Donkey Kong Country

Sometime late in the Super Nintendo’s life I got a video talking about some new Donkey Kong game. This was pretty significant to me since I hadn’t seen a Donkey Kong game in quite some time, (except that one). But this one was completely different from any Donkey Kong game that I had ever played.

This time, see, Donkey Kong is the protagonist. It turns out that his horde of bananas has been stolen by a group of alligator-like creatures (kremlings) and their buddies for reasons that are unknown to me. It’s worth noting that the Donkey Kong in this game isn’t the same Donkey Kong that was in the original games. That Donkey Kong is in this game as Cranky Kong, and is the ancestor of the Donkey Kong in this game.

Just try to not think about it too much.

Another thing to note is that this game was made with a (then) new technique of making graphics in full 3D and then taking what amounts to 2D pictures of them doing their various animations. This has a net benefit of making the game look fully 3D without actually needing to have a bleeding-edge system to pull it off. Pretty slick.

This game managed to greatly expand the Donkey Kong universe with some memorable characters and give the series a bit of a ‘reboot’ if you will. One that was, thankfully, reasonably well done and actually stuck.

A bit after the game was released, there were two video game competitions held at Blockbuster with Nintendo’s help. The games that they featured were Star Fox and Donkey Kong Country. After those contests were over, Nintendo collected some of the cartridges and made them available to subscribers via their Nintendo Power catalog. I wasn’t ever able to get my hands on the Star Fox cartridge, but I was able to snag one of the super-rare copies of Donkey Kong Country. It’s pretty much the same as the other game with the a few exceptions. It’s timed, and your goal is to rack up a huge point total in the allotted time. It’s a lot more challenging than the original game since you’re just making a mad dash through the levels to get a high score.

But still, even though I don’t own a copy of the whole game, I wouldn’t trade the competition cartridge for very many things.

Sorry about that.

One Response to “Donkey Kong Country”

  1. [...] thought the original Donkey Kong Country game was pretty good, but I never got any of the sequels. They were a whole lot like the first one, [...]

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