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.

Perfect Dark (Xbox 360)

Developer:

Rare

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Release Date:

2000

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Systems:

N64, Xbox 360

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the spiritual successor to Rare's legendary N64 FPS GoldenEye 007: the slightly less legendary Perfect Darkﾞ!

It came out three years later for the same console, runs on the same engine, and was developed by a lot of the same people, so it's basically GoldenEye 2 (or GoldenEye 008?) There were proper sequels to GoldenEye, but Rare had been outbid by EA and decided they'd rather do their own thing anyway, so Black Ops gave us third person shooter Tomorrow Never Dies on the PlayStation and Eurocom got to make the next first person N64 Bond shooter, The World is Not Enough. Both considerably less legendary.

Perfect Dark was was released late in the N64's life and was so ambitious that it required the Expansion Pak installed in order to access 65% of its content. Though even with double the RAM under the hood, the game still suffers from framerate issues. Fortunately I'm mostly going to be playing the remastered Xbox 360 version on the Xbox One, which has about 2000 times the RAM. I would've played the PC version and used a mouse but to this day the game still hasn't got a PC port.

If you're wondering why there's an N behind the title despite the letter not appearing in either word, that's so that the Nintendo logo can spin around and morph into the logo! It's a little different in the Xbox Live Arcade version, as 4J Studio's logo takes Nintendo's place. Not a lot of Nintendo logos on Microsoft games I've noticed. If you're wondering why there's a dakuten (ﾞ) after the K... I've got no idea. They thought it'd look cool I guess. Like how Street Fighter II′ has a dash.

Alright I'll put this on and give it an hour or two then. I used to love the game but I can't remember if there's anything notable I should be playing up to (mostly because it's the multiplayer I was obsessed with), so I'm just going to play the first few levels and document my findings.