When I was younger, the Wii was my main game console, and aside from the hacked hard drive of 200 games that we had and the occasional trips to the store for new releases, one of my sources for Wii games was bulk-buying pirated game discs. Most of these didn't actually work (or they only worked for a little while), but one of the few that did was Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, and so when my family found its disk within a stack of shovel ware and movie tie-in games yesterday, I immediately remembered playing through the first level and getting scared of how intimidating the first boss was when I must've been around eight or nine years old. After finding the disc and seeing that it still worked after all these years I spent the past two days playing it, and I was surprised with just how much of a blast I had with this game, and I'd honestly consider Donkey Kong Jungle Beat to be one of the best games in the franchise.

When it first came out on the GameCube, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat was designed to be played with the DK Bongos, and as much as I wish that I had that controller for the sake of both novelty and to see how the game worked around Nintendo's answer to the Dance Dance Revolution mat, I still thought that this game felt great on the Wii. Although the level design is much less tough than that of the original Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Donkey Kong is given a ton of new moves to make the levels feel more dynamic, with the shockwave move in particular making attacks feel satisfying and powerful. Along with avoiding obstacles and getting to the end of the stage, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat also puts an emphasis on chaining moves in order to collect as many bananas as possible (which are eventually used as both your health for the kingdom's boss fight and the game's method of ranking your score), and combining that with Donkey Kong's new side jumps, ground pounds, and wall jumps gives the game a unique sense of flow and rhythm that feels immensely rewarding when pulled off correctly, especially thanks to the game's immensely over-the-top presentation. Despite how much this game deviates from the rest of the series, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat still managed to feature a good amount of animal sections which served as good shifts from the core gameplay, and the same can be said for the genuinely fun water levels.

As I was playing Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, it didn't take long for me to start making connections between this game and Super Mario Galaxy, so I wasn't surprised to find out that they were both made by the same division of Nintendo. On top of using a few of the same sound effects, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat also shares some ideas that were expanded upon three years later, such as the giant flowers that fling you after spinning on them and water sections in the sky, and it was interesting to see these concepts in their infancy. My only gripes have to do with the boss fights, because while they were fun, there wasn't much variety to them, as there were only four kinds of bosses that got repeated each time (aside from the final boss). Wall jumping was also a bit finicky when it came to dodging attacks from bosses, but that's more of a nitpick than anything major. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat was an amazing and inventive platformer, and while I didn't get to experience the game with the original DK Bongos, I still had a ton of fun with it.