Donkey Kong Country (SNES)

Hello, welcome back! It's Super Adventures' 13th birthday today and I've got some good news for you. Four years ago I replaced around 14,000 screenshots across 1000 articles to improve their quality, and everything was great... until I started getting complaints that images weren't loading. It didn't happen to everyone, just some people some of the time. Eventually all the images stopped working for me entirely, which was a good thing because it meant I could see what needed fixing and sort it out.

Long story short, I've replaced all those screenshots across all those articles again, so everything should be fine now and you can go browse the archives. Even the really old posts where you'd be lucky to get one sentence under each picture. In fact, if you're nostalgic for the classic Super Adventures style, I've retconned in a mysterious never-before-seen authentic guest post from 2013 that originally didn't get published for whatever reason. Go look for frogs, that's your clue.

Developer:

Rare

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

SNES, GBC, GBA

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing about something else that's celebrating an anniversary this year: the legendary Donkey Kong Country!

It's known as Super Donkey Kong in Japan, because putting the word 'Super' in front of names is awesome, especially if the name of a game for the Super Nintendo... a console I have really neglected these past few years. I don't even know how that happened, it's not like I want to avoid showing off 16-bit game art.

I'm really trying to make up for it here, as Donkey Kong Country was one of the biggest releases of the 16-bit era. In fact, it was the best-selling game of 1994, almost doubling the sales of its nearest rival Street Fighter II and selling over seven times as well as Super Metroid. Though in Japan it got utterly thrashed by Final Fantasy VI and Americans spent more money on NBA Jam. Actually, I'm not sure that second fact is true. Sure NBA Jam sold more copies in the US in '94, but DKC was an unusually pricey game if I recall. Around £60 in the UK (£120 today, or $150 USD).

The game was able to get away with its exorbitant price tag due to the sheer force of hype around it. Not because it was the first Donkey Kong game in like a decade (aside from the Game Boy game that came out a few months earlier), but because of its incredible visuals. It featured fully ray-traced graphics that players could enjoy without buying a CD drive, or a 32X add-on, or a shiny new 3DO console. The cartridge didn't even include a Super FX chip!

Alright, my plan is to play the game for about an hour and hope that I can think of something to write. I mean, it's been like 3 years since I've covered a SNES platformer, so I've probably forgotten all the things I used to whine about.

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Donkey Kong (Arcade)

Previously on Donkey Kong:

13 years earlier, in 1981, a giant King Kong rip-off called Donkey Kong kidnapped Mario Jumpman's girl and started lobbing barrels at him when he made the treacherous ascent to rescue her. He wasn't exactly the good guy in this scenario, but the arcade game was a massive massive success and when it got a sequel the following year the roles were reversed. This time Mario was the villain and Donkey Kong was the damsel in distress, who had to be rescued by his son, Donkey Kong Jr.

In 1983, Donkey Kong got a third arcade game where a guy called Stanley tried to get him out of his greenhouse. Meanwhile Donkey Kong Jr. solved maths problems in a Famicom edutainment game. And that was it for the two apes. Mario became a star on the NES and Game Boy, while his former antagonists settled into a comfortable retirement.

11 YEARS LATER

Suddenly a new hero with a red tie drops out of nowhere, knocks the elderly Donkey Kong off his girders, and does a little dance as he falls! The guy has no respect for his elders. To be fair, the former Donkey Kong has always been a dick and he probably deserved it.

I love how '90s this intro is, with its 'This isn't your father's Donkey Kong!' attitude and its CD boombox. It even starts with the original Donkey Kong theme playing on a hand-cranked gramophone to really hammer home how ancient and rubbish the arcade game is compared to this cutting-edge 3D rendered graphical showcase.

But then old Cranky Donkey Kong gets his revenge by lobbing a TNT barrel up at the game's radical new primate, showing that the game's not quite as full of itself as it seemed.

Also, the animation falls apart a bit when the new Donkey Kong slides down the screen with his eyes still sticking out. Doesn't look great.

