Iconic Donkey Kong Country splash screen
Some of the best console games ever are scrollers. If you’re not familiar a scroller is a game where your character moves generally left to right across the game world dodging obstacles and destroying enemies. The NES superstars like Castelvania and Super Mario (duh!) were full blown arcade games before they came to the home systems so they hold a special place but the SNES has its own superstar.
Donkey Kong Country. This is another survivor and its Nintendo Wii version is also quite fun. The SNES retro special though was just brilliant. It really pushed the limit on what the system was capable of graphics wise and the game play was just superb. DKC is one of those games you could waste a whole weekend, and the following week, trying to beat. In short – this game is addictive and absolutely essential to any complete retro game collection. There were some additional novel features to the DKC games.
Your mission was to collect bananas which were brazenly stolen from the Kong Cache. On this mission you mark your progress along a colorful map which features many different areas. This is reminiscent of the Super Mario World method of tracking progress and even includes the percentage tracking. This makes the game progress immediately recognizable and is a nice touch to connect the franchise back to other games on the system. The varied worlds are also a great deal of fun to move through and give a good feeling of accomplishment as you move along. There are other neat features in this game as well.
Multi-player
One cool aspect was the team-play function. This allowed one player to be Donkey and one Diddy. If one of you died, the other took over. You could also tag out to let the alternate play for either the special skills or to take a break. This was a pretty cool way to feature cooperative play and I don’t think I ever saw it before this game but I’m not sure if this was the first game to feature it. It’s hard to believe but I actually don’t know everything about these… yet!
Seen here is the Rhino
Another neat part of this game was the animals you got to ride.You could get special animals from crates and then ride them with different abilities. Water levels had a swordfish you could use to swim quickly and stab at enemies. On land you had a couple options. One was the ostrich which had a limited flight aspect and could run quickly. There was also a rhino you could use to run, stomp, and stab your enemies. It was a new thing at the time and pretty fun. This game really broke some new ground and is one I highly recommend you try. Once you do, I’m pretty sure you’ll want a copy of this classic.