Donkey Kong on Game Boy is a good example of a remake that expands on the original design in a cool way
This Donkey Kong reboot is kinda the gold standard for remaking a old game while adding a bunch of stuff to it. While the first 4 levels are like playing the arcade game it quickly opens up into a puzzle platformer. I doubt this needs to be said but 5 years later DK has kidnapped Pauline again. Mario must once again make his way through a bunch of levels but this time he’s got some new skills to even the odds.
From his SMB2 days he has retained the ability to pick up and throw enemies. Which is good since that is the only way to get rid of them unless a hammer is available on certain levels. A new defensive move that has him do a handstand will deflect projectiles and get a slightly higher jump afterwards. Having learned by watching DK Jr climb on vines he can also do that and spin to win on power lines too. All of these different skills must be used to succeed in the 100 levels that must be competed to succeed.
On top of that each world tends to add something new to ramp up the difficulty slightly every time. Whither it is wind that pushes Mario around or levers that must be used to solve a puzzles you’ll very rarely see any of them reused in a similar way till the end game. Which just kind of layers everything on top of each other. Which could be a problem if the difficulty wasn’t fair. By fair I mean you’ll likely have 99 lives by the time the credits roll. At minimum the early levels just let the player farm a bunch of lives so getting a game over is pretty tough.
All of what I mentioned sounds good and it is. Yet it does go on for slightly to long. I never beat this game till recently for a reason. Since this is primarily a portable game it could be kinda hard to progress since the game doesn’t save till after beating 4 levels. Which doesn’t take a long time but that feels like why I never got all the way through it till I played it with my GBA player on Gamecube.
Overall this is a fun little puzzle platformer that kinda just puts Donkey Kong and DK Jr into one game with more mechanics. All of the new stuff just makes it more of a fleshed out game compared to the replayable nature of the arcade releases. Which was a cool thing to do. The puzzle platformer nature of it also lets it stand the test of time. Still fun to play right now just like it was in 94.
