Donkey Kong Land: Big monkey, little game - retro special
Table of contents
1 Have I heard Meta? 2 Have fun with few buttons 3 Candy has to stay at home 4 K.O.N.G. 5 Play it again, Kong However, that wasn't the rareware way. Instead, they sat down at the drawing board again for the first mobile monkey trip, borrowing elements from Donkey Kong Country, but ultimately delivering a completely independent adventure full of ideas that started less than a year after the SNES game Module bay migrated.Have I heard Meta?
They are the stuff video gamer nightmares are made of: The wasps cannot be defeated without aids and are often placed really nasty. Source: PC Games The result was Donkey Kong Land and the differences to the big brother already start at the story level: After defeating the nasty King K. Rool, monkey grandpa Cranky Kong complains that the adventure on the SNES is only was so well received because the 3D calculated graphics would have dazzled the players. That would not have happened in his time! To prove otherwise, Donkey and Diddy Kong embark on an 8-bit black-and-white adventure that aims to show that the gameplay was the main factor behind the success of their adventure, not the technology. Quite meta - but the approach works surprisingly well! It's just a shame that this creative story is only mentioned in the manual of the game, we don't hear about it during the monkey trip itself.Who is wondering why the pictures on these pages shine in subtle colors: Donkey Kong Land was one of the first Game Boy titles to support the Super Nintendo's Super Game Boy tool, which made the handheld games look a little nicer and more on the TV, and that's the version we used for the recordings resorted to. Whether this SNES trick supports Cranky's argument or not, everyone has to decide for themselves! Either way, country definitely doesn't look as good as country, the old primacy is right there. Nevertheless, the style comes across surprisingly well in the slimmed-down Game Boy version.
Have fun with few buttons
Admittedly, Donkey Kong Land is less extensive than its country counterpart, some Hours you are still busy and are well entertained. Source: PC Games In terms of play, the adventure is simple, but really well implemented. Although many worlds are based on those in Country and overall fewer and shorter levels await us, there are also completely independent sections and even adversaries. No matter where, our goal is to just get to the end of the stage. So we hop in jungle areas, icy tundras, dilapidated factories, gloomy mines and more from left to right, take a seat in carts and zoom through narrow corridors, swing around on lianas, try to climb tightly tied ropes to the top of a ship get there, take a deep breath and go into the cool water and, and, and. It's really impressive how much variety the developers were able to tease out of so little hardware power. And you have to remember that everything we do can only be controlled with the D-pad plus two buttons!For an 8-bit title that is played with just one D-pad and two action buttons Donkey Kong Land offers quite a few different maneuvers. Source: PC Games You never get the feeling that the controls are overloaded (or underloaded), and the extreme precision of the SNES counterpart when moving is also evident on the handheld. With A we jump, with B we run and kill enemies, all other actions are context-sensitive, for example when we hold on to a rope or pick up an object. Of course there are also animal helpers on board, on whose back Donkey or Diddy can take a seat and then jet through the area. It's only two of the five fauna friends from Country, but they are probably the most popular: Rhino Rambi knocks even the toughest villain out of their socks and likes to thunder through massive stone walls to take us to hidden bonus rooms. Vogelstrauß Expresso can jump extremely high and sail long distances through the air. Again and again we have to prove ourselves in battles against nasty bosses, all of which require a good deal of skill and responsiveness. Unlike the SNES, there are only four instead of seven, but they have also been completely redeveloped. In short: A nice thing, and in this regard alone a lot more than just a cheaply made country copy!
Candy has to stay at home
To the 30 stages, plus four boss worlds, we reach a world map on which the individual levels are shown as points. There is not much to do here, the map is primarily used to get from one section to the next. Nonetheless, the rudiments of what would also be used in the later country games and would find their perfection in the freely explorable hubs of the N64 adventure rarewars are already beginning to show: Small, interactive elements ensure that you don't just go through stupidly a list scrolls. Rocks can be blasted away for alternative routes. Unfortunately the various shops and huts of the extended Kong family are no longer available, where we save the game in Country or pick up level tips from Cranky. But that is bearable, because in the end these areas in Country are nothing more than pretty menus.K.O.N.G.
On the upper world map, small alternative paths show a very early approach of what Rareware would implement in the studio's 3D games. Source: PC Games So you spend most of your time in the levels themselves, and there is still a lot to collect on the way to the goal. The standard collectibles are bananas, which await us both individually and in packs of five. We also find balloons that have to be packed quickly before they sail away and that give us an extra life, as well as so-called Kong tokens, which we can also exchange for extra lives. And collecting lives is definitely very relevant, because Donkey Kong Land is a lot, but not easy! Badly placed enemies, demanding bouncing passages and other nasty things - if the controls weren't so successful, you would regularly throw the Game Boy into the corner in frustration and blame the game for failure.Provides a co-op mode it doesn't, even if that were logical in the face of two heroes. Instead, the other monkey serves as a kind of second life. Source: PC Games Ultimately, you are responsible for your own luck, even when it comes to saving. Unlike in Country, where you can save on the map with Candy Kong at any time, in Land you need the last collectible items, the iconic K.O.N.G.-letters. On the SNES we only get an extra life if we collect the four letters in a level, so here they are much more relevant! To what extent this was a good design decision is an open question, because if you have managed a particularly difficult world with great effort, only to be confronted with the game over screen in the next level because of too many lost lives after being careless, that can be frustrating. But hey, at least you can save - that was by no means a matter of course in Game Boy days.
