Game:

Donkey Kong Land (1995)

Duration: 0:00

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0

Originally recorded: September 12, 2024 (*phew*)
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Generally speaking, I prefer to just stick to a single game per session. It just makes sorting things out for YouTube a little easier in retrospect. But when it comes to these multi-game streams, I tend to offer a little more wiggle room. Most of the time, I just feel sort of neutral about the whole thing. You know, "it can't be helped" and all that jazz. But for once, I feel like it was actually worthwhile. After all, being able to see just how much of a jump in quality there is between the first and second DKL back-to-back helps to illustrate just how bad the former is compared to the latter.

First things first, I stand by my seemingly flippant score of 5/10 on the original Donkey Kong Land. Honestly, the fact that it came out that the game was built on the same framework as the Battletoads Game Boy game doesn't surprise me in the least. Because this game feels like it doesn't want to be a platformer in any sense of the word... and it will constantly remind you of that for every single solitary second of gameplay. That being said, I can at least appreciate the unique settings they added to the game. I just wish I could say the same for its original gameplay gimmicks.

Was pretty funny to see how Dari couldn't comprehend the bit-crunched visage of King K. Rool though. Not that I blame him: I had a better view and knew exactly what to look for.

Switching to DKL2 felt like a light switch went off. No more slippery physics. No more panicking over not finding all of the K-O-N-G letters in order to prevent losing a neglible amount of progress that took far too much time to make. No more random deaths that should've just resulted in me losing a single Kong -- especially since that's exactly what did happen previously in the same exact situation! And deaths by screen-crunch have gone down a whopping 95%. THIS. This is what a portable Donkey Kong platformer should've always felt like.

But it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Now that the game's playing fair, there's a lot of legitimate difficulty at play this time around. Also, now I'm on the hook for a full playthrough. But on the plus side, I get to use interrupt saves between sessions now, which means my hoard of banana coins I collected this time around will be able to help me save scum through the rest of the game without issue. And I only barely managed to finish the second world this time around. Of course, Dari tells me that's the longest world in the entire game... but KI remembers things differently. Though they have gone on record that they've only played it to the same extent once, which hampers their memories of the game significantly. So, who knows? 9 levels still feels like overkill though.