Donkey Kong (Game Boy)

Donkey Kong Country wasn't actually the game to end Donkey Kong's long exile however, as he got a Game Boy game earlier in the year. This version of the ape is wearing the red tie, but he's got the old character design, so I'm thinking it's the original monkey

DKC's cool new Donkey Kong was reimagined by the guy who designed the Battletoads, so he's got a bit of that in his DNA now.

Personally, I prefer Rare's new design for the character, even if the eyes are really weird. I don't even know what's going on there.

They redesigned Donkey Kong Jr. as well, but Nintendo thought he looked too different and asked for him to have a different name. So now that's Diddy Kong, who is a completely new character. But is this Donkey Kong a completely new character, or is he the original Donkey Kong Jr. grown up? I dunno, maybe?

Anyway, this is the only choice the game offers you when you start it up, aside from letting you pick a save slot. There are no other options at all; no difficulty settings, no alternate controls, no sound test, nothing.

Game Boy Color

Hang on, I've found the sound test. It was in the Game Boy Color port.

I'm trying to figure out what I'm looking at here, as Donkey Kong can't be kneeling down in a lake of radioactive waste, that'd just be weird. Are those supposed to be his feet? Is he wearing shoes today?

Welcome to Donkey Kong Country. It's a lot like Super Mario World or Yoshi's Island and it even features a similar world map. I guess Cranky Kong used his Donkey Kong royalties to get his family out of New York and move them them a tropical island. Then he spent the rest of the cash on having a giant version of his own head carved into the rock.

It's weird that the water isn't animated. I feel like it should be, seeing as the game likes to show off. I don't blame the artists though, as water's a pain.

Alright, I'm going to world 1, Kongo Jungle, then to level 1, Jungle Hijinxs. Nowhere I can go.

KONGO JUNGLE, LEVEL 1: JUNGLE HIJINXS

Hey, a butterfly! I've written about two games this year and they've both had butterflies at the start. There were no spinning bananas in Model Builder though... or trees. Those are very plastic looking leaves, but this is unambiguously a jungle, which means that even though we've entered the third dimension, the revolutionary Donkey Kong Country basically starts in a forest like every other platformer. Also, the gameplay is still entirely 100% 2D.

The graphics look a bit ropey on a sharp monitor screen to be honest, with its limited colours, symmetrical trees, and cloned plants, but... it's a Super Nintendo game. I'm sure that Rare would've liked to do a Killer Instinct and render the whole background as a video, but the SNES didn't come with a hard drive, so they had to make do with building it from repeated tiles. DKC features a massive 32 Mb cartridge, but that's megabits, not megabytes, so you have to divide that number by 8. Basically, the whole game would've fit onto 5 Amiga disks.

There's no time limit so I could stand here forever if I wanted, listening to how the music shifts between different phases, but there are doors on the left for me to check out. The level began with the dude bursting out of his house in such a hurry that he sent pieces of broken door flying, but I want to see what's up there.

It's a creepy 1UP balloon that looks like Donkey Kong's head and a tyre so I can bounce up and reach it! Also some more butterflies and a weird 3D animated painting.

There's no tiled background in here, this is all one rendered image, so the artists were able to go wild and fill it full of details (like a picture of his girlfriend on the wall). They also filled it with fruit, so at least we can be sure the guy's not going to run out of bananas any time soon.

You can see here on your crystal-clear modern screen how they struggled with the SNES's colour limits. But I'm painfully aware of how beautiful images get mutilated when you reduce them to 256 colours or less, so personally I think they've done a great job. This was magic on the CRT TVs of the time.

