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Hey friends!

I have to share Donkey Kong 94 with you, because it's so under-appreciated! I feel like because this game was gameboy-only, it was largely ignored which is a real shame. I was lucky enough grow up playing this.

The game starts out with you playing the levels from the original arcade Donkey Kong, with slightly more fidelity. Very quickly though, this game takes a twist and suddenly its a puzzle platformer? Throwing out the convention of climbing to the top of a level, you must instead figure out how to carry an awkward key to its appropriate keyhole. There's 101 levels in this game, and most of them don't feel like filler at all. Some of the levels are genuinely very clever, and I've never seen anything like them since.

Oh! Also, you know how in Super Mario 64 when Mario was all of the sudden capable of all these acrobatic stunts we'd never seen him do before? He got those moves from Donkey Kong 94! Once you get the hang of it, having Mario backflip through a level feels super satisfying.

I hope it's not just nostalgia fuelling my enthusiasm for this game, because I've tried my best to nitpick every level and mechanic with a critical eye. I'm still in love, so that must say something, right?

Sure, Donkey Kong 94 suffers from quite a few problems older games tend to. It has lives that are pointless, because you get so many of them. It also falls directly into the problematic "Damsel in Distress" trope. I still think it is more than worth playing.

Anyway, I hope you have a 3DS because it's available on Virtual Console now and it still feels as fresh as I remember it!