I gotta stop getting influenced by the internet; that's my fault. Let's start there. After hearing Giant Bomb folks go coo-coo for Donkey Kong on Nintendo Game Boy, I took the plunge and got the Nintendo Switch Online trial. The trial is bad. Maybe, however, the rumors about the little arcade game were true. The short answer to that is: Nope. Fell for it again, stupid! You dummy!
For a reference point, Donkey Kong on Game Boy is the precursor to those Mario vs. Donkey Kong games that came out to no fanfare on Nintendo DS. I think there's a Nintendo Switch sequel that's out, maybe? I don't know. That's how much of a non-factor these titles are. After a brief arcade switcheroo, every other stage is a little puzzle room, where the goal is to get a key to a door and escape, jumping obstacles and avoiding enemies on the way. Some places have references to other iterations in the franchise, like Donkey Kong Jr. ropes. You'll get a bunch of cute cutscenes every now and then, which symbolize the chase between the two rivals. Unsurprisingly, the atmosphere is kept pretty light-hearted.
Well, that's where the good vibes stop. The platform puzzle game has that classic portable jank that's present in most early generation transitions. Limited pixels make it hard to always get a sense of what picture the space paints. The screen is too compressed to convey enough information about your perilous surroundings. Controls are both stiff and somehow still extremely slippery. Essentially, the tiny specs of the machine hit every pitfall for the genre that Donkey Kong is. It's like playing any Sega Game Gear game. Who says Nintendon't?
Sometimes, rooms are one screen, but other times you'll have to scroll to get around. You won't know until you get there, although you do get a quick fly-through at the start. What awaits you on the part of the screen that you can't see? Probably death, statistically. As an admittance of failure, the puzzle game hands out extra lives like candy. Nintendo knows they’ve made a stinker here; they just got to see you through it. In a playthrough, you'll get over 100 extra tries, before the giant selection of stages is over. That's how rough of a journey it is. At least, as one of the only positives, there is a lot of video game here. Areas have certain themes, but they'll explore a wide array of little systems within. If you can bear it, you'll probably hit a few puzzles that are clever, in between the torture of slipping off a platform endlessly or clipping the singular pixel of an enemy. Whoops, sorry. Try again! Ha ha!
The big sell is that Donkey Kong on Game Boy gets a bunch of additional moves. New Mario tech just dropped! You can now backflip or do a handstand and, considering how flukey the controls are, none of it is particularly helpful. Since Mario slips off most terrain, you'll naturally push back, which is also the motion of doing a backflip, in the limited space you have. Surprise; you're dead again. Ha ha! Still, if you were an idiot and have never played a video game before, this enticing offer would sound great, on paper. More is better. The moveset does, in all honesty, open up a lot of possibilities on how to traverse an area. There is merit to be found, if you dig deep. Level design, when unimpeded by aforementioned issues, does have a pretty clear signaling of what Nintendo would like you to do. If there's one thing the company knows how to build, it's a level that you can play with your eyes. However, you can just cut any corners that you'd like and high jump over entire sections, even if that kind of confidence will likely end in failure.
This enhanced movement would later get pushed into the similarly hyped up Super Mario 64, an equally terrible video game, but now in an extra, third dimension. You might remember that game. In fact, I don't think I have actually ever enjoyed Mario’s acrobatics, so this tech really started quite the rotten trend. I'm sure there's one iteration where the plumber doing tricks on it doesn't suck, even if I can't recall it. My point is that the extreme limitations of the Game Boy was a terrible place to choose as a first exploration of complex agency. Even if implemented perfectly, this kind of freedom had little room to breathe. A good, consistent jump could've done wonders here. Instead, you're just flailing around wildly, possibly scrolling blindly to a part of the screen that leads to instant death. And now do it about one hundred times more, with increasingly tougher challenges. If I had chosen to do this on an actual Game Boy, I don't think that the gadget would've survived.
I played the whole thing, although I probably shouldn't have. I gritted my teeth and forced myself past every cheap death, even the ones in the fuck-ass wind stages that amplify the slippery nature just a little more, because fuck you. Ha ha! Periodically, Donkey Kong will throw a boss encounter at you, to very differing results. Some fights are just as annoying as the rest of the game, while others are infuriating nonsense. The finale is a huge gauntlet that is not reasonable for a person to complete without a rewind function. I mean, I'm sure it can be done, but I don't think that your sanity is worth plowing through that large an amount of randomness. It could be minutes of perfect inputs, before you get a chance to hit Donkey Kong’s enlarged sprite, which does admittedly look pretty imposing. Good luck doing something like that without ever slipping once. If and when you do make an error, you get to do that trial all over again. And that's after suffering through dozens of stages. What a joy. If it were me, Pauline would've stayed there. I got a side piece called Peach anyway. She baked me a cake and everything. Your reward for beating it all is a mushroom? Get out of here!
A while ago, I eagerly took advantage of the Netflix games library, to go through all of The Rise of the Golden Idol, after much ado. It's decent, but overblown. After years of trying and failing, I buckled down and finished Mega Man 2, as my first Mega Man ever. It's just an okay platformer, propped up by extremely good music. Currently, I'm playing through all of Tears of the Kingdom; a game that sucks so bad that I've never been this shaken in my faith in games press. Anyone who considered this turd a Game of the Year cannot have sane takes worth listening to. That is a video game belief akin to being a Trump supporter, to me. Maybe they secretly are.
I'm slowly starting to realize that people are very bad at seeing video games for what they are, past their goggles of brand loyalty. Hell, the game is colloquially called Donkey Kong ‘94, because the actual title is just Donkey Kong. Nintendo didn't even bother differentiating it; that's how little thought they spent on clearing production. Fans did that kind of work for them. The publisher just had to get this shit out the door, as they knew that people would gobble up their slop every time, no matter what. And they did – and do. Anyway, the Nintendo Switch 2 is almost five hundred bucks now, with a paid feature demo. And people call it a fair price. How is that fealty treating you?
You could play this puzzle game, I guess. I wouldn't.