01 / 30

1994 - Rise of the Robots (Amiga)

02 / 30

1984 - The Last Starfighter (Movie)

03 / 30

1987 - Doctor Who (TV)

04 / 30

1990 - Awesome (Amiga)

05 / 30

1990 - Corporation (Amiga)

06 / 30

1991 - Alien Breed (Amiga)

07 / 30

1991 - Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi (MS-DOS)

08 / 30

1993 - Microcosm (FM Towns)

09 / 30

1993 - Star Wars: X-Wing (MS-DOS)

10 / 30

1993 - The 7th Guest (MS-DOS)

11 / 30

1993 - Syndicate (MS-DOS)

12 / 30

1993 - SeaQuest DSV (TV)

13 / 30

1993 - Myst (MS-DOS)

14 / 30

1993 - Star Wars: Rebel Assault (MS-DOS)

15 / 30

1993 - Bloodnet (MS-DOS)

16 / 30

1994 - Babylon 5 (TV)

17 / 30

1994 - Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (Mega Drive)

18 / 30

1994 - Theme Park (MS-DOS)

19 / 30

1994 - Zool 2 (CD32)

20 / 30

1994 - Star Wars: TIE Fighter (MS-DOS)

21 / 30

1994 - Star Crusader (MS-DOS)

22 / 30

1994 - ReBoot (TV)

23 / 30

1994 - Little Big Adventure (MS-DOS)

24 / 30

1994 - Super Stardust (Amiga)

25 / 30

1994 - MegaRace (3DO)

26 / 30

1994 - One Must Fall 2097 (MS-DOS)

27 / 30

1994 - Killer Instinct (Arcade)

28 / 30

1994 - Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine (Sega CD)

29 / 30

1994 - Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller (3DO)

30 / 30

1994 - Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger (MS-DOS)

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Here's some trivia for you, Donkey Kong Country and Rise of the Robots were both released on 18th November 1994, with Killer Instinct hitting arcades less than a month earlier.

3D rendered visuals had actually been around in games for a few years at this point. Amiga shoot 'em up Awesome had a full ray-traced intro back in 1990, Wing Commander II used 3D backgrounds in 1991, and by 1993 games like The 7th Guest and Rebel Assault had so much CGI in them that you needed to get a CD drive just to see it.

Final Fantasy VII (PSX)

It wasn't the 3D rendering technology alone that made Donkey Kong Country special, though Rare certainly had some amazing hardware. I think they used their Nintendo money to get a $500,000 SGI Challenge XL server and multiple $X0,000 Indigo 2 workstations running Alias PowerAnimator, or something like that. This was the same tech used to make things like Jurassic Park in 1993 and Final Fantasy VII in 1997.

What really made DKC special, is that they used this tech to make a whole game full of creatures with life and character and charm running around on top of bright detailed beautiful scenery, with everything blending together perfectly. And then they put it on the SNES, where such things were never meant to be.

Alright, next I'll check the dark, empty ugly cave under Donkey Kong's house.

Oh no, the guy's ran out of bananas!

The exact same thing happened to Quik the Thunder Rabbit this same year, only it was his carrot stash that got raided. Still, it's not a massive problem, as bananas literally grow on trees. Well, they spin on the ground next to trees at least.

Fun banana fact: a refrigerated banana can stay at peak ripeness for up to 10 days. So even if he recovers his bananas he'll have to replace them all in a week or two anyway.

Game Boy Advance

Donkey Kong Country eventually got ported to the Game Boy Advance as well, and this version features the intro cutscene that was originally planned for the SNES game! It shows Diddy Kong being attacked by Kremling thieves while on guard duty and honestly, with dialogue like this I can live without it.

They could've made a bit of room for this intro in the original SNES version, but instead they must have thought a scene of Donkey Kong kicking Cranky off a girder and getting blown up in retribution was a better use of their resources and they were dead on right. It establishes the game's irreverent tongue-in-cheek tone, which is completely absent in this new cutscene.

I was going to demonstrate some of my hard-earned game design knowledge and talk about how platformer games use floating collectables to subconsciously lead the player through the safe route and teach them how to play, but there's nothing subconscious about this banana formation. That's literally an arrow, pointing straight down.

I trusted the bananas, jumped from the tree, and landed with enough force to smash a patch of ground open. This got me a free metal barrel!

Barrels have been an essential part of Donkey Kong lore ever since the first game, when he tossed an inexhaustible supply of them down at the plumber coming to rescue his girlfriend. So for tradition's sake, I should grab this one and lob it at a rodent.

