Donkey Kong Country is getting to be the Game That Will Not Go Away. Way, way back in 1994, when it was first released for the Super Nintendo, it dropped jaws the world over and had players struggling for words. How had those crafty developers made a game look so good on such a piddling home game machine? How how how?

In retrospect all the fuss was over the top. DKC was an ordinary 2D platform game like many dozens of games before it. It told of a big dumb ape and his naughty little monkey pal, and of their quest to reclaim their prized bananas, which had been stolen by an even naughtier cabal of crocodiles. Standard Nintendo ludicrousness.

Donkey Kong (the ape) and Diddy Kong (the naughty little monkey) got their bananas back the traditional way: by walking to the right while the background scrolled past to the left, and by jumping up and bopping on the head any crocodiles they encountered. They encountered many, many crocodiles, so they did a great deal of jumping and bopping-on-the-head. Still standard Nintendo ludicrousness. So why all the flap and fuss and dropping of jaws? Simple: in 1994, home video game systems did not do 3D graphics. Not at all. They showed blippy pictures and made blippy noises. At their most ambitious they used an unseemly number of colours on the screen at the same time.

Donkey Kong Country looked like 3D. It was not true 3D, because Donkey and Diddy were still visible only from the side, and they still marched to the right and the backgrounds still slid by to the left. The ape and the monkey were simple flat 2D images, and they were animated by substituting one 2D still (a "sprite") for another at high speed. But as they moved, they looked like something out of a high-end animator's workstation. Which, as it turned out, was exactly what they were. The game's developers began by rendering 3D models of all the characters on high-end animation hardware, and then they took snapshots of all the poses they needed. Presto! They had sprites that looked better than anything ever seen on a home machine. And gamers had their jaws in their laps. And Nintendo had money coming out the wazoo.

The reign of the game and its sequels atop the sales charts marked the last time a Nintendo console was the #1 machine. In the time since, Sony's PlayStation has had a jolly good run of it, and Nintendo has leaned harder and harder on its Game Boy systems for cashflow and self-esteem. In 2000, this meant the re-release of Donkey Kong Country for the Game Boy Color, as part of an ambitious project to bring the hits of the Super Nintendo to a new generation. And today, it means the re-re-release of the same title for the Game Boy Advance, as part of another ambitious project to bring the hits of the Super Nintendo to a new generation. See? The Game That Will Not Go Away.

Donkey Kong Country is still loads of fun. When you are not walking to the right and bopping crocodiles (who are called "Kremlings") on the head, you get to swim through underground tunnels and ride coal carts through abandoned mine shafts. You find hidden corridors to explore, many of which are full of stolen bananas. You swing from vines. You bounce on discarded tires. You get shot out of a cannon into another cannon into another cannon. It is every bit the game it was nine years ago, except that instead of amazing, it now looks like a standard-issue platformer. That is OK. The cannon bits are really quick and will make you dizzy.