Why the f*ck do poeple think Donkey Kong Country is some graphical marvel? It looks like SHIT, the only thing it does is put a ton of colors on screen at once, that's IT. There isn't anything technically impressive about it; there are barely any sprites on screen at once, the bosses are small, the art is HORRIBLE, and it plays like shit. Yoshi's Island looks a billion times better and has about the best graphics the SNES can offer thanks to the FX chip. The SNES could do some nice graphics here and there, but DKC has aged almost as badly as shit like X-Perts.
I don't know if the layers of snow count as sprites or not, but there seemed to be a lot going on during those levels. Plus, aren't there times when the screen is full of bananas? I haven't really played it since it came out, so my memory of the overall game is a little blurry.
I don't think it's total garbage(except for the art & character design) or anything. It just reminds me of those generic Genesis platformers.
Speaking of Genesis, I tried Comix Zone for the first time on the Genesis Coll. PS2 the other day. I was surprised to find the exactly same effect as DKC at the title screen with a similar looking layout.
I still think DKC looks nice these days, though I admit the graphic style is terribly outdated. I think it's kind of stupid for people to say the graphics suck because the backgrounds are static though because tons of other platformers have static backgrounds. At least DKC made pretty static backgrounds! 
A game doesn't have to be "technically impressive" to have nice graphics. Hell, there are a lot of games that aren't as technically impressive as others but have much better graphics in my opinion which to me gives it overall better presentation. An example of this to me is Lightening Force. People rave about this game's graphics because of it's technical features, like lots of parallax scrolling layers, but in my opinion the layers look ass ugly. Take for example the level with all the cloud layers. The layers don't shape out the clouds, instead they are just flat, boxy clouds which makes it look like fat, grey lines going across the screen rather than actual clouds. Not to mention I found the colors to be dirty and the artwork to be mediocre at best. So in a case like this, I would say a game like (and I know this is a weird example to use) Cadash for TG16 has better graphics because the art is nicer.
Maybe I'm also remembering the DKC sequals, but I thought that some stages actually had a bunch of layers of bg's with the occasiional effect thrown in.
But as I've said before, scrolling bg's/parallax/whatever doesn't make good graphics, it only complements good graphics when it's needed and can make games look worse when it's used just for the sake of having it.
The PC Engine is the best example of this. Too many developers were too lazy to program in scrolling bg's in many of the better looking PCE games, but most people think that they look awesome.
Just the same, large or lots of sprites don't equal nice graphics either. Too many 16-bit games were busted from using retard sized character sprites.