If you lob an iron barrel at a wall you can actually jump on when it rebounds and ride it, but I'd rather get rid of the thing so I can pick up that DK barrel on the right and chuck it at a crocodile.

Hey, there was a monkey in the barrel! Donkey Kong Country is one of the few games that lets you use your hit-point pickups as a weapon.

Diddy Kong's not going to be any help during gameplay, he's just going to trail behind me like Tails in the Sonic games, but collecting a second Kong is like getting a mushroom in Super Mario Bros., as it lets me survive being hit. In fact a lot of this game is like Super Mario Bros. now that I think about it.

These Kremlings weren't in any of the older Donkey Kong or Mario games, DKC basically inherited nothing from them but barrels, but they were in a Rare game... that got cancelled. It was apparently a point-and-click adventure called Johnny Blastoff and the Kremling Armada and it was going to be about pirates. Not many pirates in this, but Rare made up for that in the next game.

Game Boy Color

The Game Boy Color port is kind of abstract by comparison, but I can tell that it's the same level and that it's doing its best to recreate the SNES experience on 8-bit hardware. Honestly, it's doing a surprisingly good job, with the gameplay being extremely similar and the pure synth soundtrack is as catchy as the sample-based tracks its based on.

There's one big difference I've noticed so far though: it doesn't want to put both apes on screen at once, so your backup primate is indicated by a DK barrel icon. And the big K indicates that I've found the level's first KONG letter, which is the game's version of Mario World's Yoshi coins.

I can switch from Donkey Kong to Diddy Kong at any time, but I usually don't see a point. Donkey Kong's able to hurt tougher enemies and Diddy's allegedly a little more agile, but I've never noticed. It's not like the second game, where Dixie Kong plays noticeably different due to her helicopter hair ability.

Actually, I'm going to check this out. I'm going to go make the same jump as Donkey Kong and then Diddy Kong and then compare the two with the magic of animated GIFs.

EVENTUALLY

Oh damn, it turns out that Diddy really can jump slightly higher! So if I'd switched to Diddy Kong right away I would've been able to grab the 1UP balloon that was up there before it floated away!

One thing that I can never do is pick up the other monkey and throw them. In the sequels, you can lift up your partner and lob them to interesting places. It's very useful when there's a secret bonus barrel cannon you want to reach.

Here's something interesting I noticed: I motion-stabilised the two clips so I could line them up exactly, but in game the camera always moves to match the height of the floor. If you jump into the air, it stays still, if you jump onto a tree, it moves up. I've seen Mario games doing something similar, keeping the camera locked onto a horizontal path until you force it to move.

Game Boy Advance

Damn, how many animals did the Kremlings pack into boxes last night? I have no idea how or why they got a rhino into a crate, but they're about to regret it.

This GBA version is actually very similar to the SNES game, except with the graphics reduced to fit the smaller screen and the effects reduced to suit the less powerful hardware. Also, looking at screenshots on a monitor is like staring into a light bulb, because the original GBA didn't have any lighting of its own for the screen and they had to compensate.

I experimented with editing the screenshots to fix it, but the best I got out of that was disappointment.

Rambi's just like Yoshi in Super Mario World, except instead of eating enemies he just charges right through them. Beavers are deadly creatures who can kill an ape in a single touch, but when you're riding a rhinoceros it works the other way around. I could've just rolled into them or jumped on them (like in a Super Mario game), but this is faster and safer.

In the GBC game, breaking the box lets you play as Rambi, so you get to gallop around on four legs for a bit, which is pretty unusual for a platformer. Wait, you gallop around on four legs anyway! 

Rambi can smash through secret walls as well, which is good if you're looking for treasure.

Speaking of bonuses, I just picked up the third KONG letter. There are four on every stage and they're in order, so if you find you've collected K NG, you'll know roughly where to go looking for the O. You have to remember which ones you're missing though, as the UI only comes on screen when it's useful. Most of the time there is nothing to distract from the monkey business.

See, now that I'm collecting bananas the banana count has appeared. They're like the coins in Super Mario, whenever I collect 100 of them I get an extra life. That's why the lives counter has appeared too.

