I have a pretty good house rule concerning my video game purchases: don't touch the Donkey Kong franchise. DKC for the SNES was a technically amazing game, but it bored me to tears. For some reason, I never connected well with the characters, and the play control was a little fuzzy to me. I never really got to where I didn't know I was playing a game, which is important for a good game.
Donkey Konga was hyped pretty well, and I bought in to the hype. I mean, Nintendo is great at kooky games, and what could be kookier than playing the game with bongos?
Unfortunately the game does not deliver what I wanted. This simple want it does not provide is the desire to keep playing it. First, let me cover the normal categories.
Story
*Donkey and Diddy find bongos on the beach*
DK: What's this?
Diddy: I don't know.
Cranky: It's a drum.
DK: Oh we better play it then. Because, you know, we are monkeys and we live in the jungle and like rap music and play drums and I better stop before we get sued for racism.
The story is simple, but I shrugged that off because this is basically DDR with bongos and it's not like DDR has some kind of awesome story to motivate you.
Graphics
I don't know what they were thinking. The graphics in this game are horrible, and some of the later SNES DKC games could probably trump Donkey Konga in the graphics department, since the sprites had more than 3 frames of animation.
It doesn't really matter, though, because you spend 90% of the time staring at the spot the drum marks go by, so you only see the craptastic animation during breaks.
Sound
Some of the songs are covers, but that's cool. There's a pretty wide variety of stuff, from kids' songs like Bingo (yes, the "farmer who had a dog" Bingo) to Queen's overplayed "We Will Rock You" to the Pokemon TV Theme.
Play Control
Look this isn't rocket science, you basically have 4 buttons, and one of them is a noise sensor. I guess the bongos are pretty responsive but I can't really say more than that.
Fun
I played the game on the easy difficulty for a while, but it got boring fast. So I turned it up a couple notches and had a pretty good time. It's your standard "hit the buttons at exactly the right time" rhythm game, so it taps a gaming skill that dates to the very beginning of video game history, which is part of why rhythm games are so popular, IMO. You know exactly what you need to do, and the game gives you plenty of time to do it. So why oh WHY did I hit the right drum instead of the left? AGGGHHHHH!!!
Anyway, what seriously detracts from the fun is the lack of motivation. You play and get coins based on how good you play. You use these coins to buy things. That's a great system, because it encourages you to play the game more so you can get more things to do. However, I was looking forward to having 3 or 4 crappy songs that I had to suffer through just to unlock one awesome song, with the chance to unlock several other awesome songs and that one cruddy song that has a really high value for no reason. Instead, I take my hard-earned coins to the music store and find that all the songs are already available, I'm competing for the right to play them in Gorilla mode, the extra hard difficulty with no notes. Oh great, I hit a drum for two hours and now I get to play the same song again but now I have a reason to watch that Godforsaken elephant go through his 3 frames of animation for 3 minutes.
You can also unlock different sets of bongo noises, but so far it seems all they really do is obscure the music so that it gets more difficult to keep to the rhythm. There's also some minigames but at this point I had decided that I was really disappointed with Donkey Konga.
If you really like playing bongos you'll probably like the game. If you can identify with gorillas that live in the jungle, like rap music, and play drums then you get bonus points. If you like playing games that reward you for your devotion by bestowing extra levels and fun new features upon you, you'd probably get more fun out of a trip to the dentist.
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Originally Posted by The Cyborg
FYI, the original Donkey Kong was for the arcade, and ports were made to many systems.
