I find it peculiar that DKC was first released in PAL regions, and developed by a PAL region-based company... but that all of the in-game text (even in the PAL version) is based on NTSC (United States) spelling conventions. This indicates to me that it was basically 'designed for' a North American audience.
I wonder if we should take that to mean that the NTSC game is the one from which the other two regions were 'adapted'...
That seems to be the case, as it's the only region of the game which respects the language conventions of those playing it.
I'm starting to think that this is an overwhelmingly valid reason to adopt the NTSC version as DKC-Atlas' 'native' region.
The question still exists... v1.0 or v1.2? Original, or updated? Old-skool SNES, or new standard Wii VC? You guys have made some good points about this, but I still don't know what would make the most sense. In a way, DKC-Atlas has a great potential to open the eyes of newcomers who have just discovered the DKCs on Virtual Console... but my original (and much of my current) intent is to honour the
original games - the SNES versions. If it weren't for the VC releases, it would be an easy choice of v1.0, but since there are a confusing amount of SNES revisions, and there is only one VC release per region (I think this is the case, at least), it almost feels like that would be the most clear choice...
All that said, I'm leaning towards the v1.0 release, for the love of old-skool.
(...and because 1.0 has better glitches!)