
I Just Can’t Wait to Be Done With These Monkeys This made each level feel like a chore, a far cry from Donkey and Diddy Kong’s fast, fluid animations.Ģ. His movements were jerky, and his roar and paw-swipe attacks were imprecise. In The Lion King, taking Simba from one rocky surface to the next felt a bit like maneuvering pieces in Tetris. I did know this, though: Donkey Kong Country was as smooth to play as The Lion King was clunky. Being seven, I wasn’t the savvy media consumer I am today and thus couldn’t really understand the disparity in quality between the two.
Both were part of my family’s video game collection. The former holds up as an excellent side-scrolling platformer nearly 25 years after its release, while the latter? Not so much.
9 Pokemon That Are My Sons Whom I Am Very Proud Ofĭonkey Kong Country came out within weeks of The Lion King. Jumanji 4 is Absolutely Going to be Fortnite. The Strange History of Lion King Animated Spinoffs. Here’s why it’s stuck with me, decades later. Whenever I had the privilege of playing the SNES, The Lion King was one of my go-tos, and despite its objective terribleness, it taught me more about media - and myself - than I ever could’ve imagined. I was seven years old when it was released, a Lion King superfan living in the suburbs of west Michigan with my parents and my gaming-adept older brothers. Like other Disney games, The Lion King ’s 16-bit adaptation was loved by many, but it didn’t exactly earn the same accolades as the Magical Quest series or the Aladdin adaptation. Some, like the many Disney games developed by Capcom, were well-received, while those based smaller properties and designed by less prestigious studios suffered from clunky mechanics and flimsy storytelling. These titles typically came out at the height of a movie or TV show’s peak in popularity, and their quality varied wildly.
Most 1990s console games based on branded properties were trash, cash grabs purchased by parents who recognized their kids’ favorite characters on the packaging and rightly assumed console-addicted children would get at least a few hours of playtime regardless of quality.