Donkey Kong Land

The Good
Donkey Kong Land is one of the first Game Boy games I ever played. Everything in this game melds almost seamlessly and has no low spots in the gameplay!

First off, the graphics. THE BEST GAME BOY GRAPHICS EVER ! Except for Game Boy Color games that is. Donkey, Diddy, and all the Kremlins look fantastic! Smooth, fluid animation moves these characters in the handheld history books! I've yet to see any other game on the original Game Boy to look this good and play smoothly. The backgrounds are awesome! Super detailed, very clear, and surprisingly expressive, I paused the game many times just to look at them!

Sound is obviously something that one wouldn't expect much from the Game Boy, but it's better than most. More exactly the music. I can't remember who did it, but it's by and large some of the best music ever composed for the system. The rest of the sound is made up of the usual beeps and such, but played with headphones, it's an extremely immersive experience. And I should point out, the music in the water levels is the best in the whole game!

The controls are very simple. A is jump, B is run and pick up stuff, select changes the characters, and start is pause. Simple intuitive, responsive, nuff said.

The gameplay is very addictive and is nothing but pure platforming action! No puzzles, no item hunts (except "KONG" which you need to save your game) and no annoying characters. Jumping on stuff hasn't been this fun since Super Mario Brothers! And it's fast! No waiting! Jump, swim, and ride birds all the way to the end! Plus the bosses are really cool. Especially that giant clam! And this is one of the few Game Boy games I know of that you can save your game. With three save slots! Very nice.

The Bad
Those "leaps of faith" tend to be VERY annoying in the city levels. And sometimes the characters blend with the background too well.

The Bottom Line
Get it! You'll love it! One of Rare's finest efforts. Plus it comes in a yellow cartridge! Add some color to that drab grey collection of cartridges!

The Good
They say first impressions are everything... Well, not exactly. At first DKL impressed as a portentous wonder: I can't believe I'm playing Donkey Kong Country on my Game Boy!
The graphics are really good, not only I can tell everything from everything else but after a while it starts to look like the beautiful pre-rendered 3D sprites, animation and backgrounds of the original. I thought I was playing on Super Nintendo... Maybe an overstatement...
Though Rare made good use of the same Silicon Graphics tools they developed DKC on the SNES with, and according to lead programmer Paul Machacek, they even took advantage of Game Boy's "higher-than-NES" capabilities for handling sprites... Yes! apparently that was the case:
The Game Boy could do some things graphically better than its 8-bit older brother! He even claims that the game looks better on the original GB than on a Super GB (and that I can believe for sure, cuz you know, the Super GB colors suck!)

I took a moment to listen to the music and hum to the amazing David Wise iconic tunes - with even some new ones - ported into the cheapest sound hardware ever. The team was way into development of DKC2 for the Super NES when they started this sequel, and a sequel it is, that has 34 original levels in the familiar DKC universe setting but also new locations, new enemies and bosses; with great re-playability on behalf of the secret bonuses and the completion percentage system. All of which makes a fair game time for your money.
The game is so long that the cartridge even has some save files, finally putting to good use those damn Kong letters that now you need to collect in order to save (though at the same time it's kind of annoying when you can't because you haven't found one of the letters after finally beating a particularly difficult level).
But the most impressive part is how the characters - you can only see and control one at a time - feel while jumping and climbing, moving and rolling... It's not perfect. But I was expecting a floating, flickery, laggy mess... And there is some of that, definitely loses some of the kinetic energy the series is known for... But so many platformers get it wrong, and DKL got it right!
It even has some animal buddies! Is there anything Rare couldn't do back in those days? ...

The Bad
And then you begin to play and the issues of making a Game Boy follow-up for one of the most technically challenging games of the 16-bit era begin to appear.
At times DKL becomes borderline unplayable. The enemies appear suddenly out of nowhere, sometimes the game doesn't remember you collected a Kong barrel, resulting in cheap deaths; a simple fall into thin air could mean sudden death out of the system's short memory, the hit boxes are horrible... All of these ramp up the challenge in an already extremely difficult platformer. And I mean Hard!

The Bottom Line
Yes! This is not the original. But neither just a cheap port, this is its own game with its faults and merits and even some new interesting platforming ideas; I would have loved this as a child, the whole thing reeks of ambition like the feverish dream of a mad genius programmer. Apparently first impressions ARE everything and I'll be damned if this doesn't feel like a full DKC game on a Game Boy and again: isn't that freaking amazing!?

The Good
Although based on the SNES title Donkey Kong Country, I liked the fact that Rare created a different type of game instead of a direct port. The new levels (including my personal fav based on a city landscape) are very well designed for the most part, and the boss characters hold a little bit of a challenge compared to the SNES coutnerparts.

Graphically, I found this a mixed bag. Sure, this is a Game Boy game we're talking about, but you can clearly see Rare put in the hard hours to make sure the main characters control, move and look perfect, even without colour. In my mind, it's the most detailed Game Boy game I've ever seen (at least as far as platform games go).

The Bad
There are times where the characters are hard to tell from the backgrounds, which can become a problem when attempting to complete certain challenges. It didn't stop me from playing straight through, but it did become confusing at times.

The sound effects are a little less then expected for such a game. There are some nice renditions of the original score from Donkey Kong Country, but they aren't perfect. And a lack of character sounds doesn't help either. Still, what they were able to achieve on such small a cart should be awarded. It sounds better then a majority of other games on the system.

It's also a pitty that the two player mode was dropped for the Game Boy series. I doubt it would have been possible though.

The Bottom Line
DKL is a fantastic achievement for the Game Boy, keeping in mind the limitations of the system. There are some minor problems that spoil it a little, but I enjoyed every minute.