I know this is rage bait, but DKC was fantastic. I remember when Blockbuster video held a contest where you could play a game, and if you had the best score in the entire store you could win free movie rentals for a year. And if you did good enough, you could qualify for a “The Wizard” style video game competition in California. I played the shit out of this game to practice for weeks. I learned all the spots where you could drop down a hole and instead of dying, you get some rewards. I went in to this blockbuster ready to get my family a year of free movie rentals and possibly a trip to California. The first hole I dropped down I died. They had a modified version of the game that didn’t have these secrets in it. I was entirely unprepared. I played my 3 turns and did pretty terrible. After we left the blockbuster my parents had to run into a store and I just waited in the car. I literally cried cause I was so disappointed in how bad I did.
The sound design was amazing. I can still hear the boing from jumping on a tire. The success jingle echos still.
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.
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
Soundtrack is pretty good I guess?
Invalid opinion. Soundtrack is peak.
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)
It used isometric 3D since the SNES lacked any 3D capability.
It was made by the same people that did those isometric games on 8 bit computers, Ashby Computer Graphics, aka Ultimate, which changed their name to Rare.
I mean, other types of displays definitely existed.
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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
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
I still have the plasma TV in my house my dad bought in 2007. The backlight is a little dim but not too much, and there is no significant screen burn-in to my knowledge.
It’s great for mid-late 2000’s consoles and TV shows.
I bet, they are still technically good displays that can potentially surpass most modern LCDs.
OLED does beat them in every way now though
Rear projections are 3 crts in a trench coat.
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https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/xbox-360-kid
This meme is almost 20 years old
first off - don’t get me wrong - i love the history for this
but how many times do you think people have done a repost post like yours?
is that n-1?
I’m trying to steer my younger (13) half-brother into thinking like this, that you’re doing stuff for fun. There doesn’t need to be instant (or not instant) rewards, especially the kinds that are so common now with many games that are made for kids and teens like a “billion zoomble bucks”, ultra rare legendary gold skin (that is not actually rare in any way), digital stickers you can’t even use for anything and whatever else. The reward should always be to have fun.
