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Donkeykong land4/30/2023 ![]() It also raised the sale price of the Game Boy by $10 USD upon release. The Pocket did not sell particularly well nor change the Game Boy market significantly. The Game Boy had millions of units already sold in the last seven years when the Game Boy Pocket was introduced in 1996. I had to contend with my trusty grey brick until I bought a Game Boy Color in 2000, and I was not alone. If we are supposed to understand that this game was made with the Game Boy Pocket in mind, I guess it solves its more egregious graphical issues, but we still must acknowledge all the poor players who did not own a Game Boy Pocket to play this bad game. Just like Donkey Kong Land was released to coincide with the arrival of the Super Game Boy on store shelves, Donkey Kong Land 2 was released on the same day as the Game Boy Pocket. Since the whole marketing angle of the Donkey Kong Country series was its use of 3D graphics, they chose to use the same underlying technique on Game Boy. You need the clean lines of hand-drawn pixel art to give you a game you’ll be able to see without issues. Why don’t I play some Kirby’s Dream Land 2 instead of this crap? Is this a background element or an enemy? It threw what looks like a barrel, so I guess it’s an enemy? Oh, it wasn’t a barrel, it was a cannonball so now I’m dead. You can better discern the position of the dark blobs that populate the screen, but you’ll have a hard time figuring out what those blobs are supposed to be. They did not fully commit to the improvements you still have many decorative elements that crush visibility throughout the game. There is no way to make 3D designs work flawlessly on the original Game Boy screen, no matter how much whitespace you’re leaving in the background. They evidently tried to alleviate the problem by using whitespace appropriately, but I think they were trying to improve a fundamentally flawed concept. ![]() The developers of Donkey Kong Land 2 clearly thought so too the second game has cleaner backgrounds. The biggest issue with the first Donkey Kong Land in retrospect are its inscrutable backgrounds that make everything blurry. Essentially, we’re faced here with the harsh fact that a bad adaptation of a great game is worse than a bad original work. At least the first Land game tried to have different levels with Donkey Kong and his family. Donkey Kong Land 2 attempts to ape this seminal game and fails miserably. I have fond memories of playing the game with my best friend from primary school, slowly inching our way, level by level, through this difficult Super Nintendo classic. It stings particularly because this game tries to reproduce Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest for the Game Boy, and I simply adore Donkey Kong Country 2. The game features only minuscule improvements on the issues I had with the first game, so I am disappointed to say I do not like this sequel. Since I have never played the game before, it means my opinions are fresh. This time, I bought the game as an adult, specifically for this project. With the first game, I had decades of experience to share I owned the game has a kid. ![]() With that in mind, it’s a big responsibility for me to now discuss Donkey Kong Land 2. ![]() It’s the one that has received the most feedback from book reviews on Amazon, from Reddit’s /r/gameboy, from talking to my friends. My article on Donkey Kong Land is by far my most popular. North American release in September 1996Īn exciting cover for an unfortunate sequel.GAME BOY ESSENTIALS Home About Timeline Get the Books Donkey Kong Land 2
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