In addition to mine cart levels, there are a handful of stages where you fly on a rocket barrel, where you need to continually press the A button to maintain altitude while avoiding crashing into the scenery. The depth provided by the polygon landscape allows the players to be shot out of barrels into and out of the background, so the levels feel like more than just a straight line. The visuals are gorgeous, and the levels are substantially more detailed than they were in Jungle Beat. There’s a greater dynamic to everything than in any of the games before it. The game flows nicely, and each stage is punctuated with some great moments, whether they be parts of the stage tearing away or crumbling, or a particularly harrowing sequence of leaps and bounds over a bottomless pit. As you press on through, running to the right, jumping on various critters, all seems well. It’s 1994 all over again, except with modernized 2.5D graphics. Going into the first stage, you start inside DK’s hut as the opening drum beats of the classic Jungle Groove begin to play. The game starts off with the same map theme as the original game, and seeing an actual world map these days is always nostalgically pleasant. Starting up a game of DKCR, for a DKC fan, is pretty fantastic. More likely, however, he probably realized that a dollar from a gamer who appreciated his art form was worth the same amount as a dollar from a gamer who paid for a brand name, and for the 80s-born adolescents who were now approaching their 30s, Donkey Kong Country was a brand that had a growing sense of latent desire associated with it.
Perhaps Miyamoto realized that DKC wasn’t all that bad. Hell, Miyamoto himself had expressed displeasure with DKC over the years, casting it off as if it were something he were embarrassed of.īut something had apparently changed in the intervening years. With that simple word, Nintendo was deliberately trying to resonate with a particular kind of gamer, a kind of gamer they’d scarcely acknowledged for nearly 14 years. But the fact that they stuck the “Country” in there gave the game an entirely different level of significance. They could’ve called it “Donkey Kong Returns”, “Donkey Kong Wii”, or anything really, and the game would have sold just as well. But the title itself was the most important part of the reveal. The game’s announcement was accompanied by a fairly impressive trailer showcasing 2D sidescrolling platforming action and brief glimpses at some of the game’s show-stopping set pieces. And that’s exactly what Nintendo promised in 2010 when they revealed the next Donkey Kong game-the strategically named Donkey Kong Country Returns. Seething underneath the surface of every gamer who cut their teeth on 16-bit platformers was a longing for a return to form for the wayward gorilla and his adventures. Jungle Beat, while a very pleasant surprise in its own right, was merely an aside to the Donkey Kong platforming saga.
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