Well, Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat is the GOAT so the list is flawed, but I am excited to pick up Tropical Freeze. Where was all this universal praise upon its original release?

As long as Donkey Kong 94 is represented -- i am good.

But yeah Jungle Beat in my opinion is also better than any of the Rare's or Retro's games.

This should be an easy list and....

... What in the he... Nope. Abandon thread.

https://i.imgur.com/zGHQb4O.gif

I love seeing Donkey Kong GB as #2. One of the absolute best GB games.

15. Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600

https://i.imgur.com/WnFw93Z.jpg

Donkey Kong Land on GameBoy was the first I played outside of a version of the original, and one of the first Nintendo games I played in general. It was really difficult once you got to world 3, but I remember it kinda fondly nonetheless. Didn't realise it was thought of so poorly, but on reflection it makes sense to me.

Gonna start Tropical Freeze soon, I got the budget release of that for Wii U in a 2-for-1 deal with Splatoon 1 and never really gave it much time. Soundtrack was amazing in the 2 levels I played though!

Tropical Freeze gets lots of praise but I really don't like it.  It's a frustrating game designed for platforming experts.  That's fine if you want that but I shouldn't be able to breeze through the first several worlds of the SNES DKC games and then struggle to beat the first world in Tropical Freeze.  Despite using the Donkey Kong Country name it feels like it is targeting a different audience.  Or it's a sub-set of the SNES series' audience - the die-hards demanding a challenge.  In that sense it reminds me of homebrew hacks of classic games with cranked up difficultly.

DKC 2 is my favourite though I tend to blob the SNES trilogy together as I can't imagine owning one without the others.  If you like one of them you'll like all three.

The top 3 is pretty good.  All 3 represent different parts of the Donkey Kong series and can easily be considered the best of games of their kind.  I do think the first Donkey Kong Country should be way down on the list though.  I mean it's a decent game and all but it's pretty basic compared to what came after.  It's easily put Returns above it.  I know a lot of people love to say Tropical Freeze is a huge improvement over it but I find Returns pretty close in quality.  Tropical Freeze is a more consistent game, but I find the highs of Returns are easily as good if not better then the highs of Tropical Freeze.


Plus like others have said, Jungle Beat also deserves a lot more love.  The original on the Gamecube was just amazing and easily the best 2D platformer in a decade when it was released back in 2004, it was that good.  So many people at the time were either butthurt it used the Bongo controller or just played it from beginning to end without realizing it was designed around being point based and never bothered getting Gold or Platinum medals in stages.  When going for at least Gold the amazing design shines through and you'll see just the pure attention to detail Tokyo EAD put into every level. 

It's sad 2D gaming had been relegated to an inferior form of gaming by the early 2000's since Jungle Beat easily deserves much of the praise Galaxy would eventually receive years later.  This is why I wasn't surprised at all by how good Galaxy 1 ended up being when it was released in 2007 because Jungle Beat already showed me 3 years early that the team at Toyko EAD were masters of their craft.

Poor Donkey Kong 64. I actually liked that game...

Same. To me, that was Rare pushing that type of 3D platformer to its limits. I get that it might not be for some people and it has some flaws but, still, that was an amazing pinnacle in 3D world construction and platform variety at the time that I can keep revisiting to this day.