Donkey Kong |
cross-platform |
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Review by Joe Santulli |
Nintendo/Atari |
Platform |
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Graphics: 7 |
Sound: 6 |
Gameplay: 9 |
Overall: 9 |
There are many ways to review a classic like this, I’ve chosen to skip past the game’s history and present and focus instead on the many home variations of Donkey Kong, which is in some strange way a brother to the game I saw first, Crazy Kong. You all know the story by now: A plumber named Mario is the hero. Kong is at the top of the screen keeping Mario’s girl hostage. Four screens appearing in various order depending on the machine you were playing, but always starting with the familiar girder and barrels scene. Mario navigates to the top avoiding barrels, fireballs, and hot plates of god-knows-what to reach the girl. When he does, Kong grabs the girl and heads up another level. It’s a lot like life. The big hairy guys just know how to get the job done.
In the arcade version, Kong starts six girders high on the left. On the ColecoVision and Intellivision versions he starts five high and on the right. Many versions also attempted to render the playfield vertically, which makes the characters appear "fat" (not phat). Take a look at Mario on the C-64… man, that guy is HUGE! The hammers you use to knock out fireballs are almost always in the wrong places in the home versions as well, with only the C-64 and TI-99/4A getting it right consistently. Then there’s the issue of completeness, which was rarely met on the cartridge versions of the game. The hotplate-and-conveyors-screen is missing from most of them, even the "high-end" consoles. The VIC-20 cartridge suprisingly managed to include it even though the NES version did not. It also turned up on the Coleco ADAM "super" version of the game (which, suspiciously enough, can be dumped to a ColecoVision chip).
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