![]() This level has the most dependence on momentum jumping because you must do it properly to clear the barrels and also features the drops that look safe but aren’t, and since this is the first level, it will be the one you play the most inevitably. To impede you on your way up, Donkey Kong throws down barrels, these either rolling the length of the girders or dropping down the ladders along the way, the player needing to time their movements so they can jump over the barrels properly or avoid the possibility of a barrel rolling down a ladder they’re scaling. At the bottom is a fire barrel that will spit out a flame meant to encourage players to move, Jumpman needing to climb ladders to get between the different levels of slanted girders to reach DK and Lady at the top. The first stage, 25m, is iconic despite its simplicity. The small offering of stages makes it easy to address what works and what doesn’t in them. When Jumpman reaches the top of the stage, Donkey Kong will grab Lady and carry her higher, different hazards appearing in stages with different layouts until Jumpman finally finds him at the top, tearing out the rivets in the girders to send the gorilla falling down and allowing Lady and Jumpman to reunite… until the game loops the levels in a slightly harder version where Donkey Kong gets new tricks like throwing barrels diagonally. The giant gorilla Donkey Kong has grabbed her and is scaling the building site, stomping on some girders to misalign them and hurling barrels down at the man trying to stop the kidnapping. Jumpman needs to scale the construction site to rescue Lady, his girlfriend who would later get renamed Pauline as the characters got more attention in a game that some people cite as the first video game story line to be told on screen. Momentum based jumps and fall damage end up coloring the quality of the rest of the experience. Dropping from a great height and dying is a reasonable punishment, but in areas with moving elevator platforms, the window for success can be oddly tight, and sometimes a small drop to a previous platform can end up killing you. This makes traversing certain areas with plenty of variability in height potentially dangerous for the wrong reason. Jumpman’s leap is relatively safe on horizontal ground, but if he drops pretty much any distance greater than his own height, he will die. There is, however, a lot of verticality to the levels in Donkey Kong, the player scaling a construction site split into four unique segments based on how many meters high that portion of the site is. There is no adjusting it after you press the jump button, but the game doesn’t expect a huge degree of precision in the jumps so it’s not as bothersome as some later platformers that retain this style. First, it is momentum based, meaning if you jump in place you only go straight up and then down, and if you jump while running, your movement follows a rigid arc. Despite later defining the way platformers should naturally play in Super Mario Bros., here the man named Jumpman has a few issues with his jump. Mario makes his first turn as a playable character in this title, then known as Jumpman since he would only get the more normal human name later as a reference to a warehouse landlord Nintendo of America rented from. All because this particular game caught fire the way it did back in 1981… so you think it would play a bit better than it does.Ĭreated back when the platformer genre was so young it didn’t have a proper name yet, Donkey Kong contains a few of the annoying issues we would now condemn in a game that isn’t so monumentally important to the industry. ![]() video game industry later with the NES, the company who dominated handheld gaming almost exclusively for years, and would produce many more of gaming’s best franchises and titles. On top of this, it propelled Nintendo from just another game developer to super stardom, allowing them to be the kind of company that could revive the dying U.S. Not only did it introduce the world to the most famous video game character of all time in the form of Mario, it was also the start of both his and Donkey Kong’s many video game adventures, both series producing many excellent and genre defining titles later down the line. If you asked me what might be the most important video game of all time, I think my answer would be Donkey Kong.
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