Donkey Kong Country was one of the games that sealed Rare's reputation as one of the finest developers of the 90s, though they've recently slipped somewhat, their classic Super Nintendo titles remain excellent games in nearly every respect and Donkey Kong Country is one of their finest.

Donkey Kong Country takes Nintendo's earliest mascot and makes him the hero of the game. The plot is paper thin but goes like this, Donkey Kong lives in the Jungle and has a massive horde of bananas. One day his bananas are missing and he goes the get them back. Along with new sidekick Diddy Kong, the player travels on a whirlwind adventure through some of the best designed and most beautiful platform levels ever made.

Gameplay is very strong, in fact this was probably the best platformer of the 90s that didn't have Mario in the title. You control either Donkey Kong or Diddy Kong, freely switching between them at any time. You work your way through the levels, clearly feeling the influence of Sonic the Hedgehog as they have a bit of a track feel to the them, fighting baddies and collecting bananas. Both your simian heroes play differently, Diddy is more limber but lacks the strength to fight all the foes you might encounter, Donkey can't reach quite so many out of the way platforms but is a match for any foe. This dual gameplay style along with the tag-team gameplay is great fun. Every so often the game also treats you to some ridable jungle animal, the most fun being the rhino that charges towards your goal like nature's tank.

Levels are also nice and different, the Jungle levels early on soon develop into caverns with mine carts to ride around in and lagoons to swim through. It never gets dull and the supporting characters you meet along the way are some of the funniest in any game I've played.

Visually this is a stunner. For this game Rare pioneered the technique of pre-rendered graphics. Instead of using simple two dimensional, hand drawn sprites, they prepared very sophisticated 3D models and animated them. Then the animation is converted into the game's characters, levels, backgrounds. Donkey Kong Country was part of the early 3D gaming craze thanks to this optical illusion, despite offering nothing in the way of 3D gameplay. The machines used to render the original 3D models were very powerful for the time and far outstripped any kind of rendering possible in real time. This meant that when true 3D gaming was introduced a few years later on the Playstation and Nintendo 64, despite offering true 360 degree environments, it didn't look as good as the game on offer here.

I've mentioned before that possibly the greatest use for the Gameboy Advance was running ports of games previously for home consoles, if there's a proof of this then it's Donkey Kong Country. This game plays and feels identical to the original and even more importantly, it looks identical. To have what was once a powerhouse of a game running on a handheld was very impressive when this was released and it's still pretty nice now. It makes great use of the hardware, though it's worth noting that the brightness has been bumped up a fair bit. No doubt this was done to improve the look on the first GBA systems without any form of backlight, what this means is that when played on a GBA SP or Nintendo DS, this game looks a little washed out. It's not too bad but it does put a little dampener on and otherwise lovely looking game.

Donkey Kong Country is just as fun now as it was in the 90s, it's a great platformer and still looks wonderful. If you own an Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS or DS lite and don't own this, then you should. DSi and DSi XL owners are excluded again, I'm afraid.

This is getting a little hard to find now and will probably be around the £10-£15 mark on Amazon. It's worth it though.