![]() By this point the Turbo-Grafx 16 was gone, its mascot game Bonk’s Adventure ported to the NES in January of 1994. The best aspect to focus on is the console wars, 1994 having been a strange ceasefire in which Nintendo unexpectedly won the generation because the challengers all vacated the field. Of course, Cranky Kong then blasts his replacement as Donkey Kong with a barrel of TNT, so it’s not quite that simple.Ĭomparison, then. But it has never been so explicit – the sixteen-bit era literally kicking the decrepit eight-bit era off its chair. This confluence of technological history and brand history has been present before – consider the way in which the Mega Man series haunted Mega Man X, or the sepia-toned recaps of the previous Metroid games. Nintendo didn’t offer just any property out to a British studio that had (by this point twice) impressed with their technical prowess – they offered one that hadn’t had a game in a decade, whose importance to the company was already as the discarded past to their main franchise. But the choice of history to dethrone is careful. Not so much a passing of the torch as the law of the jungle, young eating old. ![]() The girders transform to trees, and there is rocking out, a shredding guitar remix of the music as the new generation of Kong boogies. The classic music chimes forth, nearly allowed to resolve, when on the last note a boombox drops from the sky, followed by a younger ape long on attitude, who kicks the old man off. An old and wizened monkey sits atop it, turning the crank of a gramophone. The old familiar girders, rendered in vivid 3D. It doesn’t help that the computing strength used to render the models here is a sneeze compared to a modern console, or that the design for Donkey Kong here became the new standard, reused all the way to the present day, so that this appears to be a primitive copy instead of a preview of the future. To a modern eye it looks pixelated and muddy – a bad imitation of the future. The result were the smoothest 3D models in console history. In this case, a clever hack for 3D graphics in which the output of high-powered digital rendering on ultra-expensive Silicon Graphics machines was converted into sixteen-bit sprites in the same way that Mortal Kombat used video and ClayFighter had used claymation figures. The content is akin to that of Banzai Bill or the polygonal space ships of Star Fox – a straightforward demonstration of technological prowess. And yet the start of the game is all about attraction – a wire-framed Rare logo, followed by an ostentatiously 3-D Nintendo logo. ![]() Indeed, almost all of the arcade trappings that defined the platformer’s shift to home consoles are gone, the lone holdout having been the score, kept vestigially in Super Mario World and gone here. The game is based on a double, after all.
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