Donkey Kong Land III

So this is interesting. When I was a kid, I loved Donkey Kong Country on SNES. And yet, when I went back and replayed it a year ago or so, I was very underwhelmed. I assumed that meant I just wasn't really a fan of the DK series anymore. Yet, I decided to play Donkey Kong Land III this week out of curiosity. I played the Game Boy trilogy of games about a decade ago and was super impressed with them. Our baby has had sleeping issues the past week, so it felt like I wanted to play something fairly simple to try to relax before bed.

Anyway, here's what's interesting - about thirty minutes in, I kind of feel like the Donkey Kong Land games on GB might actually hold up better over the years than their big brother console analogs. I don't know. I'm still very early into playing this one. But it kind of feels like when bringing these games to GB they simplified in such a way as to highlight the pure platforming and omit a lot of the BS that infuriated me about the SNES games. Maybe I'm wrong, and I just haven't seen enough yet. We'll find out.

But for right now, I'm having a good time. And I actually find the visuals are just insanely impressive on GB. I don't know how they managed to get that faux polygon look working on such primitive hardware. In demaking it, they made it even more awesome. Which is ironic because I find the SNES games now look horribly dated.

I changed my mind. While I'm still impressed with the technical feats of Donkey Kong Land III, I find it still suffers from the same problem I tend to have with EVERY Donkey Kong Country/etc game. Basically, the solid platforming lulls me into feeling like I'm going to like the game, only to find that I get thrown into some part that's just so frustrating that I end up tossing the controller (or in this case, 3DS) aside in disgust after dying over and over again.

The first big boss fight of the game is against an oyster who lets smaller oysters go after you (you're a swordfish at this part, by the way) and you need to wait until the right moment to push them into the big oyster. This is after avoiding them AND getting them into the right position to be aimed at him. The problem is your sprite is so large that dodging them is a huge issue. So after seven or eight deaths, I just gave up. Why? Because the game stopped feeling fun. Just stopped dead in its tracks. Ugh.