I'll be honest with you. I really don't like Donkey Kong. By Donkey Kong, I mean the arcade game, and NES port. Are these games super important? Yes. Are they objectively good games? Yes. Did they introduce us to Mario? Yes! Did they put Nintendo on the map and enable them to have the cash to make my beloved NES? Yes! Are they fun? Sort of.
I know that in the very early days of video gaming, Donkey Kong was a titanic technical achievement, and represented a serious jump forward in terms of storytelling in games, graphical excellence, tight controls, and innovative and active level design. In other words, it's just another great leap forward for Miyamoto and Co.
And I know that Donkey Kong is a great arcade game, but that doesn't always translate well to consoles, and it's on consoles that I truly fell in love with games. They were longer due to exponentially expanding amounts of memory that could be included on a cartridge. They allowed a more natural learning curve of difficulty due to this long length, and due to the fact that there was less incentive to make the game super difficult, thus sucking away all of your quarters and making profit for the company. The arcade games that I truly love and grew up loving were the ones that exemplified all of the great elements of console games, rather than the reverse being true. I loved arcade fighting games that featured competition between players (Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, Tekken, Guilty Gear) or games that required collaboration between players (X-Men, The Simpsons). The great thing about arcades for me was the social aspect, not the crushing difficulty.
And boy is Donkey Kong difficult. The hitboxes are weird. The jumping is difficult to time. And the fall damage.......ugh. The best change from Donkey Kong Mario to Super Mario Bros. Mario is no fall damage. Does it make logical sense? No! Jumping from impossible heights should hurt. But it's just not fun. It doesn't encourage liberal experimentation in game play. It doesn't make your heart leap at death defying stunts.
All that is to say that the first Donkey Kong game with which I fell in love was Donkey Kong Country. I am a huge SNES-N64 fan of Rare. They were Nintendo's go to ace third party developer in those days, and a ton of my favorite games from those systems were developed by Rare. The decision to license one of Nintendo's most famous and important characters, the first one that made them great, was gutsy, and it payed off big time.
The visuals are excellent, and represented a huge leap forward in graphic design for the time. Most games that take huge leaps forward with visual experiments are cool at the time, but later are looked back on with a bit of derision. They just don't age gracefully (e.g. the first generation of 3D console games like Tomb Raider, Virtua Fighter, Space Harrier, etc.). Somehow Rare avoided this, as all three of the DKC games look great to this day. Their use of 3D models turned into sprites is fantastic.
The controls on the first one are good, but not quite as tight as the second. The rolling off the edge and then jumpy simply doesn't work sometimes, resulting in a lot of deaths trying to get all of those secrets. Additionally, there are sometimes waaaay too many levels between save points (I'm looking at you, level with the platforms that you have to refuel).
The design of levels and music, however, are fantastic. They are only a slight touch below the second in both categories. The levels have a great amount of mystery to them, with all of the secrets peppered throughout.
The bosses are fun, and challenging.
And they took Donkey Kong and turned him from a princess stealing villain into the hero of the day, fighting sinister crocodiles for the sake of his precious banana horde. Yes, I know that Donkey Kong from the DKC era is technically Donkey Kong Jr., but who really cares?
In an age where a lot of retro games have aged badly, DKC has only gotten better with time. As a testament, in a house full of plenty of modern video games, my kids are most often to request to play DKC, DKC2, or DKC3 for their time playing games. The keep coming back to them time and time again, soaking in the environment, enjoying the characters, and continually trying to better themselves by getting past the part that killed them last time. That quest for self-improvement is at the core of all great games, and kids fundamentally get this, without it needing to be explained for them.
DKC is a great game, and really is the seed of a lot of talent and great ideas at Rare in the 90s (to be culminated in DKC2). I'd give it a 9/10. Go check it out, if you haven't already!
-TRO
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