This is like one of those bonus levels in Super Mario as well. One of the really boring ones to be specific, I'm just going to the right. That's it.

I left the cave, returned to the level, and then charged straight into a second secret wall!

Fortunately, this bonus room is more interesting. It's like that bonus game in Super Mario Bros. 3 where there are three things cycling through different icons and you've got to stop each of them at the right moment to make them all match.

I got three gold swordfish lined up and got a gold swordfish token! Yay! Get three gold swordfish tokens and you get taken to the swordfish bonus stage. Only two more to go.

Oh, I thought this was morning but it's gotten dark already.

Hang on, is this actual level exit? Just a hole in the side of a hill? The sequel has a target to hit and if you land on it at the right moment you win a prize and get a little victory animation. I like how Dixie whips out a guitar and plays her own victory fanfare if she wins... so much better than a hole.

At least I was able to bring my animal buddy to the end; he didn't get turned into a puff of smoke by a 'No rhinos' sign. In fact, I don't know if the signs are even in the first game.

Jungle Hijinxs is done... and you don't need a spellchecker to know that's not how it's spelled.

I was going to complain here that the world map doesn't show you if you've collected all the secrets on a level, but then someone told me that the exclamation mark in the title means it's done. So, that's good. You can replay stages as much as you want and you need to enter every bonus room in every level to get the full 101% completion at the end.

Hah, I just noticed the font on that "Caves" sign. Is that Times New Roman?

KONGO JUNGLE, LEVEL 2: ROPEY RAMPAGE

The next level reuses the same background art, but it's hard to accuse it of being a lazy retread when I'm swinging on ropes in a storm. I wish I could've gotten a shot with the sky lit up, but I'm not quite fluky enough to leap from rope to rope over a wasp at the exact moment that the lightning flashes. It would've been awesome if I'd pulled it off though.

Wasps are a little scary at the best of times, but these ones are massive and covered in spikes, so I'm feeling discouraged from jumping on them. Still, it could be worse: in the third game they've got a circular saw in their ass.

With two stages done I've made it to Cranky Kong's cabin, though he's not being much use to me. In the sequel Cranky's advice costs coins, but here it's mostly worthless. "Stick to the trees in Jungle Hijinxs" is about the best you can hope for from him. I've done that level already!
 
You have to wait a fair bit to even get that, as the miserable old monkey goes on a tirade about about modern technology. Everything about this 16-bit game running on a four-year-old game console is all graphics over gameplay, style over substance! Not like it was in his day... eleven years ago.

He definitely is the original Donkey Kong by the way, I checked the manual to be sure, so I don't know why he's so ancient. I guess apes don't live that long.

Here's a timeline of the major Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong platformers to come out in the '80s and '90s. Okay, Donkey Kong 3's not a platformer, but it'd be weird to leave it out when the guy only got three arcade games. The second half of the 80s was dominated by the Mario brothers, but after they launched the Game Boy in 1989 and the SNES in 1990, things got quieter for a bit. 1993's Super Mario All-Stars was great, but it was still just a remake of their '80s hits.

So I can see why Nintendo went to a Western third-party developer for their next big 16-bit hit: they needed to get more games made. Preferably games that looked even more impressive than the Sega version of Aladdin, with its beautiful Disney animation. Nintendo took a look at what their old friends Rare were up to with Killer Instinct and realised that they were the ones to go with.

Alright, I'm heading into the Caves.

ONE LEVEL LATER

I did the Caves and now I've reached the other half of the World 1 map! Damn, there's a banana mountain over there. I didn't think I'd be recovering my banana hoard so quickly.

You'd think I could just walk up to the Barrel Flights shop from here, there's a path right there, but nope I have to go for a swim first.

KONGO JUNGLE, LEVEL 4: CORAL CAPERS

There's a nice ripple effect on the screen underwater but you'll have to take my word for that as you can only see it in motion. The game's weirdly atmospheric at times, especially with this music.

