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In honor of the release of Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for Wii U at the end of this week, I thought I’d write a blog about my top five favorite Donkey Kong games.  How high can you get?  It’s on like Don…er, a stubborn monkey!

Now, you might be wondering why there are no classic arcade DK games on my list.  That seems surprising, especially considering how much of a classic arcade fan I am.  But you see, when I was a child, the gameplay mechanics of Donkey Kong were a little too hard for my young kid brain to wrap his head around.  Meaning, I wasn’t very good at it.  And when you have a small allowance of quarters to spend on arcade games, are you going to play games you are good at and can play for a long time, or are you going to lose quarters quickly playing something you’re not good at?  I remember when Donkey Kong Jr. came out, I thought at first it was a DK game for little kids, but it was just as hard.  I still remember some Donkey Kong stuff as a kid, like the Saturday Supercarde cartoon that was really awful.  They also had Donkey Kong and DK Jr. cereals.  Donkey Kong cereal was like Cap’n Crunch in a different shape, and DK Jr. cereal was kind of like fruit-shaped Trix.  Now that I’m older, I have more respect for the old Donkey Kong game, as well as other early 2-D platformers like Pitfall.  But most of my early arcade childhood memories were geared more toward stuff like Pac-Man.

Some may also gawk at the fact that there are no Donkey Kong Country games on my list, either.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the DKC games, too.  They offered fantastic visuals, AMAZING music, and responsive controls.  But when you take all that away, all you’ve got is just a 2-D platformer.  And in the 16-bit days, the last thing I wanted was yet another 2-D mascot platformer.  So in the end, I think the DKC games are just a tiny bit overrated. 

But I still have a lot of great memories associated with the DKC series.  When I got the first game, my brother Jeff was little bitty and lived in Alabama for a couple of years.  In the summers, I’d go and visit him and our mom in Alabama.  One year I brought my SNES with me and showed him Donkey Kong Country.  He was only a little older than a year, and could barely talk.  But when I showed him the game, he just stared at it.  And when our mom came into the room, he looked at her, pointed at the TV screen, and started babbling constantly.  We didn’t know what he was saying, but he sure was telling us all about that game!  By the end of the summer, Jeff had learned how to communicate with me that he wanted me to play Donkey Kong Country.  Yup, that’s right; “Donkey Kong” was one of Jeff’s first words!  Granted, it sounded more like “Konky Konk” when he said it, but we knew what he meant!

I never owned Donkey Kong Country 2, because when it came out I was just about to start college and needed to save money.  But I did rent it and thought it was very good.  Donkey Kong Country 3 is a special game to me, because it was one of the very first games I got to review for The Dallas Morning News back then.  I didn’t get into Donkey Kong Country Returns on Wii as much, because I thought it was a little too hard.  I’m a little worried about that with Tropical Freeze as well.  But we’ll see.  At any rate, enough backstory, now onto my top five favorite Donkey Kong games!

5. Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis (DS)

The Game Boy Advance had a sequel to the Donkey Kong game on Game Boy called Mario vs. Donkey Kong.  It was good, but not near as good as the GB one.  But when they made a sequel to Mario vs. Donkey Kong on the DS, it was a totally different game!  In this one, you had to guide the wind-up Mini-Marios to a goal and keep them out of harm’s way.  The Mini-Marios would walk on their own, so gameplay was a lot like Lemmings.  The game was entirely touch-screen control based, but it worked very well.  You would swipe left and right to make the Mini-Marios move in that direction, up to make them jump, and tap on them to make them stop.  The game felt a little easy, not because of a lack of challenge, but because the controls worked so well.  I loved how the final boss fight paid homage to the classic arcade game, and when you were done, you could make your own levels and share them online, too! 

This game must’ve been successful for Nintendo, because there are tons of sequels, too.  Minis March Again was a downloadable DSiWare sequel, but it looked like just more of the same, so I never bought it.  The cartridge based Mini-Land Mayhem had you using the touch screen to manipulate the environment instead of the Mini-Marios themselves.  And the 3DS had a downloadable spinoff called Mario & Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move, but it played more like Pipe Dream than anything.  I like how Pauline shows up in all these games, wonder how Peach feels about that.  All are great puzzlers, but not as good as the original sequel.  You know what’s cool is that all these games were developed by an American division of Nintendo.

4. Donkey Konga (GameCube)

Back in the PS2 and GameCube days, Pac-Man creator Namco had a huge hit on their hands in Japanese arcades.  It was called Taiko no Tatsujin, and it was a music rhythm game where you beat on a Taiko drum.  It spawned tons of arcade sequels and ports on home consoles, including the PS2, Wii, DS, PSP, and 3DS!  Back in those days, Namco’s US division was braver and would take chances and release a lot of unusual games in the US.  Some were hits, like Katamari Damacy, and some were not.  Like when they localized Taiko no Tatsujin on the PS2 and brought it over here as Taiko Drum Master.  It didn’t do very well in the US; guess Americans would rather be heroes on a virtual guitar instead.  Go figure.  But I LOVED it and imported any Taiko game I could on my region-free consoles (PSP and DS). 

