Official Score = 2 Devils[/caption]When I was a kid there was a couple of small, 'mini-mart' style stores over by where a friend of mine used to live, and in these stores were a couple of coin-op arcade games... Also there was an arcade close by as well, so one of the things that we used to like to do is to grab as much money from our mom's that we could and then circulate between the stores and play at the arcades... And you know what? If you haven't tried an arcade game, then you don't know what you are missing!
As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to say that a fair amount of video games that I would eventually play on a home console system in the late 1980s through the mid 1990s, I started off playing on an arcade system system some where! Including, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., and heck even, Street Fighter 2!
And another one is, Donkey Kong (1981)!
Now Donkey Kong was created by Shigeru Miyamoto who was tasked by Nintendo to convert an older game called, 'Radar Scope' which had done poorly, but Nintendo was interested in converting it with the intention of creating a game that Americans would really enjoy... And you know what? It ended up being one of the more popular Nintendo Arcade games of it's time!
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Jumpman (Mario) as he is trying to rescue his girl friend, 'The Lady' (Pauline) from Donkey Kong![/caption]The game itself is one of the earliest known video games to have a story and tells of how Donkey Kong (A large Gorilla) has kidnapped Jumpman's (A character that would later be re-named, 'Mario' and would become the lead character in one of Nintendo's most famous video game series,) girlfriend, 'The Lady' (later known as, 'Pauline'.) And since you play as Jumpman you have to go from level to level jumping over and avoiding stuff that is being rained down on you from Donkey Kong!
I have played this game on both the Arcade game setup as well as on the NES, and in all truth, on both Video Game setups, the game play was extremely easy, the music was so-so, but in all truth, considering the age of the game, the graphics was actually quite good!
This game would later be put on such gaming consoles as, the Game & Watch multiscreen, the Amiga 500, Apple II, Atari 7800, Intellivision, Commodore 64, Commodore VIC-20, Famicom Disk System, IBM PC booter, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Atari 8-bit family and Mini-Arcade versions, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). the GameCube and as an item for purchase on the Wii's Virtual Console. The original arcade version of the game appears in the Nintendo 64 game Donkey Kong 64. Nintendo released the NES version on the e-Reader and for the Game Boy Advance Classic NES series in 2002 and 2004,
Also in 1994, a remake of the original game was released for the Game Boy, adding 96 new levels.
The truth is, is that this game was a lot of fun at the arcade, you know when you were a kid and you were waiting for your Pizza to arrive and your mom gave you a couple of dollars, to play some games...Well playing this game in that type of set up in all truth was an awful lot of fun! But I can't say for all systems, but in all truth, something was definitely lost in translation between the arcade game and the version on the NES!
http://youtu.be/EhFV5-qbbIw
