Retro Gaming Australia

We at Retro Gaming Australia would love to see more retro-inspired rewards in the Australian Club Nintendo Stars Catalogue. So, it is fair to say we were a tad jealous when we spied the Japanese Club Nintendo offering original polo shirts featuring designs from some of our favourite Nintendo titles.

For 550 points each, members can reward themselves with a polo shirt for which they can choose both the colour (from a selection of eight) and logo from one of six which represent Animal Crossing, Game & Watch, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros.

Personally, I’m partial to the pink shirt with Animal Crossing’s Rover as the logo.

Rare’s final SNES release.

Donkey Kong Country: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble was the third and final game in the series to appear on the SNES. This time around, both Donkey and Diddy are kidnapped, and it’s up to Dixie and newcomer Kiddy to do the rescuing. The game actually came out after the Nintendo 64, which hurt its sales performance.

Originally developed as RC Pro Am 64, would you believe?

Diddy Kong Racing is a multi-vehicle kart racing game for the Nintendo 64. Basically rushed out for Christmas in 1997 when Banjo-Kazooie and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time were delayed, DKR‘s adventure mode and multi-pathed tracks proved popular with content-starved N64 gamers everywhere.

The Intellivision version of Donkey Kong has widely held to be crap for over 25 years. Some even go so far as to believe that Coleco purposely sabotaged the Intellivision version so that people would purchase the Colecovision and it’s version of Donkey Kong instead. Well Intellivision fans, later this year, you’ll have an opportunity to purchase a greatly improved version of Donkey Kong for your beloved system, courtesy of Carl Mueller Jr.

You can see a comparison between the two versions in the video above.

Advanced orders for the game will ship at the end of August. Alternatively, it’ll be available for general purchase after November 2011. You can order the game here.

Via GameSetWatch

You should all have watched King of Kong by now. It was a 2007 documentary about the battle between Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell for the world record high score in Donkey Kong. Director Seth Gordon ended up hitting the big time after the film, breaking into directing film and television, including new release film Horrible Bosses.

Now that that’s all wrapped up, he’s talking about the King of Kong remake, which has the backing of New Line Cinema. (continue reading…)

Depending on who you believe, Saturday was the 30th anniversary of the first release of Donkey Kong, and thus 30 years since Mario first debuted.

What you may not know is that Nintendo does not actually own the rights to produce the game, and may not own the source code.

Gamasutra has produced an excellent article, which they call “The Secret History of Donkey Kong”, which discusses the events leading up to the release of the game, the stoush between Nintendo and Ikegami, the company which programmed and manufactured the game and the aftermath of the game’s release. Read it now!

The game that turned the tides of the 16-bit conflict.

Donkey Kong Country was the ape’s first home console outing in almost a decade. The game boasted graphics at a quality unseen at that point in time, thanks largely to Rare’s Advanced Computer Modelling technique, whereby characters were rendered as 3D models and converted into sprites. It is still the most successful western developed game released in Japan, having sold over 2 million copies there, and about 8 million total worldwide. This ad is for the UK release of the game.

Search for Donkey Kong Country on eBay

Today’s ad is for everybody’s favourite 30 hour+ collect-a-thon

Donkey Kong 64 was the last original Donkey Kong game developed by Rare to be released before they were bought out by Microsoft. It was the first game on the Nintendo 64 that required the Expansion Pak, which was included in most copies of the game free of charge. Due to difficulties with Expansion Pak emulation and the inclusion of Jetpac (which Microsoft owns the rights to) in the game, Donkey Kong 64 has not, and probably will not be released on the Virtual Console.

Search for Donkey Kong 64 on eBay