Cheap Donkey Kong Country (Video Games) (Game Boy Advance) Price

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Customer Reviews of Donkey Kong Country

BUY THIS GAME
I was a little skeptical having played Donkey Kong Country for SNES, but I have to tell you that Rare held up to its name. The mini games and multiplayer add that Gameboy feel, while the game itself is almost a direct copy of the original. The graphics aren't as sharp, but the ability to play DKC on the go is awesome, and now you can save in the middle of a level. If you're tired of Mario, DKC won't let you down.

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An all-time classic, unfortunately, is now way too easy.
When it was first released for the Super NES in 1994, "Donkey Kong Country" set the world on fire. Astonshing ACM graphics, stereo sound, awesome music, and just plain FUN gameplay quickly made it one of the best-selling platform action games of all time. It later spawned two sequels, plus a 3-D version for the Nintendo 64, and each sequel got progressively better as the years went by.

Now we have the convenient travel size version of the adventures of Donkey and Diddy. We have all the same unique levels, heroic Kongs, cute animal buddies, evil Kremlings, and other all-too-familiar enemy creatures. The graphics are not nearly as detailed as they are on the SNES version, but the backgrounds are still beautiful and the landscape of the levels still shows a lot of the original drawing (especially the levels in "Gorilla Glacier"); and the sound is not nearly as crisp, but players can still tell how catchy the tunes are and how well they fit each scenario. (Who could forget the all-time classic jungle music, or bonus area music?)

Of course, this is all expected when you make a portable version of one of the greatest games ever. Unfortunately, there is a major flaw with this portable game: even with all the original levels, the game is now way too easy. Much, much, much easier than the original game ever was.

One of the silliest new features added to this game is that when you save your game, you save the number of lives you have as well. This is especially dumb when you take in the new Mini-game features: six difficulty levels each of a fishing game and a dancing game. If you've played "Dance Dance Revolution" before, you should be able to win 3 extra lives every time you play any level on the dancing game; if not, keep trying, there are no rhythms harder than quarter notes. Fishing is just dropping a hook into the sea and trying to catch the right types of fish; you don't even have to try to reel in the fish since the game automatically does it for you. The only level on the fishing game that I didn't beat on my first try was the "Gorilla Glacier" one, where you had to catch 50 jellyfish in the allotted time.

Also, you are allowed to call Funky's Flights anywhere you want, so you can go back and play easy levels to get tons of extra lives there. This works even if you haven't found Funky in the hardest area you reached, so you basically go and get tons of extra lives any time you want even if the mini-games bore you to tears.

Another easy way to repeatedly get extra lives is with Golden Animal tokens; every time you get three, you can enter a bonus area where you get another life for every 100 little tokens you collect (my record: 1138 in the Expresso one). You could do this as often as you wanted in the original too, but this game saves your tokens, so you often start the game with two of one type of token, and then you may end up going to the corresponding bonus area without even planning on it.

But no matter how you play, you'll find it really easy to keep winning lives over and over again. You'll be up to 99 lives before you know it. Although the game does give you a Hero Mode once you've beaten it--where you can only play as Diddy and have no checkpoints in the levels--you still can save your progress with a huge number of lives, so any difficulty added to the levels quickly gets canceled out. (Oh, and one more really stupid addition is that if you've beaten a level, you can do the START+SELECT trick to escape from the level when you die, EVEN IF THE DEATH ANIMATION AND MUSIC HAS ALREADY STARTED, and you still won't lose a life! It's a really cheap way to save yourself from losing lives when you don't have to.)

But apart from being able to survive infinitely, there is an even bigger problem regarding difficulty; the difficulty of finding all the secrets has been significantly diminished as well. One of the best features of the original game was that there were tons of bonus areas full of great items. The easiest ones to find were hidden in doors that had to be broken with a barrel, but the more secretive ones were in barrels that were hidden off the screen, and often players had to risk jumping into oblivion in hopes of finding a hidden bonus area. The portable game has flattened and shrunk the screen down to an uncomfortable size, and now the "hidden" bonus barrels are often in plain view! There's no more fun in trying to find the "hidden" bonus areas, because now, you can see them all! And even if you don't see the *barrel* itself, you often can still see a trail of bananas leading to the barrel, and even these were carefully hidden from view in the original as well.

"Donkey Kong Country" will always be one of the most brilliant games ever made. I haven't stopped playing the original game since it first came out. But I felt like putting down the travel-size version in a month, simply because it had so much fun and challenge taken away that it really didn't do justice to the SNES version. The game gets 3 stars for remaining faithful to the original with all the same graphics, music, characters, and levels; in fact, this is where the most of the fun in this GBA version comes from. If Rare hadn't at least done this, I would easily have given the game 2 stars, or possibly even 1.

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Awesome
Donkey Kong Country for Gameboy Advance is the exact same game as the original Donkey Kong Country for Super NES. It still has all the awesome action and the awesome characters. The stages, yes may get a little difficult throughout the game but if you keep practicing, you're going to beat it. One of the levels in particular is extremely hard, I almost gave up. The storyline is just like any Donkey Kong game, King K Rool has stolen the bananas and Donkey and Diddy have to get them back (with a little help from the rhino, ostrich and shark). I highly recommend this game, especially if you enjoyed it the first time around on the Super NES. An excellent classic, a favourite of mine.