You can't see this secret passage at all, but I sensed something was up when I saw a lone banana sitting there by a wall. The game's sneaky with its bananas. Sometimes they'll helpfully point you to something, other times they'll lure you away from treasure, so I've got to check all the paths. Donkey and Diddy can hold their breath like Mario so I've got the time.

KONGO JUNGLE, LEVEL 5: BARREL CANNON CANYON

The next level is all about getting the timing right on these mysterious floating barrel cannons. They're simple to use, I just jump at them and then press the button when I want to fire my monkey across the screen. I figured I'd get the timing right without much trouble too, but nope! This is turning into a disaster.

To be fair, I always do the first few just fine. But then there's one I always mess up, which means falling off the screen and getting a free trip back to the world map. Restarts are quick and there's always a single checkpoint halfway through the stage (like in the Mario games), but man I'm getting sick of replaying this bit with the barrels.

6 times I've screwed up on the same section now! I've been earning a ton of lives along the way and getting through levels fairly unscathed, but I just used up nearly half of my 1UP stash in this one spot.

On the plus side, I found a third gold swordfish in a bonus room, so I get the gold swordfish bonus level! This time I'm racing around a Pac-Man maze collecting fish instead of bananas, but it's the same deal: every 100 I pick up gets me an extra life. The sequels make you find and win different kinds of coins to progress, but everything you collect in DKC 1 is for the ultimate purpose of increasing the lives count.

There is a tiny bit of thinking involved here as there's a giant golden token hidden somewhere and picking it up doubles the tiny tokens you've collected so far. You have to decide on when to quit harvesting fish and go for the multiplier. Fortunately the timer sticks around on screen, so you know how many seconds you've got left.

Well okay, it's not really counting seconds, the timer ticks down too fast for that, but it gives you a number you can work with.

EVENTUALLY

Thank fuck, I've reached Candy's Save Point! I can finally save my progress and it doesn't even cost any coins.

The save screen tells me that I've only been playing for 20 minutes, but it feels like hours. And most of those hours were spent just getting past that one barrel section. The game is smooth sailing until it's not.

Candy Kong is Donkey Kong's girlfriend, so it's fortunate they already have the same last name. I'm assuming they're not related, as this is a Nintendo game for kids and that'd be weird. It's already weird enough that she's wearing a swimsuit, though I suppose they are standing next to a lake.

Game Boy Advance

The GBA port doesn't need the Save Point as you can just save anywhere on the world map. Which makes sense for a portable system. This menu also gives you stats for every level; handy when you're trying to work out what bonus rooms you're missing.

This version also has a remade world map, with scrolling! I guess it was done this way to suit the smaller screen. Hang on, I'm next to Banana Mountain. Does that mean that I'm fighting the World 1 boss next?

I hope this isn't going to give me too much trouble. I ran out of patience for learning boss enemy routines years ago.

KONGO JUNGLE, LEVEL 6: VERY GNAWTY'S LAIR

The big beaver was a complete pushover!

I just had to step on his head a few times and I got my big Nintendo banana. The only reason I screwed up, lost Donkey Kong and switched to Diddy is because I was trying to keep the camera as still as possible for sake of the GIF. That pretty parallax scrolling looks great in motion though, even with the frame rate halved like this.

You'd think this would be the end of the quest, bananas retrieved, but the princess is in another castle, and by 'princess' I mean 'more bananas'.

MONKEY MINES, LEVEL 1: WINKY'S WALKWAY

Nice, a Donkey Kong barrel right at the start of the next stage. I don't like it when I've only got the one monkey and I have to play cautiously.

I do like that lighting effect though, using transparency to break the 256 colour limit. The game's got more graphical tricks than just the pre-rendered graphics and it all works harmoniously. When the game's in motion you don't even notice that the poles holding up the walkways are on one of the background layers, so the characters walk in front of them.

It's been a struggle for me to catch a moment with two enemies on screen at once, but that's normal for 16-bit platformers. Plus it suits the game's design, as it features tight, focused levels designed to make you deal with a string of challenges. Not that these guys are any challenge at all, even the ones that jump occasionally. You can just do a cartwheel attack into them, they're nothing.

