I won’t deny the technical achievement that this game was for Nintendo, and the coup it was for Rare (at the time). And i would never take pot-shots at anyone’s joy of nostalgia around this game: Not all of my own favorite picks are winners. But I absolutely agree with this greentext. I recall getting this game new and just feeling underwhelmed by it.
Your boos mean nothing, I’ve seen what makes you cheer.
It wasn’t that bad, but it was absolutely overrated. Good soundtrack though.
On the one hand, I didn’t like it that much when it came out. It’s not that I hated it or hated on it, just wasn’t my thing. Mario games were far superior platforming experience all around, in my opinion.
Graphics for the time and platform were great. If you weren’t there at the time and your frame of reference is modern (32-bit or later) graphics, of course they suck. But that’s hardly fair or objective, when it comes to understanding why they were well-regarded AT THAT TIME.
But, I’ll add this: A number of my friends’ kids were introduced to 8-bit and 16-bit games first, in lieu of exposing them to toxic modern phone/tablet games. And the SNES Donkey Kong game(s) were/are amongst the games that the kids enjoyed and played the most. So, there’s something to that, if you ask me.
The sound design was amazing. I can still hear the boing from jumping on a tire. The success jingle echos still.
Even 4chan can’t deny how good the soundtrack is
Idk, I think the game was pretty sick
I have a solid memory of my roommate and I hitting Mine Cart Madness, and when I finally made it through we whooped and hollered so much the upstairs neighbor got mad and came down to shush us, at 4 PM on a Saturday
The reward for 101% was getting 101% ya muppet. Does this idiot think people play games for intangible pointless achievements instead of having fun? It must fucking suck going through life needing an extra reward for doing something fun.
Meanwhile, the reward for 100%ing a game in 2025 is… a ribbon on your Steam account.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/xbox-360-kid
This meme is almost 20 years old
This comment deserves a *
No pre-order bonus
No battle pass
not even skins
Video game disregarded.
the chain smoking and hard drugs of video game’s
Anyone tell that fool that CRTs were literally the only kind of TV that existed at the time
Admittedly, this game doesn’t look particularly good on a CRT, either.
The hype about the visuals being “3D” was so weird and misinformed, and you could absolutely tell at the time.
IMO, that’s all a part of the Rare+Nintendo hype at the time. Killer Instinct was in the same campaign for these pre-rendered 3D graphics as the wave of the future. Don’t forget, they had to go toe-to-toe with Sony’s Playstationat that time, so bringing anything that looked like real 3D on a SNES was kind of a big deal.
It was pseudo-3D, I remember reading an article about how they made the sprites, but can’t find that… wikipedia has
Donkey Kong Country was one of the first games for a mainstream home video game console to use pre-rendered 3D graphics
and they used SGI workstations to create the models and animations before compressing/converting them to 2D sprites
Rare invested their NES profit in Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) Challenge workstations with Alias rendering software to render 3D models. It was a significant risk, as each workstation cost £80,000.
(sharing bc I thought that’s a crazy amount of money for 1992)
Meanwhile, Nintendo positioned this method to compete with Aladdin, which simply hired Walt Disney animators to do the sprites.
I mean, other types of displays definitely existed.
In that era you had CRTs or Rear Projection TVs.
Rear Projection was bigger (55" 4:3) but often times was susceptible to burn-in and had a worse quality picture compared to a CRT
Before LCDs it was plasma which until the the late 2000s had more technical advantages over LCD Refresh rate, contrast. LCDs couldn’t really match them until the 2010s (I never had a plasma display though so I don’t fully understand plasma)
DLP was a thing and could get up to and over 80" while maintaining quality but DLP could not be wall mounted as they were quite big like rear projection screens
Rear projections are 3 crts in a trench coat.
Before LCDs it was plasma which until the the late 2000s had more technical advantages over LCD Refresh rate, contrast. LCDs couldn’t really match them until the 2010s
glances at Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD TV from 2007 currently in living room
still works really well
fucking 80 lbs
and don’t forget to tell the movers to keep it upright during transport to prevent damage lol
Bad viewing angles, poor contrast ratios, poor refresh rate and poor display speed.
I was not saying that they were non existent or unreliable. The technology was just poor at that time and beaten by Plasma displays in those areas
Plasma displays had 2 problems though (besides cost) They were heavier than LCDs and their backlights would dim over time.
Edit: I was reading on wikipedia… they work like those plasma globes!
Plasma displays were affected by screen burn-in where as LCDs typically are not.
Also it seems like on Contrast ratio plasma still is not beaten by LCD displays
Though there are a lot of LED backlight technologies that help. Such as being able to only run a portion of the backlight for a given area.
For a while there were also Dual Layer LCD panels. They would effectively use one layer of LCD to control color and another to try to control brightness / prevent light bleed through. I think those are obsolete for the most part now.
Plasma displays had 2 problems though (besides cost) They were heavier than LCDs and their backlights would dim over time
Plasmas dont have backlights, they worked similar to oled.
You are correct. They were susceptible to burn in and dimming over time but did not have a back light.
I never owned a plasma display because they were too expensive. CRT until 08 when we upgraded to a Vizio LCD for me
I should’ve corrected that after my wikipedia dive
Yea but LCDs were shit and had shifting colors across the screen even when you were sitting right in front of them.
It looked pretty good for the time. Couldnt do real time 3D rendering and also be fast (StarFox was truly 3D; but iirc also ran at like 15fps and had to use a special chip in the cart to do that), so they compromised with sprites made from pre-rendered 3D models.
It also had great level design and memorable music.
You could start Starfox without the extra chip if you did some trick with the cartridge, but there were big black bits on the screen or something? It sorta worked but it sucked. I can’t remember any more details than that.
has Diddy
Well at the time he was going by Puff Daddy
Soundtrack is pretty good I guess?
Invalid opinion. Soundtrack is peak.
One of my favorite albums of all time is the soundtrack to globulous, a sphere based tetris clone for early iphones which has since been discontinued. I’ve never played it, never will, the soundtrack is a stand alone journey! I would put Globulous OST up there with Enigma MCMXC a.D.
monke
He’s right you know
I played Donkey Kong Country on a Gameboy Colour (I had a SNES but never got the SNES version) and I thought it was one of the best games ever 😭 still remember tryin to get past that mine cart level lol