Donkey Kong makes cover for the first time on Volume 61 (June 1994), though the only time for "classic" Donkey Kong, all the rest would be the Rareware version of Donkey Kong that will appear in Donkey Kong Country later this year and would be the de facto Donkey Kong for Nintendo as a whole up until Donkey Kong Bananza in 2025.

As the featured Game Boy game is indeed a Game Boy game, it gets pushed back toward the back half of the magazine to focus on the Super NES games, and they don't have great pickings this time around if the headliner is Hudson Soft's Beauty and the Beast with eight pages. (Keep in mind that this is 1994, the film was back in 1991). The next game, Firestriker, I've never heard of. There's four pages on a preview for Illusion of Gaia and then a few pages on ClayFighter: Tournament Edition. A few issues back I said it was a Blockbuster exclusive but now I'm not too sure. It seems to cite Wikipedia, which had a reference mentioning that the Nintendo 64 game ClayFighter: Sculptor's Cut was a Blockbuster exclusive but I'm not sure about Tournament Edition. The next few pages cover The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang which initially looked a bit like some sort of Aero the Acro-Bat rip-off (which in turn followed Bubsy and Sonic before it), but it's not a platformer, it's an action-RPG. The extended maps for it are on the reverse side of the Super Street Fighter II poster, a third iteration of Street Fighter II for Super NES. (There were many iterations of SFII over the years.) Then there's the Saturday Night Slam Masters with wrestler profiles, Fatal Fury 2 with special moves, Air Strike Patrol with mission strategies (only Missions 2, 4, 6, and 8), and Super Loopz that just describes the game.

We get into an article on Secret of Mana, where it talks about not just the game (first discussed in Volume 54) but also how RPGs (or "Epic Games") have more continuous sales and appeal than action-oriented games as time goes by. The days of Dragon Warrior pumping out several games for the NES and with disappointing sales (enough to kill off the release of Earth Bound, as Volume 56 discusses) were over, and Super NES would be the premier spot of JRPGs for a few years (with Square leading the pack)...well, until Square would pack up for Sony, and take those RPG players with it. As Secret of Mana had a quiet release but was able to put up continuous sales, Nintendo Power announces in this issue a three-part series on the game, but that will have to wait until next issue. For now, it's time for Classified Information.

Once again, it's ALL Super NES games except the last one (Jurassic Park for the Game Boy). The games this time around are Super Star Wars: Super Empire Strikes Back, Rocky Rodent, NBA Jam, Super Conflict: The Mideast, Batman Return, Street Combat , and Mega Man X. The Super Metroid comic concludes (only five parts, remember those comics in 1992? Good times)...and then we get to Counselor's Corner, where they talk about Flashback, Plok, Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II (featuring a map of the Monkey Maze), and Ultima: Runes of Virtue II (for the Game Boy). Despite (for the first time) no NES games covered at all in this issue, at least all three systems see something on Counslor's Corner.

Finally, we get to our cover feature...Donkey Kong for the Game Boy is not merely a port, although you do get to play all four stages of the original before it turns into a puzzle platformer with over a hundred levels (which is why it's called "Donkey Kong '94", even the Japanese version calls it Donkey Kong GB) and uses the Super Game Boy's capabilities for a few color screens and some sound features. I would say that it's one of the best Game Boy games at this point so far. However, there's only six pages here, hardly enough to really dig into the game...and they seem to be using a beta version; it has a squirrel boss that was removed in the final game. Fandom's page for this issue also notes that in the side columns where they talk about previous Donkey Kong games, they put Mario as the protagonist for Donkey Kong 3 instead of the forgotten Stanley the Bugman.

The other two games covered in the Game Boy section, Monster Max and Stop That Roach!, aren't nearly as memorable.There's also a few pages on the Super Game Boy peripheral. It was a neat concept that was revisited with Game Boy Player a decade later, and had some additional features just beyond new color palettes in Game Boy games and the features in Donkey Kong. There were some flaws (clock speed slightly faster, no link cable port, neither of which were discussed in the article) and while these were fixed with a Super Game Boy 2 released a few years later that was never released stateside.

Player's Poll Contest on Tommy Moe's Winter Extreme: Skiing and Snowboarding by Electro Brain is a trip to Aspen, Colorado to see Tommy Moe compete in a World Cup race (the FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, that is) with VIP seat, meeting Tommy Moe, and a bunch of skiing gear (Dynastar Coupe S9 skis, Lance XR 9 racing boots, Kerma ski poles, Salomon bindings) along with the game. Second Prize (only three winners) get a set of skis and the game, third prize is t-shirts.

The SNES Top 20 has some crazy shakeups. NBA Jam was #14 last month and zoomed to the top with 31,855 points, a factor of more than 2:1 against runner-up The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (#4 last month). Super Metroid keeps #3. Mortal Kombat is at #4 (last month #1, but #3 the month before that), Star Fox back at #5 (#16 last month, but #8 before that), Street Fighter II Turbo falling fast (#6 from #2, with #1 the previous month...the original Street Fighter II: The World Warrior long gone despite winning the 1992 Nintendo Power Awards), Secret of Mana holding #7, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball improved from #9 to #8, Final Fantasy II reappearing at #9, and Super Mario Kart from #5 to #10. Other notes...
* NHL Stanley Cup went from #8 to #15.
* Mega Man X dropped from #10 to #11.
* Super Mario All-Stars dropped from #6 to #12.
* Mario Paint is gone from the list. However, SimCity resurfaces as #16.

