Musings Of A First Time Donkey Kong Country Player

I've recently been on something of a retro game kick as of late, and I've taken the opportunity to catch up on some classic games that I might have missed back when they first released. And as the title of this blog post ever so obviously points out, I'll be talking Donkey Kong Country today.

...Yeah, I'm not going to make an "It's on like Donkey Kong" quip here.

The Donkey Kong Country series has always weirdly eluded me for some reason. Growing up, I was fortunate to live in a household with relatives that were avid gamers (My older sister and uncle in particular) and was exposed to the joys of the NES/SNES/Genesis at a very early age. I was able to play a lot of the usual SNES standbys: Super Mario All Stars/World, Starfox, Chrono Trigger, even EarthBound. (Which I'm totally going to make a blog post about one of these days.) Yet, I was never able to play any of the Donkey Kong Country games. I knew that they existed and that they were platformers, but I never actually spent any time with them. Or at least the SNES versions, anyway. My first exposure to Rare's Donkey Kong platformers were through the Donkey Kong Land series:

Man, do I love Classic Nintendo box art.

So when I decided to permanently bring my SNES out of retirement, I knew that the Donkey Kong Country games would have to be the first thing I had to try. I actually owned a Wii for quite a while, and could have easily bought all three games in the series from the Virtual Console, but when I actually decided to purchase the games, Nintendo decided to take down all three games from the service. Luckily for me, there remain a few under the radar game stores that still have a decent (albeit shrinking) selection of Super Nintendo games for sale. One trip and $35 dollars later, I found myself a proud owner of Donkey Kong Country. The game itself was only $15, I bought Breath of Fire along with it, which brought the price up an extra $20. I hooked up the Super Nintendo, jammed that cartridge in and began my experience.

Now, I always heard that the Donkey Kong series could be a bit tricky, especially regarding levels involving mine carts or copious amounts of barrels. What I wasn't informed of is just how many of these levels boil down to straight up trial and error. The first level that completely stumped me was the appropriately named "Mine Cart Carnage"

Now, when I first reached this level, I wasn't expecting to lose as many lives as I did. But sure enough, my life count dwindled down, and I found myself pretty frustrated by deaths I deemed to be pretty unfair. And that leads right into my first gripe with the game:

Donkey Kong Country's hit detection is weird.

A majority of my deaths on this level weren't because I mistimed a jump and jumped into a pit or into an oncoming Kremling, but because a stray mine cart clipped the bottom of my mine cart. After the first two times that this killed me, I wised up and attempted to approach that particular jump differently, which worked. However, on the very next obstacle, I attempted the same, and promptly lost a life. It's just not limited to the mine cart sections in particular, though. Trying to bounce on a string of enemies in the game reveal just how inconsistent the hit detection can be at times. It's far from game breaking, but considering how unforgiving a few stages can be, it does become something of an annoyance.

I've since gone on to beat the game, and currently considering playing the highly praised sequel, but what I've mentioned so far is just a brief mention of some of the things that annoyed me in the game. There's a lot more things (And one particularly nasty level I have in mind) that I could talk more about, but I think that's enough DKC talk for one day. I'll probably get around to highlighting that in a follow up post in the future.

And hey, this is my first time doing any sort of blogging, so feel free to leave any sort of comments and criticisms!