Donkey Kong Country

aka: Chaoji Dajingang, DKC, Donkey Kong 2001, Donkey Kong Country 1, Super Donkey Kong
Moby ID: 5199

Game Boy Color version

What was Nintendo thinking...

The Good
Donkey Kong Country was a important game for the SNES back in 1994 for many reasons, not the least for its graphics, it was ported to the Game Boy Color in 2000, keeping most of its game play features intact, remaining a great game, but many flaws exist.

The Bad
The graphics suffer a great deal from the Game Boy Color capabilities, the backgrounds remain, however the characters are 2D sprites, and are barely recognizable from the SNES version, also for some reason this port auto-saves itself, the save points are removed, rendering this game much easier to complete. However once again due to the Game Boy Color's capabilities this game is rendered much harder since the method to detect that you have hit something or picked up something is very poor, I have been right over a item and not picked it up, while missing a enemy quite completely, and lost a life...Lastly the major change to gameplay is that when you obtain an animal, you do not ride it, you become it, and you cannot dismount from it, unlike the original version, this is a great change from the original.

The Bottom Line
This port puzzles me, the original version was renowned for its graphics, graphics which the Game Boy Color could not achieve, Also the two button interface hurts the game as well. Avoid this port like the plague, I haven't seen the GBA version, however, I would presume it's better...

by Chris Lesinky (294) on May 3, 2007

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