Donkey Kong Land

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!?