We’ve got a lot of really good comparison and technical videos coming in the near future! Let us know what games, consoles, or comparisons you’d like to see us cover.

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Listening to the DK underwater theme is like being caressed by angels

I love DKC so much. The amount of memories that came flooding back from this one was incredible. Hope you all enjoy!

its amazing how many gba titles were passed over by people because they thought they were mere inferior ports but this video clearly shows that they made a concerted effort to deliver the best possible experience on the handheld.

Gameboy Advanced (GBA) kept me entertained and engaged with some home console games when travelling or being away from home, most notably Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros 3. Even with the minor or most noticeable differences between the respective consoles and GBA, you can't help but appreciate the work and efforts from the companies who make it possible. Differences aside, simpler times back then have earned a great deal of respect from me, and this is a great example of that.

It's much brighter to look good on  GBA in a normal lit room or playing outside.

Really nice video. The only thing I think is missing: while speaking about soundtrack changes, it would have been interesting to quickly mention the changes in treetop rock music, which go beyond changing the instruments as it gets added a new section (I love both versions, but if I have to choose, I prefer GBA one)

I’ve always loved how minimalistic and realistic the overall aesthetic of the original game is, so some of the post-SNES Rare style more cartoony visual effects and additional SFXs in the GBA port kind of clash that philosophy and I’m not a big fan of it, to be honest.

DKC on SNES hands down! ⭐️ ⭐️  ⭐️

Aquatic Ambiance on the SNES: 😌
Aquatic Ambiance on the GBA: 😫

I honestly love both versions equally because they each have something unique to bring to the table.

This is the first channel I've actually subscribed to in probably over a year, I live for this kind of stuff.

Finally,

- NO obvious AI scripts

- No fiverr voiceover

- Actual editing to match what you say in said script and not somehow putting Vectorman in this video

Keep doing these videos :face-blue-smiling:

Also the new cutscenes kinda suck ngl for the GBA version

the only good thing of the GBA version when you save the game you keep all your life when you turn it off and on but the SNES version when you save the game turn it off and on you don't keep all your life

Wow GBA version only came out 9 years after the original?! That tripped me out to hear haha. The SNES version was the first game I ever played and still has a special place in my heart. The GBA version was great too even though the music stepped down (It was still great) and washed out colors. I loved the extra add ons and I can say I completed it fully!!

I personally don’t believe that the source code was created from scratch.
Why? Because there are many recompilors out there wich could translate 65x code into arm code and all unsupported features from each cpu type will be flagged so that the user could manually debug and/or change the code if nessecary to make it all run stable with no crashes or bugs to worry about it anymore.
Then they could remove or add some new stuff to it like in this case.
About it’s graphics, they could decide to zoom in or down scale the graphics or use a combination of both to account for the gba’s lower resolution.
They could also brighten up or dimmer down the colors to account for the brighter or darker screen.
Now for what i,ve heard, they did still had those floppies with those map screens stored on them but they just couldn’t find a reader for that weird floppy disk format so they had to redo all world map screens and also those screens from cranky and funky kong has been changed as well.
But the levels ithemselfes are not recreated altrough some background layers has been added like in the mine car stages and what not but that’s it.
For the music department, it could be that they used the data from the snes game and combined them with new instruments with some slight changes here and there using midi.
Altrough many sound effects from the original were reused along with many new ones.
For the button layout, all they had to do was remap those buttons for the gba port.
So all in all with modern toolkits being availible since the mid to late 90’s, i do believe that those games are semi automatically ported to the gba.


Yea in the 80’s game developers didn’t had such luxury so in most cases games had to be made from scratch or with some luck they could use a similar game engine from a different game for that target hardware and moddify that to get around it.
And if they were really lucky they could just do a near 1 to 1 port from an system to another one like from the msx to the colecovision or to the sega sg1000  or vice versa without having to change anyghing other then some memory adresses but that’s it.
Same with porting atari 400 games to the atari 5200 or vice versa, nothing had to be changed other then changing those memory adresses but that’s it.

Thing is why would you eva want to redo stuff all they way from scratch if there are sooo many convertor tools availible these days?
Becausse doing it the semi automatic way will save you alooot of time and money as a developers and for the consumer to not having to pay that much for that ported game at the end😀

Los diseños de nintendo gba eran demasiado buenos

Never realised it had these changes, think the snes one seems better still, but i will try the gab sometime

Excellent video! I'm quite thankful for the GBA versions of these games (DK/Mario) as I did not have a SNES growing up.
It's fascinating to see the differences!

I definitely feel like the snes version was better in most regards. It's just all together prettier and more cohesive.

I'll give them the changes to the later boss battles are largely an improvement.

But bad minigames and the redone world maps are mostly a step down.

Maybe I'm just being old and cranky here though.(pun definitely intended)

Genuinely curious, is there anyone here who considers the GBA version the better experience?