Donkey Kong was one of the most known staple character in the video game market to date. His first appearance was in the old Donkey Kong arcade game, which featured a young soon-to-be Mario battling the titular ape in order to rescue Pauline, Mario's first girlfriend. Since then, Rare decided that they were tired of the simian being downplayed as a villain, and decided to invent his own spin-off series, Donkey Kong Country, and MAN, was it a huge success. The gameplay took everything that was good about the Mario games and increased it tenfold, with a multitude of secrets, characters, and scenery that puts most other SNES games to shame. To this day, DKC is Rare's most fondly-remembered franchise sans Banjo-Kazooie, and the series has maintained luster even with the more recent Donkey Kong Country Returns, which was the first non-Rare Donkey Kong platformer. Of course, Rare couldn't pass up the opportunity to frighten the absolute crap out of us, and jeez Louise, did they ever. The series, straight from the get-go, had VERY unsettling Game Over screens, showcasing, in respective order, Donkey and Diddy Kong bruised from head to toe, Diddy and Dixie locked away in a jail cell, and Dixie and Kiddy trapped in a creepy cradle, complete with a dark background and, in the second game's case, a RED BACKGROUND after a few seconds of waiting. That's not the only thing about the original trilogy that scared our socks off; in DKC2, in the middle of a stage where you infiltrate a Zinger hive (Zingers are essentially GIANT WASPS), you begin to hear unnerving music. Suddenly, out of nowhere, you find a GIANT RED ZINGER that chases you relentlessly, forcing you to speed up or get crushed. If that wasn't enough, the unnerving music transforms into PANIC MUSIC, which jump starts your fight-or-flight response, and let me tell you, if you're a normal person, you BETTER be on flight mode during this segment. Oh, but this is absolutely NOTHING compared to the series' first (and only) 3D outing, Donkey Kong 64, which might as well have been named 'Donkey Kong: Freakish Nightmare Edition.' At first, everything seems to be normal, what with the dark, mechanical replica of K. Rool sailing across the seas and DK Isles peacefully placed in the middle of the ocean. And then you get to Frantic Factory, an already disturbing, haunted toy factory with many haywire mechanisms going off and that is populated by autonomous wind-up crocodiles which have to be killed with explosives. Then you reach the level's boss, Mad Jack, and mother of mercy on a Cracker Jack, is this guy terrifying. Imagine, a giant, possessed Jack-In-The-Box that sounds like Donald Duck on crystal meth, who can SHOOT LASERS at you, raise pillars of damaging light anywhere he pleases, jumps at you at mach speed, and can turn INVISIBLE, of all things. Yep, the third boss of the game is, essentially, a giant toy version of the Bloodsuckers from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadows of Chernobyl, who are already pretty damn scary to begin with. If that wasn't enough, let me introduce you to Kracshot Kroc, a henchman who has a favorite motto, and that motto is "GET OUT." Every time you do something wrong (or RIGHT, depending on what area you're in), a cursor appears onscreen, coupled with the previous quote being yelled in a TRAUMATIZING voice, and you have a set amount of time to evacuate the area before being one-shot killed. The first time you hear him, I GUARANTEE you will immediately soil yourself from the sheer terror in his voice, let alone his business ethics of sniping your face off. Not even the most recent entry in the series, Donkey Kong Country Returns, fails to bring chills to your spine. At one point later in the game, you're progressing through what appears to be a rather empty-looking level... until you walk ten meters to your right, and then you suddenly get chased by a SWARM of black spiders. And by 'swarm,' I don't just mean 'swarm,' I mean a f*cking TIDAL WAVE OF SPIDERS. The music also speeds up to accompany the madness, and the only way to avoid being bitten to death is to move your ass or lose your ass. If Rare went out to make a cutesy platformer series, they certainly did, but they offset it quite a bit with such mortifying features as the ones listed above. Those damn, dirty apes.
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