Anyway, Nintendo saw how big the Taiko games were in Japan, and they wanted a piece of the action.  So they got Namco to make them a drum game for the GameCube.  It was called Donkey Konga, and it featured Donkey Kong Country characters and a barrel-shaped double bongo drum controller.  But it played almost just like the Taiko games.  I didn’t like it as much as Taiko Drum Master, but it was still a fun music game anyway.

3. Donkey Kong 64 (N64)

While Nintendo had a lot of great first party titles on the N64, it was really Rare who carried that console through its darker times with games like Banjo-Kazooie and Diddy Kong Racing.  Donkey Kong 64 was another good example.  It was a 3-D platformer that was very similar to Banjo-Kazooie.  In fact, one of the DK64 levels was originally supposed to be in Banjo’s game (the forest level where you turned day to night).  DK64 was a bit more action-oriented, though.  I liked how you could play the original Donkey Kong arcade game in DK64, too.  To this day it’s the closest thing we’ll get to an arcade port of Donkey Kong on a home console.  I think having it be in DK64 helped me get better at the original game, too!  You could also play one of Rare’s very first games: Jetpac.  Plus, from the annoying DK rap at the beginning to the character select screen where cowardly Chunky would encourage you to pick Tiny Kong instead, DK64 felt like an interactive 3-D Saturday morning cartoon.

A lot of people complain that DK64 is one of the worst offenders of needless collect-a-thons, and in a way I’d have to agree.  Each of the five playable characters has their own colored bananas to collect in every stage, and there are 100 of each in all!  Not to mention the ammo, coconuts, and other things to gather.  It got kind of ridiculous, but at the time it didn’t bother me as much as it would now.  Another interesting thing I read on the Internet recently was about the Expansion Pack that came with every copy of the game.  I don’t know if this is really true or not, since I read it on the Internet, but supposedly the only reason why it was included with every game was that there was a bug the programmers couldn’t fix unless the pack was in the N64.  It cost a lot of money for Rare.  If that’s true, it would make sense considering Banjo-Tooie came out a year later and looked way better than DK64 did and it didn’t even use the pack!  At any rate, DK64 is a special game to me also because I got to review it for The Dallas Morning News, and even got to pick my own artwork and front page tagline to be featured for that game.  Definitely a high point in my game reviewing ‘career.’

2. Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat (GameCube)

While the barrel bongo controllers were made for Donkey Konga, it wasn’t the best use of that peripheral.  That honor went to a 2-D platformer called Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat, where you used the bongos to control DK.  Tap the left and right bongos to move in those directions, both to jump, and clap for a shockwave attack.  Boss battles were cool, too, as they played like a bongo Punch Out game.  It was very creative.  The goal wasn’t just to simply get to the end of the stage, but to get a high score as well.  This took a lot of tricky finesse.  For instance, if you just jumped to collect a banana, you’d get one point.  But if you did a backflip, and then clapped to get the banana with your shockwave, you’d triple the points.  So you’d have to find all sorts of neat ways to do tricks to boost your score.  It was amazing, and one of the best GameCube games around.  The team that made Jungle Beat went on to create other great Nintendo classics, such as Super Mario Galaxy!

There is a “Play it on Wii” version of Jungle Beat that uses the Wii remote and nunchuck to move DK.  I’d like to try it, but I can’t imagine it would be any better than the original.  There was supposed to be another game that used the bongo controllers on GameCube: a racing game with DK characters called Donkey Kong: Barrel Blast.  It was eventually ported to the Wii instead, but I’d stay away from it if I were you.  It’s one of the worst first party Nintendo games I’ve ever played!

1. Donkey Kong (Game Boy)

OK, now onto my favorite DK game.  When you first pop this cartridge into your Game Boy or Super Game Boy player (my method of choice), you would go through the four levels of the arcade game.  But then, you’re treated to 100 brand new levels!  Some are like puzzles where you must figure out how to get a key to a door, but there are also plenty of action stages where you have to reach the top where DK is.  DK Jr. and gameplay elements from that game appear as well.  Cutscenes feel like the ones from classics like Pac-Man, but serve a dual purpose as they explain gameplay elements you’ll encounter next.  And it had one of the most epic final boss fights ever!  Controls were spot on and felt like the original arcade game, but now you could do way more stuff.  Such as a triple jump, backflip, handstand, as well as pick up and throw objects.  Mario had almost as many moves in this tiny game as he does in Mario 64!  But it all felt right.  Not only is Game Boy Donkey Kong my favorite DK game, it’s also one of the best arcade updates to this day.  If you enjoy the classic arcade game, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you play this if you haven’t already.  Luckily, if you have access to a 3DS, you can download it on Virtual Console. 

And those are my favorite DK games.  In the comments section, let me know what you think of my picks, and tell me your favorite DK games, too!  That’s all for now!  Later!  --Cary