It's not that I don't enjoy playing games that look like rotting seaweed...
There are few games as visually hideous as Donkey Kong Land. By some miracle, the individual sprites bear a close resemblance to their Super Nintendo counterparts. But this ceases to matter once the game enters one of its seizure fits. Yup, the entire game gets sick periodically when there are too many sprites on screen. Not just Donkey Kong and the enemies either, I mean the BANANAS (which are as numerous as coins in Mario games) will overload the game's memory. That's when the real fun begins.
It's really kind of interesting to watch Donkey Kong's world literally begin to melt like a box of green and yellow crayolas. All of this because there's too much **** on screen at once. Donkey Kong's sprite starts expanding, like literally growing new pixels that float around his body like a swarm of flies. Same goes for the enemy sprites, it can be headache inducing.
So we've got these swarms of mini pixels stringing themselves together like wires around every sprite's head. The whole universe is coming apart at the seams: I can't see **** because the clusters of glitched pixels are melding into one another! Everything is merging like some quantum slingshot effect that's causing the game to implode on itself.
Your only salvation is to reach the end the level. Doing so will stop the graphics from rendering the current stage and essentially reboot the system. At this point, though, everything on screen is part of the mutated horror of Donkey Kong Land. Poor DK is a conglomerate of beaver teeth, monkey fur, and those weird flying pig things.
Let's say you complete the level. Feeling particularly masochistic, you play the next level. Everything goes off without a hitch. No universal implosion or rogue pixels. The game operates more or less how it was probably intended to. You discover that the game is so **** average that you throw it in your closet somewhere never to be played again.
A 5/10 seems appropriate since half of the time the game plays average and the other half is like watching a digital apocalypse on a microcosm scale. I think it's also worth noting that you can't save in this crappy game unless you collect every KONG letter in a stage. Apparently there was no memory left to create regular save points, a password system, or anything more practical. Seeing as how the game pukes pixels left and right as it is, I wonder if the stupid saving system was the only way to ensure this trash passed its testing phases.
The only other possible question would be the sound. Rule 102 of video game design is that nothing is ever as good if it's ported to an inferior system.