Rool has kidnapped Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong and his girlfriend Dixie are out to rescue him), you can take one hit before having to restart a level (banishing your selected character to a barrel with 'DK' written on it, which can be broken open to return him or her to your side), there's lots of stuff to find and collect (bananas, DK tokens, extra lives, coins with crocs on them, bonus room entrances), and you generally move left to right, leaping between platforms and objects, bouncing off the heads of enemies and occasionally deviating into a forced-scroll or mine cart level. It's a pretty standard 2D platformer, which means the plot's incidental (K. Still though, if Nintendo's enduring efforts to make us play its old platformers were to end with DKC2, then it wouldn't be so bad, because this isn't a bad swansong. Lest we all wake up next year and find ourselves playing trumped up versions of modern day classics like Super Mario 64 on handhelds instead because Nintendo's running out of older back catalogue. But, the outside possibility of a "lets shelve the GBA and focus on the DS"-level change of heart notwithstanding, this is probably where we ought to say schtop. And still not quite the 2D platformer we're going to throw a wobbly at some day. It tried a few different things, sharpened up a few areas (controls, difficulty curve, bonus rooms) and lasted slightly longer, but it was, however enjoyable, a pretty standard example of the genre game. You see, DKC2 wasn't particularly revolutionary. Or is it Diddy Kong's Quest? We're never sure which it is, but we like the first one better. In its latest fit of frenzied restoration, Nintendo has given us Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest. Enough's enough chaps, we've had all the best ones - third parties took care of the others - and you know it can only go downhill from here.īut no. Arguably though (and I do want to argue about this one), that's where it should have stopped. Not as much as the Mario games, for obvious reasons (mainly that they were much better), but in a sort of nostalgic "I played this all Christmas day in the early 90s and ooh crap it was gorgeous" kind of sickening rose-tinted sort of way.
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Sure, graphics improved, level designs got craftier and more imaginative, and enemies learnt how to move around the screen properly after that, but the point is it was ace and still is.Īnd, of course, Nintendo also thrust Donkey Kong Country upon us again with another handheld port. 3, which was probably a defining moment in this reviewer's young life when it originally appeared.
As for Yoshi's Island - arguably it was even better (in fact, since I don't want to argue about it, they were both top), and then there was Super Mario Bros. But then that was a feat of precision that would make Audi engineers vomit in admiration. Perhaps it was the joy of playing something like that again on a shiny new handheld, or perhaps we're just idiots, but we liked it.
It was inevitable then, that when Nintendo decided to re-release 400 of them on the Game Boy Advance, we were going to get cross with one sooner or later. They were to that generation what third-person action games are to this ubiquitous, varying in quality, largely the same sort of thing, and generally flawed in all the same ways.
Back in 1996, when DKC2 first graced these shores (that's Blighty, by the way - I'm sure it came out in other places beforehand), the Super Nintendo was rife with the things.