The gameplay consists of four levels that are named based on how high up you are. Each level contains different hazards, such as barrels, pitfalls, fireballs, and springs that try to fall on you. Here's a picture of the first stage of the four:
This level is easy enough. However, that blue barrel falls directly into the fire and creates a fireball. Now, the fireball is there to make sure that you don't dawdle too long on any one girder. It can climb up ladders, so don't think you're safe just because you're a girder above it.
After beating the four levels, you start over at the first, but with a few changes. On your second run, the brown barrels can sometimes fall directly down to the next girder without having to roll all the way down. This alone killed me more times than you'd think.
One hazard is that they went for the realistic interpretation of humans in that they're slightly more vulnerable to falling than Humpty Dumpty filled with nitroglycerine. Seriously, if Jump-Man falls even a little bit, he dies.
The graphics and sound seem laughable today, but back in the 80s, this was state of the art. The music gets repetitive, though.
Donkey Kong was one of the few arcade games that translates well to a home game controller. Most arcade games that don't translate well use some sort of dial or trackball for controls, but the arcade Donkey Kong used a joystick and a button, and actually plays better on a D-pad than a joystick in my opinion.
If you asked me to give the game a rating, I'd ask you to consider the silliness of what you just said, but if pressed, I would have to give it a 9 out of 10. It's not my favorite game, but it's definitely famous and thoroughly deserving of that fame.
In some ways, I consider old games like Donkey Kong superior to most modern games because they were made so that you would have lots of fun playing them for hours on end, and, in an arcade, dump about $20 worth of quarters into them, and still come back the next day to play some more. The things I value in a game mainly have to do with how much fun the game is, and whether I got my money's worth out of it(also known as replay value).
You can get the NES Donkey Kong for about $5.00 U.S. on the Wii Shop Channel. If you can't do that, I'd suggest investing in an NES and buying the game on Amazon. It's probably less expensive and quicker to get a Wii and buy the game over the Shop Channel though.
Our next quarter will take us to 1987, where we will review my absolute favorite NES game of all time, Mega Man II.
