about it (or minding), and when my time there ended I panicked a little, wondering just how the inevitable  “So, what did you get up to while I was away?” conversations would go. Would Kotori be happy? Jealous? How did her tennis event go? Would she come back elated, upset, or plain exhausted? There were still so many days of my virtual holiday to go, sleeping in a room in her home and meeting other people while thinking about someone else…

The truth is, I have no idea what happens in this potentially awkward after, as the game skips straight to the end of the holiday and then plunges headlong into the Christmas/New Year climax.

I was relieved—and a touch dismayed too. There’s no cross-route complexity here, no ongoing interactions between various cast members or global changes to the story. I end up on one path and play it through until it ends, and that’s it. This decision makes the romances feel somewhat permissive and passive, as if anything that doesn’t align with what I want to do gets tidied away for another run. I’m not an equal partner in a blossoming relationship, I’m in charge, a director—and if I haven’t shown an ongoing interest then it doesn’t exist.

Whoever I end up spending my time with, our conversations are enhanced by Kita e’s phenomenal “Communication Break System”. The idea is that instead of the game inserting pauses into someone’s dialogue, me politely standing by until I’m allowed to have an opinion, I’m expected to be an active listener, ready to prod the X button and then select my chosen answer whenever I think it’s time to reply. 

There are no markers to indicate when I should do this, the game relying entirely on my ability to pay attention and read social cues. If I don’t react, the person I’m speaking to will skip over the topic or invitation they were just discussing and I lose the chance to do something fun together or make a positive comment they’d have appreciated. 

But what happens if I do this at the wrong time? If I speak up when I shouldn’t have?

There are two possible outcomes in that scenario. One: nothing. The game ignores me, and the dialogue carries on regardless. Two: I interrupt, and the game reacts in an almost magical way. 

When someone’s talking for a while—maybe about the place we’ve gone to visit, or recalling some happy memory—I can organically interject and then ask them to repeat what they just said, change the topic, give them a present, or apologise for interrupting them (helpful when knocking the controller by accident). What’s amazing is if I say “Can you repeat that?” they don’t just restart the dialogue from the top of the last audio track played, I get a true response. “Oh, sure! OK, so…” and then they loop back around to the top of whatever they were just saying. Likewise, if I didn’t mean to say anything at all, their response to the “Ah, it’s nothing” choice is often something like “Don’t worry about it. Anyway, what was I saying…?” and then they pick back up at the line I interrupted. It’s astonishing to see this sort of thing happen so seamlessly in a game released decades ago.

As anxiety-inducing as it is to potentially miss out because I’m not paying attention, this system is something to be treasured. Being able to do something as simple as choosing for myself to take a moment to agree with someone’s thoughts, or stopping them to ask for further details about something they’ve just mentioned, brings so much life to the dialogue. I’m here, I’m listening, I’m making an effort.

It creates some really lovely spontaneous moments too. One of my favourites was pretending to sneak off to the toilet at a restaurant, only to rush back to the shop Kotori had seen something she liked but didn’t buy to get it for her, and then present it to her as a gift when I got back.

It’s all lovely, really. Events are largely a simple case of “Do you want to go to [place]?” with a yes taking us there immediately. The number of times I had to manually go somewhere to meet up with someone wasn’t zero, but it was pretty close. And wherever I end up, I’ll have a nice time. It’s fun meeting Kotori’s friend Ayu, or building a rapport with Megumi’s cows (really), potentially even seeing a calf being born in the middle of the night, and then getting a serving of fresh ice cream at the end of it. The relaxed pace of these interactions matches the holiday theme—I don’t have to be perfect to have someone like me enough to meet up at the White Illumination countdown. Obviously I have to follow through on promises made and show an interest, but it never felt like these relationships hinged on carefully working through a rigid checklist of mandatory scenarios and correct responses, that I was one wrong move away from ending the game alone.

Playing through Kita e’s a lot like going on a real holiday—not just to Hokkaido, but anywhere. Sure, there are some bumps along the way and not everything goes the way you hope it would, but by the end you’re happier for the experience, have had some fun unplanned adventures, made some incredible memories you’ll hold dear forever, and can’t wait to return. 

How it started

I carry a lot of different phones around, and I rarely get questions about them because most people stopped talking about which phone they own around 2017. I could be using an unreleased iPhone 18 Pro Max Air Ultra to pay for my coffee and nobody would raise an eyebrow (present company excepted, of course). To the majority, a phone is a phone; no matter who makes it or what software it runs, they're all roughly the same size and shape. Unless that phone happens to be a flip phone.

Flip phones attract attention from the kind of people who have seen every type of phone in existence, which makes sense: they're very obviously d …

Read the full story at The Verge.