Full Game Reviews
Rating of
3.5/5
A Tepid Spiritual Successor
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 03/08/2026
“Donkey Kong Classics” on the NES was the first game I ever ‘finished.’ The fact that the entire game was just three screens (that repeated indefinitely for high-score chasing) went a long way toward that momentous feat in my gaming career, as running out of lives and getting booted back to the beginning by a Game Over screen never felt like a massive loss of progress.
Flash forward to the early 2000s, and I was fiddling around with a huge collection of ROMs I had acquired, and seeing a Game Boy port of “Donkey Kong” – typically dubbed “Donkey Kong ‘94” by fans – I decided to see if the greenscale brick offered a faithful recreation of my first gaming conquest.
It did not.
Instead of a faithful recreation of a clunky, repetitive, and short Arcade game, …
