If you think you are good at video games, then try your hand at Donkey Kong Country Returns — a real test and challenge for gamers produced by Retro Studios to reboot the Donkey Kong franchise.

The people at Retro Studios have made a video game that is simultaneously delightful — a fun romp, one might say — and a tense, white-knuckled ride that is hair raising and, at times, so frustrating it makes you want to throw your controller across the room.

Retro Studios does a great job of revamping this dated gaming style with new and interesting features. The mine-cart levels, a staple of the Donkey Kong Country franchise, are back, but they are more challenging, fun and fast-paced. The game also has various rocket levels that have Donkey Kong and Diddy riding rockets through some insanely hard courses. These levels are probably the hardest in the game because they don’t have a very accurate control system, which made things more difficult.   

Because of the abnormal amount of challenges placed on players, Retro Studios added a helping mechanism. If a player dies a certain number of times on a particular level, the player can have the game finish the level itself — this can get players past difficult parts or show them how to solve a particular level.

In every level, there are four K-O-N-G letters that players can collect to unlock new, harder levels. If you get every letter in each world and complete each bonus stage (which is no small feat), you can move on to expert-only levels. If some players manage that, more goodies will await them at the end of the rainbow. Also in every level, there are various puzzle pieces, which open up image and diorama galleries. A word of warning: Anyone who plans on completing 100 percent of this game will have to devote many hours to it.

If I can issue any wisdom to people who might not know much about video games, it would be to buy Donkey Kong Country Returns or Super Mario Galaxy 2, because they are the best Wii games of 2010.

Ben Montoya is a freshman at Santa Fe High School. He can be reached at booga274@gmail.com.