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Donkey Kong Country

It seems kind of strange, after the much-publicized break-up of Nintendo and Rare, and Rare’s subsequent purchase by Microsoft, to see Nintendo and Rare continue to collaborate on games. In a way, it’s almost fiting, with Donkey Kong Country being the game that cemented the relationship between the two companies. One could argue it’s a testament to how some things never change, and some things do.

The original Donkey Kong Country was wildly praised for its beautiful pre-rendered graphics and amazing soundtrack, and in spite of its simplistic gameplay, the game was so aesthetically stunning that it acted as a shot of adrenaline in the SNES’ lifespan, showing gamers that Nintendo’s console was still a contender even against the slew of CD-format consoles being released at the time.

The GBA re-release marks the second time this title has been brought to the Game Boy, with a Game Boy Color version having been released a few years back (As well as the extremely similar Donkey Kong Land released before that on the original Game Boy). This time, however, the GBA’s ability to play almost pixel-perfect ports of Super Nintendo games made it seem like gamers would finally recieve a definitive handheld port of the title. Unfortunately, the game has sadly lost much of its luster, and even worse is the fact that the reason why is not because of the passage of time, but because of a subdued port.

The gameplay itself has made the jump to the handheld very well, though this was hardly a great feat, with the controls and gameplay of the original being very simple to begin with. Just as before, players can switch between the strong Donkey Kong and the agile Diddy Kong as they jump, crawl, and swim through the game’s varied platformer levels. One thing Donkey Kong Country did that was very unique was to have the player make a goal out of finding every level’s numerous secret areas, requiring that the player find every last one to achieve a 101% cleared status. In these respects, nothing has changed, and players will find every last barrel and bananna right where it should be.

Rare did make a few changes to the overall way the game works, however. Players can now save anywhere on the map screen, elimanating the need for save rooms, and putting a (bad) dancing pattern game in its place. Furthermore, Rare apparently wanted to try and expand upon the plot a bit, which they did by having a few breif extra scenes where Cranky comes out and says a few words every now and then, like after you beat a boss. Finally, the two-player mode is now gone for obvious reasons, though in its place is a new DK Attack mode where you can try and get high scores in timed versions of the level’s you’ve completed in the game. As far as gameplay is concerned, the Game Boy Advance version of Donkey Kong Country is more or less every bit as good as the original, for what it’s worth.

That said, the gameplay wasn’t really the main draw of the original game. As I said, the main appeal of the original was the game’s more aesthetic qualities, which have regrettably taken a hit in the transition to the handheld. While obvious changes needed to be made because of the differences in the SNES and GBA’s screen size and resolution, most of the spit and polish of the original game has also vanished completely. Characters don’t animate as smoothly, levels feature stunted color pallettes, and subtle details in many of the levels (Such as weather changes and the sun gradually setting) are nowhere to be seen. It sems the developers noticed this, and tried to add in a few details to make up for it, such as tiny crawling lizards, spiders and other insects sprinkled throughout many of the areas, but these additions stick out like a sore thumb, and actually detract from the experience more than add to it.

Things get even worse in the sound department. The depth and variety that was in the original’s soundtrack is lost, with quality of this version’s music ranging from decent to terrible. To add insult to injury, Nintendo’s back to their usual habits of adding in new voicework like they did for the Super Mario Advance series, only now many of their new terrible voice clips are actually used in place of the old voice clips. A word to the wise, Nintendo: You do not create a game to capitalize on nostalgia, and then go and change everything.

Nintendo has shown with great ports like Yoshi’s Island that they’re more than capable of porting SNES games to the Game Boy Advance faithfully and accurately, so seeing something like this now only makes one feel that it wasn’t even given an effort, but instead slapped together to cash in on the original.

In the end, Donkey Kong Country’s sound and graphics fare as “decent” overall, and with the splendor of the original essentially gone, what players are left with is a simple platformer. Fans of the original may enjoy this game for whatever nostalgia hasn’t been sucked out in the transition to the GBA, and the game is still a decent platformer, but there are numerous alternatives on the platform that are much more deserving of your hard-earned money.

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Posted by Daniel "monk" Pelfrey on Jul 18th, 2003 and is filed under GBA Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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