List of Donkey Kong Land 2 glitches

This is a list of glitches in the game Donkey Kong Land 2.

Glitches
NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, all names are conjectural.

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 and returning to the main level, the counter does not reset to 0 in the English version. Therefore, when collecting single bananas or defeating enemies, the counter will still decrease. When the counter reaches zero, the sound effect when a Kremkoin appears will still be heard, as if the Kongs are still in a bonus stage.

Exiting a level, losing a life, or resetting the game with A+B+Select+Start 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.

Save Recovery Bug
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.

The intended behavior was that the game would copy the valid backup copy into the main file, but due to an error in the subroutine that handles this, the game ends up writing to an invalid location in ROM instead of the intended location in SRAM, meaning that if the main save is corrupted, it will not be replaced with a backup copy. Therefore, if the main save 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, and other things.

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

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.

Screen Lag
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
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.