A Thirteen-Year-Old's Venture into Retro Gaming; or, How to Drain Your Allowance Part 1

The main reason that most gamers are drawn to retro gaming is nostalgia. The feeling of when they were a kid and there wasn't a worry in there life, just playing video games. It could be for the Genesis, or the SNES, or the N64. That is not me. My first console was the Wii, and my first games were Wii Sports and Super Mario Galaxy. I only really got into gaming around 2 years ago but it quickly became my favorite hobby. This is the first installment in hopefully a series of blogs about my experience and the games I get.

Part 1: The SNES and Donkey Kong Country

When I was at Awesome Con, Washington DC's very own comic convention, my friends and I noticed a store filled with old games and consoles. We browsed for a while, went walking around the main hall for a bit, and eventually returned to the store. I was originally thinking of buying a GBA for $35 dollars, but then I noticed that they had the SNES for the price of $55 dollars. Both me and my friend bought Super Nintendos, with me buying Donkey Kong Country and my friend buying Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart. My friend told me that he felt nostalgia for these games even though he never had them as a kid, and I find that very strange but also felt it a little myself.

At the time of this writing, I have only finished the first world of the game. This game is beautiful and the soundtrack is phenomenal even today. I have only played one other game in the series before, Donkey Kong Country Returns, which I beat but not very easily. I found the first world of this game to be a breeze, but my first real roadblock was the first mine cart level. The problem with this level is that it is so far zoomed in that it is hard to see if there will be enemies coming up or you will just plummet to your doom. I understand that it needed to be like that for the purpose of the "3D" graphics, but it can really be annoying at times. Overall my experience will Donkey Kong Country has been very positive, even if I have gotten very frustrated with it even on the second world.

The mine cart levels do rely too much on memorization. If you liked DKC 1, though, you definitely need to try 2. I like the first one a lot, but the DKC 2 is easily one of my favorite SNES games.

If you like both enough, the third one is also a really good game but it's missing something. They recycle a lot of ideas and a lot of the new ones aren't as interesting or fun.