Hey all you hairless apes out there!
Okay, enough monkey business, and let's start talking about a situation which I have been thinking about that had been driving me bananas lately!
Donkey Kong 64, which I personally consider one of the best Nintendo 64 platformers released in the system's later years. People who bought the original package would have gotten an Expansion Pak for free, which is convenient since the game actually required the Expansion Pak, much like The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, which was released a bit later. The U.S. version of the Game Pak was all banana-yellow in colour too. The game even introduced Diddy Kong's upgrades with the Barrel Jet Pack, and the Peanut Popguns. The game also made debut to three more Kongs: Tiny, Chunky, and Lanky. (Only Tiny was later redesigned and featured in further games though, along with Lanky. Whatever happened to Chunky, I wonder.)
Anyway, I really loved the game on the Nintendo 64, and I hoped Nintendo would later port it for the Virtual Console. Of course, then I started thinking about why wouldn't they release it there yet.
Well, for one, Nintendo 64 is getting the least treatment by Nintendo for Virtual Console apparently. I mean, there were so many great Nintendo 64 games, and by far only one third-party Nintendo 64 game (Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber) had been released on the Virtual Console, and it wasn't even that notable during its life-time. Not the mention in 2010, the Virtual Console on the Wii is now dying for some reason, and no official explanations were given for that either.
Nintendo should have released Diddy Kong Racing for the Virtual Console as well, and the availablity of the remake on the Nintendo DS is not an excuse against it, considering there is also a remake for Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo DS, and yet the original game is available on the Virtual Console. Of course, we're actually talking about Donkey Kong 64 right now, and it doesn't have a remake whatsoever, unlike its predecessors (SNES Donkey Kong Country trilogy), which incidentally are all available on the Virtual Console as well!
However, then I thought about an even more dead-end reason why the game Donkey Kong 64 wouldn't be released for the Virtual Console at all! It is quite unfortunate as well, really, and I'm not really sure it could be fixed in any way possible without altering the game so much. What is this reason, you may ask? Well, first of all, I just want to state that Rare had made it painfully clear that they won't be able to release any of their own IP game series for the Virtual Console, such as the original Banjo-Kazooie games, which are currently only available via the Xbox Live Arcade. Now, granted, Donkey Kong 64 should technically belong to Nintendo, but I fear it is doesn't belong to Nintendo by 100%. I'll explain.
If you played Donkey Kong 64 before, this should make sense. The game is just filled with a lot of great stuff, including a couple of bonus, classic games which can be played at any time once unlocked, which are the original Donkey Kong and Jetpac! As you may know, Jetpac is Rare's very first game, released waaaay back in 1983, when they were still called Ultimate Play the Game. Since that game belongs to Rare, it should automatically belong to Microsoft as well. You might think they could easily remove the game, but then again the game was integrated into Donkey Kong 64 in a way that it becomes part of the mandatory game-play! If you had finished the game, you may recall the only way to get the Rare Coin - one of the two notable coins which unlocks the room to the final boss - is by playing Cranky Kong's mini-game feature, which had us attempting to gain a certain high-score in Jetpac! Like, omigosh!
So yeah... there seems to be a great difficulty in actually getting Donkey Kong 64 into the world again. Do you suppose there could be any way the game will ever see the day of light again?
Post your own thoughts.
