Donkey Kong Land is basically what happened when Rare and Nintendo dragged Donkey Kong Country kicking and screaming onto the Game Boy. The first game features an entirely original set of levels, while the second and third games are more closely based on their SNES equivalents.
Both the NES and the WWF were at the top of their game at the end of the 1980s, so it was only natural that the two forces would collide. WWF WrestleMania Challenge is the second WWF effort for the system, and features eight WWF superstars, including favourites such as Hulk Hogan, The Macho Man Randy Savage and the Ultimate Warrior.
One of the most popular and groundbreaking games of the 32/64-bit era was GoldenEye 007. The game is widely held to be one of the best licensed games ever produced, but the reason it’s so popular is its splitscreen multiplayer feature.
Banjo-Kazooie is one of Rare’s finest platforming efforts, sadly oft overlooked nowadays because of its collection based progress mechanics. The UK ad pays homage to the promotional campaign for the 1978 Superman film.
Jet Force Gemini is one of Rare’s great games of the Nintendo 64 era. Although it wasn’t quite as successful as other efforts, the game did a great job of blending exploration and third person shooting action. Shame about the game-padding Tribal hunt, though.
We’ve seen some high profile withdrawls of games from the Wii’s Virtual Console about, but this one is perhaps the most surprising. Reports are coming in from the US that Nintendo has pulled Donkey Kong Country, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie’s Double Trouble from the Virtual Console service. Nintendo has not provided a reason for the change. Word is that the games will be pulled from PAL region stores on the 25th of November – so if you want them, download them now.
Some folks are speculating that Nintendo might be upgrading the games to support the WiiU Game Pad, or be planning some kind of Donkey Kong collection disc, but these stories seem unlikely at this point – Donkey Kong‘s 30th anniversary was last year. There are no rights issues with Rare, as Nintendo always owned the rights to the games and characters Rare created for the franchise.
Grabbed by the Ghoulies was Rare’s first after joining the Microsoft fold. Expectations were high for Rare under Microsoft, but Ghoulies, a title ported quickly from the GameCube to the Xbox, didn’t resonate with fans, who were waiting for sequels to big time Rare hits like Perfect Dark and Banjo-Kazooie.
You might notice the video starts to get worse and ends abruptly. That’s because the NES we were playing it on has sat in a dusty house with a bunch of smokers for a couple of years. Not exactly your friendly storage environment. That may mean a hiatus for us recording NES footage until we clean this console or get a replacement console – the other one we tried was even worse.
And now you can too, thanks to the hard work of Blaziken257, who has prepared an English translation patch for the Japanese version of the game, known as Donkey Kong GB: Dinky Kong and Dixie Kong.
You can get the translation patch here
Source: Romhacking via RetroCollect
Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team was an unlikely crossover between characters developed by Rare and Technos respectively, brought together under the one roof by TradeWest. Plays more like the former than the latter, but without the ballbusting difficulty associated with other Battletoads efforts.