MONKEY MINES, LEVEL 2: MINE CART CARNAGE

This next level has taken a bit of inspiration from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom's mine cart chase. Though I don't remember Indy dying over and over again and having to keep restarting.

It's about jumping over gaps and broken carts, and the gaps have actually been no issue for me. Those carts though... if you're too quick to jump over you land on them and lose a monkey, if you're too slow you plough into them.

What's really frustrating is that I nearly did the whole thing on my first try! It's just the one jump that's really messing me up.

EVENTUALLY

Well okay, even if I had made that jump first time, I probably would've lost a life on this bit afterwards.

It's not that I can't get past the broken carts, I get past loads of them. But there's always one that finally trips me up and then I'm back to the world map again. Fortunately, I get to start halfway through thanks to the checkpoint and restarts are nearly instantaneous.

Alright, attempt #6, let's go...

Oh, you thought you could pull that 'one last surprise enemy before the exit' trick on me? I've played video games before mate, I know how this works. Never let your guard down until you're back on the world map. (It was a narrow miss though.)

Alright, that's Mine Cart Carnage done with after five minutes and six attempts. But you can get through it in 90 seconds if you don't mess up, and I honestly think that's possible. It's not a memory test, even though having a memory helps.

MONKEY MINES, LEVEL 5: MILLSTONE MAYHEM

Damn, the game really is going full Indiana Jones right now. I can't say it doesn't have some variety in scenery. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they gave their 3D rendering servers a rest here and did the art using more traditional techniques.

Hang on, that is really sneaky. If you look carefully you can just about see the edge of a hidden barrel at the bottom of the gap. Not all instant-death bottomless pits are bad for you.

Speaking of barrels, the one DK is holding is perfectly circular on the side in this screenshot, so it seems like Rare didn't render things to be stretched correctly for 4:3 ratio TVs.

But this wheel is oval-shaped unless the aspect ratio is corrected!

I know rodents like running in wheels, but a beaver in the middle of a floating millstone is kind of unusual. He's just going to keep floating up and down in that thing for the rest of his life, or the rest of the day at least, so I'm going to need to be smart if I want to get past him.

Fortunately, I found this tyre earlier and decided to push it along just in case I came across a situation like this. With this thing as a spring, I can bounce over to that top platform and see where that takes me. Generally in platform games, you want to take the high road.

I found a frog in a box! But then I lost him a hole and when I went to get him back I got knocked right off again by a snake.

If you're wondering how I got the camera to stay still instead of following the monkeys around, the answer is I just stabilised the video afterwards. And then I painstakingly painted the enemies back into the frames when the camera panned away from them, because I'd already sunk a bunch of time into it, and it looked like ass, and man I spent way too long on a dumb GIF of a frog in a hole.

MONKEY MINES, LEVEL 6: NECKY'S NUT

Anyway, the second boss is only slightly more difficult than the first one. He pokes his head in from the side of the screen to spit a nut and you have to use the tyre to bounce up onto his head. That's pretty much it. The only thing you have to worry about is the nut he spits intersecting your monkey unexpectedly. I beat the boss on my second try and really I should've finished him off on the first try.

I like how the difficulty dynamic has been flipped so far, with the regular levels being trickier than the boss fights. After all that work getting here it's nice to be able to totally wreck a giant vulture and get my bananas back. This isn't enough bananas though, not even close. I'll need to get at least four more banana mountains shipped back to the hoard before Donkey Kong will be satisfied.

Actually, I could turn it off now, but I've only been playing for 48 minutes and I want to give it a complete hour, so I'm carrying on to world 3!

VINE VALLEY, LEVEL 2: TREE TOP TOWN

Oh no, world three starts off with barrels again! I was hoping this would be a snow world. I like snow. As long as it's not a slippery ice stage, those are always a nightmare.

I like the idea of the barrel cannons, and watching the monkeys getting launched from barrel to barrel all over the screen I just really suck at the timing. Worse, I consistently suck at it. I make the same mistake over and over and over because I don't learn.

