#Awesomemusic donkeykong portable#

This first Country chapter admittedly features quite a few arbitrary and unfair design choices, and the game feels pretty repetitive after a while, but the atmospheric visuals and music go a long way toward making up for these flaws.ĭonkey Kong The Video Game Museum 1.

The Donkey and Diddy Kong tag-team mechanic, which allowed players to soak up an extra hit or swap out characters as the situation warranted, added a little extra variety to the action. Developed by the British tech wizards at Rare and presented with glossy, computer-generated graphics, Country finally put Kong in a platformer of his own after a decade of lurking in Mario’s shadow. Country also kept the Super NES (and Nintendo) alive for a couple of years in the face of superior hardware offerings from Sony and Sega. Donkey Kong Country (Super NES, 1994)Īlthough time hasn’t been entirely kind to this game - its pre-rendered graphics looked a lot better on blurry old tube TVs than they do in perfect high-definition fidelity - it deserves a place of honor simply for putting Kong back on the map. And it’s not bad as a primitive take on hockey, at that.ĭonkey Kong Country Nintendo 10. As such, it’s one of the rarer and more expensive Game & Watch creations, but all the more interesting for its unique design.

Donkey Kong Hockey is one of the most ambitious and interesting Game & Watch handhelds ever created, almost a precursor to Switch’s tabletop play in its own limited way: It came with two detachable controllers so a pair of friends (or rivals) could play it head-to-head.

#Awesomemusic donkeykong portable#

Long before Mario starred in his own series of eponymous sports titles, he hit the ice to take on his simian nemesis in this early portable game. Donkey Kong Hockey (Game & Watch Micro Vs. Not a bad game, but an extremely strange one … and a total outlier within the franchise.ġ3. Stanley can still platform a little bit - the greenhouses have multi-level risers on their floors - but it’s really more about zapping bugs, protecting plants and blasting Kong in the butt with Agent Orange. Donkey Kong 3 also inexplicably abandons the platforming genre mechanics the original game helped create in the first place, playing instead as a shoot-’em-up reminiscent in some ways of an early Nintendo arcade game called Space Phoenix. Mario was replaced here with a less memorable hero named Stanley the Bugman, who found himself at odds with Kong when the ape decided to take over his greenhouses. Donkey Kong 3 (Arcade, 1983)īy the time Kong’s third game came around, Nintendo had earmarked Mario for greater things than simply being a monkey’s nemesis: He would go on to star in his own self-titled adventures (along with his brother, um … well, you know, the green guy). Talk about a mess - and hardly a satisfying successor to Diddy Kong Racing.ĭonkey Kong 3 The Video Game Museum 14. It didn’t even let you plug in the barrels to use as a backup option, despite the Wii’s ability to support GameCube peripherals. Aside from the fact that it wasn’t a great racing game by any means, a change in platform from GameCube to Wii during development meant that Nintendo ditched the original control scheme (which centered on the DK Bongo controllers) in favor of a Wii remote and nunchuk setup. This drum-powered (almost) racing game was not the conga controller redemption you were looking for. It’s fine, but the appeal quickly wears thin. It’s the same simplistic routine either way: Kong (or Mickey) balances on a ball while juggling objects, avoiding some rather rude interruptions by Mario. History repeated with this one: Just as the arcade Donkey Kong came into being when Nintendo bid for a Popeye license, this one replaced a Mickey Mouse game.

Donkey Kong Circus (Game & Watch, 1984)Ī handheld Game & Watch LCD title, Circus was mainly notable for being one of the few units to boast a color screen. This effort, however, was pretty uninspiring.Ģ0. The conga controllers would find other, better uses, and Nintendo would eventually nail the music game genre with Elite Beat Agents. These games are packed to the brim with a hodgepodge of dated dad rock, children’s ditties and other toothless tunes. The DK Bongo conga drum controllers basically made this a jungle-themed clone of Namco’s Taiko Drum Master series (it was even developed by Namco!), except with less enjoyable music. The best thing you can say for the Donkey Konga series is that it showed up before the world’s closets had become crowded with disused Guitar Hero and Rock Band peripherals. Donkey Konga series (GameCube, 2003-2005)Įven Nintendo wasn’t immune to the allure of music games built around plastic instruments.