![]() ![]() Like many recent Nintendo games, the first half is just a primer, and the structure changes significantly in the second half. Merry Mini-Land has a theme park motif with a heavy focus on riding wind currents, while Slippery Summit uses the classic Mario staple of sliding across ice to great effect in puzzle solutions. Those two, called Merry Mini-Land and Slippery Summit, are peppered in between the older worlds and feel right at home alongside the others. Donkey Kong expands on the original with two entirely new worlds, making eight standard worlds altogether. But after realizing that there was no point, I stopped even bothering with those bonus stages. So why have them at all? The anachronism seems to exist mostly to have a prize in the extra life bonus stages. There is barely any penalty, so in many cases there's no distinction between using a life and using a continue. If you happen to have already passed through a gate, an extra life will save you a little bit of legwork getting to that checkpoint, but not much, and some stages don't have a checkpoint gate at all. When you run out of lives, you hit the Restart button and continue where you left off, just like you would continue with an extra life. I know this is a Mario staple, and I think there's still room in Mario platformer design for it, but it serves little purpose here. One oddity is the antiquated presence of lives. That said, sometimes its visual similarity to a Mario platformer would play tricks on me-I had to learn the hard lesson that unlike in Mario 3, you can't actually stomp on a cannonball, for example. More often, though, simply knowing the solution is enough, and it doesn't ask for quick reflexes. Sometimes a puzzle solution will require some quick platforming precision, especially when you need to drop a key (starting a timer for when it will disappear) and then traverse the stage to get back to it. This isn't quite as smooth as a traditional Mario platformer, since it's built to facilitate complex puzzles that often involve picking up and moving platforming elements or enemies, but it's a very well-made middle-ground. ![]() Mario's nimble acrobatics feel natural and intuitive almost immediately. It's a nice little loop that allows each stage's goals to feed into the others. Then there's a boss stage against Donkey Kong, and the more minis you successfully guided in the previous stage, the more pips of health you have for the battle. Once you've completed a series of six themed stages recovering the minis, there's a follow-the-leader stage where you guide them to the exit, attempting not to lose any along the way, and having them collect alphabet blocks (spelling "TOY," naturally). You can collect a series of colored packages, carefully tucked away in hard-to-reach places, as a bonus in each stage. The puzzle-platforming stages have Mario traversing through a series of traps and enemies to reach a mini-Mario in a vending capsule. Donkey Kong isn't the villain, per se, but more like a childlike, not-too-bright antagonist in an old cereal commercial. He invades the Mario toy factory and steals all he can get his mitts on, and Mario-apparently concerned about his licensed merch-chases after the ape to recover them. The minis are the impetus for the story, though, which begins when Donkey Kong spots the little clockwork toys and gets an insatiable appetite for them. Thanks to a combination of quality-of-life improvements and visual flair that showcase what made those older games special, this Switch remake gives that original design ethos a new lease on life. While those games were charming enough, they never quite recaptured the magic of Donkey Kong on Game Boy or Mario Vs. We've received a steady stream of Lemmings-like spin-offs since then, centered mostly around guiding minis through trap-filled stages. But the minis ultimately became the stars of the sub-series and took over its identity. A successor to the stellar and underrated Game Boy version of Donkey Kong, it brought back many of the same puzzle-platforming mechanics with adorable mini-Mario toys serving as stage collectibles and story MacGuffins. Donkey Kong on Game Boy Advance was a victim of its own success. ![]()
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