The trouble is that I can't escape back to a previous world to grind for some extra lives until I unlock this world's Funky Flights, and I can't save until I get this world's Candy's Save Point. All I can do is keep pushing forward with the few lives I've got remaining and hope I can make it past this level before they run out. Reminder: when you defeat a boss, go back to Candy and save your game before moving on to the next world!

VINE VALLEY, LEVEL 3: FOREST FRENZY

I got past the barrels and unlocked the Funky Flights! I can go back to Jungle Hijinxs now and harvest some lives. A couple of dozen should do.

But I didn't do that. I went onto the next stage, like an idiot, because... I dunno, I like playing the game and wanted to play a new level? I think that's what happened here. This stage has me climbing up and down a rope to avoid these vultures, which is new. The game's doing a terrible job of boring me with repetition.

Yay I did it! 1 hour 2 minutes. That's 26% of the game, so I could theoretically beat the whole thing in 4 hours, but in reality there's no way that's happening. The game's only getting tougher and I'd have to continually return to world one to grind for extra lives whenever I throw them all away on barrels and mine carts.

Oh, also it doesn't save your lives count so whenever you load they get reset back to 5. That's very Mario World too.


CONCLUSION

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Donkey Kong Country was the best Mario game made by a Western developer since The Great Giana Sisters. It uses its SGI ray-traced graphics to appear cutting-edge and its cheeky British humour to seem irreverent, but at it's heart this takes the job of being a Mario sequel extremely seriously. In fact, it's so 8-bit at heart that they were able to make a fairly faithful Game Boy Color port of it! The game only really uses two buttons.

This could've turned out like a Philips CD-i game though, so Nintendo dodged a bullet there. In fact, the highest praise I can give this game is that I assumed Nintendo must have had more involvement with it than they actually did. British developers had a shaky track record when it came to 2D platformers, especially compared to the top Japanese teams, but this has rock-solid gameplay. Rare were supposed to beat Aladdin's visuals, but they ended up making a game that's arguably more fun to play.

Like the old-school Mario games, it's a straightforward obstacle course with the exit to your right and everything you need to think about in the moment being on the screen. There are bonus rooms to find, barrel cannons hidden in pits and extra lives in the trees, but you don't have to go hunting for 50 bananas to open the exit. It's always throwing new kinds of challenges at you, but it's less sadistic than Rare's earlier games and it generally plays fair and keeps the frustrations to a minimum. Having a decent memory helps, especially as the levels are allegedly designed so you can fly right through them once you have the timing down, but you can plausibly get through its trials without error on a first try if you've got a knack for barrel cannons. It makes me suspect that there was actually a bit of playtesting and polish going on during development for this one.

There are some things that set it apart from the Mario series however. The game has no power ups, just barrels and animals. Also, Mario promotes the pursuit of money and power, while this promotes eating healthy fruit and inflicting vengeance upon those who would steal that fruit. And it stars apes.

You could write the game off as being style over substance (Cranky Kong certainly does), but there were plenty of great games at the time that used flashy pre-rendered 3D alongside all the terrible ones. Just because it looks good, it doesn't mean it plays bad. It's not a Shadow of the Beast... or even an Earthworm Jim. And it's a much better jungle adventure than Brian the Lion.

You could also write the game off as not looking good, with 30-year-old low-res artwork that loses its magic on modern sharp screens. But I think the art design actually holds up. It's like a glimpse into the future... of GBA games. Except Rare put the effort in to clean up the art properly and sort out the outlines. It also sounds as revolutionary as it looks, and I mean that unironically. The music's so good it's even fairly decent when it's coming out of a GBA.

The game has 33 levels, 7 boss fights, and a million or so bonus rooms to lure you into going back and replaying them, so it's a decent length for a 2D platformer as well. And the biggest advantage it has over the classic games that inspired it is that it has saves, you don't have to finish it in one sitting. Also, the graphics, I guess.

    

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Next time on Super Adventures, I've got something completely different for you. Well, mostly different. See if you can guess what it is! Or you could share your thoughts about Donkey Kong Country if you want, that's cool too.