They told me that Super Game Boy augmentation was essential, but it turned out that this reimagined arcade classic's amazingly expansive nature was, on its own, the only enhancement I'd ever need.
For most of my youth, I was what you'd call a "console guy." As far as I was concerned, video games were best enjoyed when they were being played on a television screen in the maximum resolution and rendered in as many colors as possible.
"Consoles are where video games truly belong," I thought.
I was also greatly intrigued by the Super Game Boy's customization features and particularly its "Color Palette" option, which allowed you to replace games' standard monochrome color-schemes with your own personally created color-schemes (using up to four colors). The magazine illustrated how, exactly, you could manipulate games' color palettes, and it did so by highlighting changes made to classic Game Boy games like Super Mario 2: 6 Golden Coins, Tetris and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.
When I got home, I tossed Donkey Kong aside and put all of my focus on what really mattered to me: my old Game Boy favorites. I immediately got to work testing them out on the Super Game Boy. And then I spent the next few days joyously replaying them in glorious TV-display form and having fun trying to match their color-schemes to their NES counterparts'.
The game, itself, was exactly what I was expecting it to be: a visually limited, exceptionally cramped version of the arcade classic. And it was, in some very obvious ways, even more stripped down than the NES version (most noticeably, its opening stage, the Construction Site, was comprised of only four layers of girders, whereas the arcade and NES versions of the stage were comprised of six).
Sadly, I don't have many specific memories of my first Donkey Kong play-through. I don't recall how I felt about each of its newly introduced worlds or ideas or how I went about mentally processing or solving its puzzles. So I can't give you a moment-by-moment account of my experience.
My history with Donkey Kong, through which I played multiple times on screens both large and small, is more about persistent feelings than memories of specific events.
For me, the game's settings and their musical accompaniment perfectly capture the atmosphere of the era in which Donkey Kong released. Their wondrous simplicity always reminds me of a period when life was easier and I had all of the time in the world to eagerly and intently examine 8-bit-games' backgrounds and environments and think and wonder about their meaning and use my imagination to embellish them and thus form grand visualizations of them.
That's what Donkey Kong did: It kept hitting me with one inventive idea after another. It kept introducing moves, abilities and mechanics that allowed me to continuously engage with its world in fun new ways.
And worlds' stages weren't limited to single themes. Some were comprised purely of platforming challenges. Others were heavily puzzle-based and required you to engage in observation and experimentation and use your deductive skills. And a few of them were designed to test your reflexes and dexterity.
But now that I think about it, I do have one solid memory of my first play-through of Donkey Kong: I recall how much I struggled with the game's final battle against the giant-sized Donkey Kong! It was aggravating as hell, and it frustrated me in ways that few boss battles ever had.
So it turned out that Donkey Kong '94, as I would come to call it, wasn't at all the cheaply made "port" that I originally thought it to be. It was, rather, an incredibly expansive reimagining of an arcade classic and one of the most original puzzle-platformers to ever come around.
My being separated from Donkey Kong '94 for such a painfully long period was the reason why I jumped at the chance to repurchase it when it came to the 3DS Virtual Console in June of 2011. I was eager to reconnect with it because it was just too damn good to be neglected for 15-plus years. It was one of the best video games ever made, and thus it needed and deserved to be played regularly.
Donkey Kong '94 is one of the best portable games ever made, but I don't classify at as a "quintessential Game Boy game," no. Because, like I said, it rises above classification. Its visual, aural and spiritual qualities may be intrinsically linked to the Game Boy's unmistakable specifications, but the truth is that hardware, alone, could never accurately define what it is. It's a game whose greatness speaks for itself, and it says, in an emphatic manner, that Donkey Kong '94 is an outstanding video game wherever or however it's being played.
I mean, I liked playing portable and LCD handheld games, yeah, but because they weren't capable of offering colorful, high-resolution visuals, I considered them to be lesser products. I didn't believe that they were as worthy of my attention.
So if I learned that a new entry in one of my favorite series was in production, it would immediately become my preference that it appear exclusively on whichever console I was gaming on at the time. Because that console, I was certain, was the only commercially available platform that could do the game justice.
Bigger was better when it came to gaming, I felt, and nothing was going to change my opinion on the matter.
Over time, though, my perspective started to change. As the Game Boy came into its own and proved to me that it was possible for its game to rise above the platform's technological limitations and achieve console-level greatness, I softened my stance and started to embrace portable gaming.
But still I was set in my ways. For as much as I valued portable games, I continued to see them as innately inferior to console games.
That's how it was for the better part of the 90s. In that period, my heart belonged mostly to the little gray boxes that rested beneath my 20-inch Sony-brand television. They were my go-to platforms for gaming.