The Game Boy list still has The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening at #1, and has increased over 18,000 points to over 21,000, and that helps give it some ground between the new #2 Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 which jumped from #10. This breaks Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins as it goes down to #3, and it's a narrow #3 before Metroid II: Return of Samus, which is #4 (#5 last month). This is the best performance Metroid II has had in a while, it almost beat Mario...! Kirby's Dream Land is now #5 (from #3), Kirby's Pinball Land is #6 (from #4), Tetris bests its sequel at #7 (from #9), Super Mario Land (the 1989 original) drops to #8 (from #7), Mortal Kombat drops from #6 to #9, and Tetris 2 dropped from #8 to #10. Other notes...
* Donkey Kong premiers at #11.
* Faceball 2000 has been on the list for a while even if it's not a top 10 contender, appearing at #14.
* Dr. Mario is at #16, dropping two points.
* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan, the Turtles' first Game Boy adventure, appears at #17.
* Golf is at #20.

The NES list has Tetris 2 drop to #3, as Super Mario Bros. 3 regains #1 (from #3) while The Legend of Zelda retains #2. Mega Man 6 goes from #6 to #4, Kirby's Adventure holds #5, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project drops from #3 to #6, Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II moves from #11 to #7, Metroid improves from #9 to #8 (guess Super Metroid helped the original, too), Final Fantasy was bumped up to #9 from #8 (the long sales tail mentioned earlier that issue has probably almost certainly helped Final Fantasy over the last few years), and Dr. Mario making an appearance at #10, which had been off the Top 20 for a while. This breaks Tecmo Super Bowl's presence on the top 10 (that's now at #11, from #7), while Baseball Stars disappears from the list entirely again.

Now Playing largely recaps the magazine. We start out with the SNES games; Bullet-Proof Software's The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang, Capcom's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Beholder (not sure why it's not from FCI, they're still around), Kaneko's Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill (Kaneko would go under before release, leaving Socks the Cat missing for years), Raya Systems' Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon (I know the point is anti-smoking, but having the tobacco companies deploy nanobots is an extremely stupid one, even for 1990s video game standards), DTMC's Firestriker, Capcom's Saturday Night Slam Masters, Seta's A.S.P. Air Strike Patrol, Toho's Super Godzilla, Ocean's Eek! the Cat (this was just a reskinned port of an old Amiga game Ocean made called Sleepwalker, probably this was made rental only because Ocean had no faith it would sell), Takara's Fatal Fury 2, Takara's King of the Monsters 2, Interplay's ClayFighter: Tournament Edition (again, the rental exclusivity or not of this game can't be determined), Imagineer's Super Loopz, and Hudson Soft's Disney's Beauty and the Beast. The five Game Boy games covered this time around are Donkey Kong (Nintendo), Jeopardy! Sports Edition (Gametek), Monster Max (Titus...did I mention Rare developed this?), Super Battletank (Absolute), and WCW: The Main Event (FCI...ah, there they are). ClayFighter: Tournament Edition broke 4.0 in Gameplay, but Donkey Kong broke it in the other three categories, and Stop That Roach! wasn't listed.

Skipping over the actual games listed in Pak Watch (including Game Boy Tarzan, based directly on the book and not the Disney film that would appear in about five or six years from this point) to Pak Watch Update, we get to see a brief view of the industry at the time. Some highlights include...

* Valiant Comics, founded by ex-Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, was purchased by Acclaim (more accurately, Acclaim purchased Valiant's parent company Voyager Communications). This led Nintendo Power to speculate if there would be a Turok video game, of which there were no plans to do so. (Well, for now anyway). For those reading this series on Nintendo Power, Valiant Comics also did the "Nintendo Comics System" comics and had an associated contest. Who did win that, anyway?!
* They report on a Electronic Arts-Brøderbund merger (announced in early 1994, but didn't happen). By this point in time, Brøderbund (which Nintendo Power misspells as "Brodurbund") was known more for educational software than games, even if Myst (which was published under the Brøderbund brand) was still selling copies (along with Prince of Persia). This likely would've benefitted the computer side rather than the video game side. The Brøderbund that brought over Japanese titles and ports of its own originals was long gone.
* They talk about Radical Rex from Activision. "Although the idea may sound uncomfortably close to We're Back, the dino flop of '93, Rex has more going for him". I can't tell if they were referring to the movie or the Game Boy game for the movie that had that exact premise, but the answer is probably both (at least in actuality).
* They report that Williams had bought Tradewest recently. I wonder if last month's report on Project Reality WAS related to WMS Industries (Williams) buying Tradewest. Still, when you throw Rare in the mix, while Rare and Tradewest were partners during the NES years, they weren't associated during the N64 days. By the end of 1994 Rare and Nintendo will team up in a big way, but none of this for Project Reality panned out. Maybe that's why WMS Industries (or the spin-off Midway) would shut down the Corsicana offices.
* Now here's something I didn't already know: Pak Watch reported that Nintendo and Atari (Atari Games, that is) had reached a settlement Tengen would become a licensee again, with them mentioning R.B.I. Baseball and Gauntlet (the original Gauntlet) for the first time in years. However, even the officially released Tengen games remained blacklisted from the "official" NES release list in 2003 (possibly in error), while Atari Games was purchased by Time Warner soon after and started publishing under Time Warner Interactive rather than Tengen. (I thought the Time Warner thing was just coincidental).
* Discussions of the new Street Fighter movie due out later that year starring Jean-Claude Van Damme...it made money, but did the SMB movie teach you nothing?!
* Discussions of what would be released as Nickelodeon GUTS by Viacom New Media, as Viacom dipped into its selection of IPs instead of farming them out to other companies (it wouldn't last).

Next up: Volume 62 brings back Street Fighter II AGAIN with Super Street Fighter II, along with the first of three parts on the Secret of Mana special.

Written October 10, 2026

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