Skip to main content

SNES Classics: Donkey Kong Country

Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo is the quintessential DK game for me personally and far surpasses any of its predecessors. It is just as fun to pick up and play today as it was in 1994. It is not just nostalgia talking either. This game does not monkey around.

Its controls are nearly flawless, the level design is quirky and full of flavor, the graphics are amazing for the time, and it even has an infectious soundtrack that really gets you in the mood. Even when the difficulty level ramps up it never becomes too frustrating that you want to shut off the game and throw the cartridge out the window.

It was a highly successful and critically acclaimed game for its time and has still to this day lived up to its classic status as one of the greatest games on the SNES. And it will always be one of my personal favorite games. It is that good.

But not everything about the game is great though. The advertising for this was pretty awful and has not aged well at all. Especially the making of featurette which served as the first sneak peek of the game to potential consumers. It is cringe-inducing and if anything turns you off from playing the game rather than get you into a frenzy counting down the hours until the release date. It is an interesting time capsule though and a prime example of how not to advertise or promote a video game.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Fun Factor | What Makes Video Games Fun (Part One)

Video Games are usually synonymous with fun , much like any other form of play, video games can be a thrill to the senses and be some of the most rewarding activities out there. But what is it exactly that makes games fun? And are there particular elements in any game that determine how fun a game is and is there a way to take those elements and use them to make the experience of playing a game that is not considered fun enjoyable?  Now in order to really find out the answers to those questions, it is necessary to dig deep and discover what fun is and means, what its correlation is to video games , and how all of this creates the foundation for fun to be tied to video games. The Miriam Webster dictionary describes fun as “what provides amusement or enjoyment”. And also according to Miriam Webster, fun first appeared in the English language in the 1600s in France and the term made its way to the United States when petty criminals from London were carried over to the shores of the...

What I Am Playing(Day 2) | NES

Now, I am playing with power. I actually grew up with an NES in the 90's. The SNES was all the rage and so was the Genesis but my parents didn't have the money to get me one of those consoles or if they did, I never really asked for one. I wasn't what you would call a hardcore gamer. I was casual to the core. But when my Aunt got me an original NES, I really became infatuated with the console. I didn't have that many games. I only had a small bag full, but I played the heck out of all of them. I would have gotten more games and played those too if it wasn't for my cousin not following my directions and taking the game out of the slot while the system was on. He broke the system, my spirit and my will to buy another console let alone more games. In honor of my late NES, I decided to head over to a friend's house who had a Retron-5 and play the games of my youth. I started out with a true classic. Super Mario Bros. This was the game I played the most. I...

Machine Acts

There are two types of Machine Acts in video games. The diagetic and the non-diagetic. Here are a couple examples of the two. The loading screen for any level on Halo: Combat Evolved is an example of a non-diagetic machine act because you cannot skip the loading screen, nor can you interact with it in anyway and it does not change the form of gameplay or the way you play the game. As for a non-diagetic machine act, a prime example of this is the kill animation. There are kill animations in multiple video games. But the one that comes to mind most of the time is the Fatality animation from the Mortal Kombat series. The kill animation forces the player to just sit there and watch the animation as the machine plays the code and the animation to the player.