Observe carefully a screenshot of Donkey Kong Land and think on what your brain has to do to decipher what you’re looking at. It takes you an extra moment to process what you’re looking at. If you look at a picture of the game, you’ll see what I mean when I talk about an undecipherable mess. It has no sprite borders and a busy background and is thus a blurry indecipherable mess. When they made dubious games for ZX Spectrum. Donkey Kong Land, on the other hand, is not Rare at its best.
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Truly great developers like HAL Laboratory knew how to push the limits of a piece of hardware, but not exceed those limits. I’ll grant you that the grass is borderline, but there the game relies on Kirby’s whiteness to prevent an excess of ghosting. Objects have shapes, but are not coloured when you can move in front of them. On the one hand, Kirby uses its art style and restraint to show a vibrant, dare I say colourful world while keeping a healthy dose of whitespace to keep the ghosting out of the way. Kirby’s Dream Land 2 and Donkey Kong Land. To show you what I mean, let’s compare two games released around the same time: Thus, you have to be careful when creating a game’s environment to keep it simple. It’s the screen who never catches a break. The processor and the graphics chip are fine, mind you, the game suffering no slowdown at all. This causes general ghosting and turns the screen into a mess of late pixels trying to catch up to a game too complicated for the puny screen: everything’s blurry. So when you move forward, or jump, or swim, or swing on vines the Kongs, enemies, platforms, background elements, barrels, bananas, basically everything clashes with everything else. You might be tempted to think that only characters can cause ghosting, but everything that moves on the screen does. My screenshots serve only to show what Rare didn’t do to alleviate the problem. It’s a result of movement, and you can only see that movement artifact on an original screen. So it’s never too much of an issue.Īt this point remember that no screenshot I can show you can display the ghosting the Game Boy’s screen suffers. When he gets near an enemy or a wall, anything that produces ghosting of its own, the whitespace allows you to keep making sense of what’s on the screen. That’s fine for Mario because he is small, surrounded by pixels turned off and you’re moving in a single direction, so that leaves a trail behind him. So when a character is moving, as is the case with Super Mario Land for example, he leaves a trail of blurry pixels behind. When the Game Boy tells its screen to turn a pixel off, if the screen is displaying an exploding bomb for example, then the time to turn off that pixel is not instantaneous. What is ghosting? It’s a slow time to turn off a pixel when it was displaying colour before. It’s only four shades of grey with a pea-soup green background.īut people always forget about a last shortcoming: the screen suffers from severe ghosting.The shortcomings of the screen usually talked about are: Let’s talk about Donkey Kong Land by discussing first what it was displayed on, the Game Boy screen. Forgetting About the Ghosts in the Machine They paint a much more interesting portrait than the few things it did right. To those people I must say I’m sorry, I kind of liked it when I was a kid despite its flaws but the only thing essential about Donkey Kong Land is its myriad of flaws. The Donkey Kong Land sub-series, not so much.īut people love this game. DKC 2 is up there in the pantheon of eternal games. I really love the SNES Donkey Kong Country games. Why? Because the game is simply too hard to see on an original Game Boy. I didn’t know what those squares were! Were they TVs? Candy? I couldn’t decipher them. When I was a kid, it took me days to understand what the KONG letters you collected were supposed to be. I got Donkey Kong Land in 1995 when it was released, so it’s one of those games where I’m super critical because I’ve owned it for 20 years. With the Game Boy adaptation, they revealed their monkey antics. With their SNES game, Rare was able to convince everyone that a polygonal game was running on the humble Super Nintendo hardware. If you want to know how not to make a Game Boy game, look no further, this game has done everything wrong! All the mistakes a team can make when adapting a concept to Game Boy, they’re all there. This horror sold millions! Monkeying Aroundĭonkey Kong Land is the worst case scenario.
The original box art before it became a Player’s Choice.
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