List of Donkey Kong Land 2 glitches

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This is a list of glitches in Donkey Kong Land 2. Unless otherwise noted, all names are conjectural.

All versions

Diddy icons on Crocodile Isle overworld map

On the Crocodile Isle overworld map, when a boss is defeated for a particular world, a Kong icon appears on its respective map. However, regardless of which Kong defeats the boss, the icon will always be Diddy. This occurs because when a boss is beaten, the game does not check which Kong beats it before placing the icon on the Crocodile Isle overworld map. Through hacking, it is possible to change any of the icons to Dixie ones by editing the flags in a hex editor.

When visiting any of the worlds (e.g. Gangplank Galleon) themselves, the boss stage will have the correct icon, like other stages, because the game does check which Kong beat a particular boss before placing the icon on the screen. For example, if Krow's Nest is beaten with Dixie, a Dixie icon will be placed on Krow's Nest when viewed from within Gangplank Galleon, but a Diddy icon will be placed on Gangplank Galleon when viewed from Crocodile Isle.

Klinger glitch

If Diddy or Dixie moves from one vertical rope to another and happens to hit a Klinger while changing ropes, the Klinger will be defeated.

Redhot Ride glitch

In the level Redhot Ride, there is a section before the G with several Flitters and followed by a hot-air balloon. However, sometimes the third Flitter does not spawn, causing the Kongs to narrowly miss the hot-air balloon and fall to their death. It is unknown how to reproduce this consistently and is believed to occur in all versions of the game.

Save recovery oversight

To safeguard against corrupted save data, Donkey Kong Land 2 keeps three copies of every save file. To detect save corruption, a 16-bit checksum is stored at the beginning of each copy, which is the sum of all other bytes in the save data. If the checksum is not valid, the game correctly detects this and attempts to use a backup copy with a valid checksum, if there is one. While there is no known software issue that can corrupt save data, this can be an issue for hardware reasons (for example, inserting the cartridge while the Game Boy is powered on, or a dying battery).

The intended behavior was that the game would copy the valid backup copy into the main file. However, the subroutine that is supposed to handle this copying contains a stack-based error, causing the subroutine's return address to be popped off the stack instead of the intended destination address for the main save copy. The result is that the game ends up writing to an invalid location in ROM instead of the intended location in SRAM (which ends up doing nothing), meaning that if the main save is corrupted, it will not be replaced with a backup copy. Depending on what data is corrupted, it is possible to view graphical glitches in the save screen (if the save has invalid values for DK Coins, Kremkoins, or total time played), enter invalid worlds and levels, among other oddities. In this game only, it is even possible to start levels with Animal fFiends or even glitched characters.

If all three copies (including the main and two backup copies) of a save file have an invalid checksum, the game correctly handles this situation by erasing all of the copies.

This oversight later appeared in Donkey Kong Land III, and behaves the same way.

Screen lag glitch

When falling down for a long period of time, Diddy or Dixie will fall faster than the screen can keep up with. Eventually, if they disappear off of the bottom of the screen, the game will mistakenly think they fell down a pit and will cost a life. The screen will have an even harder time keeping up if there are numerous sprites on the screen that cause lag, which is especially noticeable in levels like Parrot Chute Panic and Black Ice Battle.

This glitch is actually present in some form in every Donkey Kong Country (for SNES) and every Donkey Kong Land game, but is most common in this game.

A variation of this glitch occurs in Bramble Blast. After the first bonus stage, there are three Blast Barrels that fire once the player press A. If the player presses A rapidly enough, Diddy or Dixie will be shot out so fast that a fourth Blast Barrel right after the first three will not show up until they are already past it, causing them to miss it and get hit by the brambles instead.

Sinking barrel glitch

In Pirate Panic, if Diddy or Dixie takes a barrel and then drops it (by pressing Down before letting go of B) on a barrel platform, the barrel will fall off the platform to the ground below.

English version only

Bonus counter glitch

In the "Destroy Them All!" and "Collect The Stars!" Bonus Areas, the game uses a counter to keep track of the remaining enemies (or stars) in the stage. However, when losing to a bonus stage with enemies or stars remaining and returning to the main level, the counter does not reset to 0 in the English version. Therefore, when collecting bananas (either single ones or banana bunches) or defeating enemies, the counter will still decrease. When the counter reaches zero, the chime when a Kremkoin appears will still be heard, as if the Kongs are still in a bonus stage.

In this game only, exiting a level, losing a life, or resetting the game with +++ will freeze the counter until a bonus stage is entered again, so the glitch only occurs before doing any of these things.

In the Japanese version, this glitch no longer occurs, since the counter resets to 0 whenever a main level is entered. Despite this bug fix, this change was not kept in any version of Donkey Kong Land III, so the glitch reappears in that game, with some minor differences.

DK Coin graphical glitch

This glitch only occurs in the English version of the game. On the file select screen, when holding or and any other button (excluding the D-Pad) to enter a cheat code, the top-left corner of one of the frames for the DK Coin graphic will be corrupted, depending on what button(s) are pressed. Up to ten presses can affect the DK Coin graphic, corrupting an 8x6 pixel region.

This occurs because when the graphics are loaded for the file select screen, the decompressed tiles for all frames are copied into a buffer, and then copied into VRAM. To store the last ten presses for the cheat codes, a 10-byte circular buffer is also used, and happens to share the same buffer as the DK coin graphics. Therefore, when cheat codes are entered, up to eleven bytes of the tile buffer can be overwritten (one for the number of button presses, and ten for the aforementioned circular buffer).

This glitch does not occur in the Japanese version of the game because cheat codes are unused in that version, and therefore cannot be entered at all.

Parrot Chute Panic glitch

In Parrot Chute Panic, after the Star Barrel, eventually there is a section with multiple Zingers and a DK Barrel. If too many Zingers appear on the screen, the DK Barrel does not spawn. One way to work around this is by descending slowly while moving right so that there are not too many Zingers appearing at once. In the Japanese version, two Zingers by the DK Barrel were removed, fixing this issue.