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[SolVanderlyn]

Returns and Tropical Freeze are really great, mechanically, but Rare's series was much clearer in its post-cold war message.

At the beginning of DKC1, the Kongs were greedy capitalists, interested in political rule only insofar as it allowed them to hoard bananas.

The Kremlin(gs) displaced the regime in order to redistribute wealth. Their means were drastic -- all dissenters were shoved into barrels and crates -- but the rest of the population came to be on their side, and received a reasonable stipend in exchange for military service.

The Kongs were the only animals who wanted more than they needed, and managed to reclaim their wealth by regaining power. They came to value power as much as they valued the wealth it represented.

In DKC2, the Kongs become imperialist, conquering the Kremlings' own territory. K. Rool's shift from a political leader to a military captain shows a shift in focus. This game is the darkest of the bunch, and shows a world with currency, but still in ruin. The ships have all crashed, the lava has erupted, the amusement park has gaps in its roller coaster tracks. Perhaps this shows the reality of a failed empire that had idealistic ambitions. The fun zone is taken over by briars and bees.

DKC3's K. Rool became a scientist, which seems representative of the space race, culminating in the DKC's last level, where the Kongs commandeer a rickety rocket and after that, an elegant bird. Baron K. Roolenstein's robot was made of impressive technology, but was ultimately a novelty made of what was lying around, easily dispatched by stupid, brutish force. America.

Retro's series maintains the Kongs' greed, but I don't know what the Tikis are doing. Do drums want bananas or power or anything at all? There is one scene in Tropical Freeze where a parliament of owls destroys a banana with a sledgehammer, which seems like it could be something more than a Gallagher reference, but I don't know.

I love this post. Can we have propaganda images to go along with it?

 

[Novocaine]

They were really fun when I was ten and there wasn't much else to play.

 

[TheMoon]

In hard mode you can play as Diddy or Dixie? This is in both DKCR and TF?

In Hard Mode you can play as any Kong character in DKCTF. I haven't touched DKCR in ages so I had to google an apparently in that game's equivalent, Mirror Mode, that's not possible. However, the aforementioned two-player trick still works.

 

[MrCunningham]

DKC2 and DKC3's ports are a little better, but you still have to deal with ugly, washed out colors and a bunch of other junk that doesn't need to be there.

Yeah, the colours looked terrible in the GBA ports. Rare cranked the contrast up really high so players could see the action on screen if they had a non back-lit unit. But this wasn't just an issue with the DKC games, it was really common for many GBA games to do this before the GBA:SP was released. I think Nintendo were getting complaints with the original non-backlit GBA, so they may have told developers and third parties to turn up the contrast in their games to compensate for the hard to see screen.

For example, Rock & Roll Racing on the GBA:

Compared it to the SNES version:

Yeah, the high contrast made quite a few GBA games look ugly as sin. The DKC series included.