It wasn’t that bad, but it was absolutely overrated. Good soundtrack though.
Even 4chan can’t deny how good the soundtrack is
Your boos mean nothing, I’ve seen what makes you cheer.
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.
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.
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 sound design was amazing. I can still hear the boing from jumping on a tire. The success jingle echos still.
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
I was a Genesis kid, but I played most of the SNES classics while it was still the 90s.
Donkey Kong Country has always been criminally overrated. Even on a CRT television it was just not that good.
In fact I’ll go so far as to say that between the SNES and the N64, Rare made exactly two great games: Goldeneye and Diddy Kong Racing. Everything else was middling.
sega kid
shitty game takes
Many such cases
Sonic the Hegehog wasn’t fun. Good art direction, great music; terrible level design that very often countered the premise of “going fast.” I never found them enjoyable and find it crazy how big the series is, even though most games in the franchise are said to be garbage even by Sonic fans.
For kids with very strict religious parents, sonic is the coolest media they are allowed to consume. Anything cooler than sonic would be satanic.
Hmmm… 🤔
Uh… Perfect Dark and GoldenEye.
I mentioned Goldeneye.
Yeeeeeaaaaaauuuhhhhhh but then you paired it with Diddy Kong Racing. Replace that with Perfect Dark and then you’re valid.
Diddy Kong Racing is a masterpiece. I don’t think you played it all the way through.
Banjo kazooie and dk64 were tops, you take that back right now
I’d say those were solid games, but not great.
Rare games just had this style that made everything feel a little off.
Like eating a Subway sandwich. The ham doesn’t just taste like ham; it tastes like ham + Subway. The turkey tastes like turkey + Subway. Banjo-Kazooie was the worst about this. It just had so much of this extra “Rare” flavor on top of it.
And like, you don’t notice it at first until you try the breakfast sandwich, and when that tastes like egg + Subway, you can’t eat there anymore because that’s all you can taste.
… that “style” is what makes modern games suck. They lack that authenticity. Rare’s games had personality.
Modern games don’t suck. That’s a silly thing to say.
Rare’s N64 platformers especially wouldn’t hold up today.
Go play DK64 today and tell me it’s better than a modern game. But you have to play it all the way through, all the bullshit repetitive item collection, going through the same rooms with every character to get every boring banana.
I can’t stand most platformers, but particularly older ones. It’s maddening to play within such small visual areas. If I have to consistently guess what’s on the other end of a jump in a game about controlling my jumps, you’ve fucked up completely as a developer. Donkey Kong is awful at letting you know what exists in front of you within a timely manner.
has Diddy
Well at the time he was going by Puff Daddy
No pre-order bonus
No battle pass
not even skins
Video game disregarded.
the chain smoking and hard drugs of video game’s
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 *
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.
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.
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.