And that's why I was so excited when Nintendo Power Volume 60 revealed the existence of the Super Game Boy, which was said to be a specially crafted SNES accessory that would allow me to play Game Boy games on my TV!
It was like a dream come true: Thanks to the Super Game Boy, I would finally be able to experience all of my portable favorites in a more-desirable form! I would be able to liberate them from the Game Boy's blurry, pea-green dot-matrix display and give them new life on a large, bright TV screen! I would be able to view them in a scaled-up resolution and thus gain the ability to examine them more thoroughly and discover and appreciate all of the subtle graphical details that I previously wasn't able to observe!
"After I buy the Super Game Boy," I thought, "I'll have the means to play Game Boy games in the best way possible! I'll probably never again have to pick up that old gray brick!"
I was also greatly intrigued by the Super Game Boy's customization features and particularly its "Color Palette" option, which allowed you to replace games' standard monochrome color-schemes with your own personally created color-schemes (using up to four colors). The magazine illustrated how, exactly, you could manipulate games' color palettes, and it did so by highlighting changes made to classic Game Boy games like Super Mario 2: 6 Golden Coins, Tetris and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.
Also, it highlighted the never-before-seen Game Boy version of Donkey Kong, which, until then, had only appeared in name-only form on the "Future Games" sidebar found the magazine's later pages. In several instances, it used screenshots of Donkey Kong to demonstrate how the Super Game Boy's pre-set color-schemes worked to enhance games' visual presentations.
Personally, though, I wasn't sure why, exactly, I was supposed to care about this "new" version of Donkey Kong. From what I could see, it was nothing more than a blandly designed, miniaturized port of the arcade game, and it looked even more stripped down than the NES version!
"Why would anyone want to spend money on a lesser version of an already-compromised NES game?" I wondered in a confused manner.
That proposition didn't make any sense to me. So naturally I was quick to disregard Donkey Kong.
At the time, I was far more interested in seeing what the Super Game Boy could do for Super Mario Land, Link's Awakening, Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge, Wario Land and Metroid II: Return of Samus, whose lone magazine image became an object of my fascination because of how closely its displayed color-scheme came to matching Metroid's!
"Imagine being able to take one of the Mario or Mega Man Game Boy games and make it look exactly like its NES counterpart!" I thought to myself as I read through the piece. Just the idea of doing so filled me with excitement!
Being able to colorize the games that I owned and loved sounded amazing to me. I considered that aspect of the Super Game Boy to be the device's biggest selling point.
It turned out, though, that Donkey Kong--and not any of the games on which I was fixating--was meant to be the Super Game Boy's showpiece. I didn't pick up on that because the piece didn't specifically mention the game and because I was generally oblivious and somehow gave no weight to the fact that Donkey Kong's mug was displayed on the product's box cover.
Even after the game was given feature coverage in magazine's next issue and portrayed in a way that put heavy emphasis on its Super Game Boy compatibility, I still failed to realize that it was being positioned as the device's main system-seller. I skimmed through the coverage at rocket speed and paid no attention to what I was seeing, and by doing so, I failed to notice that there was a lot more to Donkey Kong than what Volume 60's images suggested.
"Because, after all," I thought, "it's just a stupid, dumbed-down port, and thus it's not worthy of my attention."
But even if I had been paying attention, it wouldn't have mattered, anyway, because I wasn't especially interested in purchasing a Super Game Boy-exclusive game. I coveted the device only for its ability to enhance the games in my existing library.
And furthermore, I didn't care enough about the original Donkey Kong to want to own another version of it. I already owned the 2600 version, and I hadn't desired to play it since 1983. It just wasn't that interesting a game to me. (Also, I might have been leery of the Donkey Kong brand because it had been dormant for half a decade and because my last experience with it was a sampling of Donkey Kong 3, which I found to be off-puttingly weird and incredibly boring. It tarnished the big ape's name for me, and apparently, it did the same for pretty much everyone else who played it.)
"Buying such a game would be a huge waste of money," I determined.
So I couldn't wait for the day when I could pop the Super Game Boy cartridge into my SNES and begin colorizing all of my Game Boy favorites! In my estimation, seeing these games in a newly rendered form would be akin to discovering them all over again!
The more I built up the idea in my head, the more disappointed I'd become whenever my daily inquiries at the local electronic stores were met with confused-sounding replies like, "Are you sure that the magazine said that the product is coming out this year?" I wanted the Super Game Boy so bad, and I was frustrated that retailers couldn't even give me a date or a time-frame in which it was estimated to release. They knew nothing, apparently.
So my only option was to search the strip every day after school and do so with the hope that the Super Game Boy had arrived overnight. I even recruited my poor father into the effort. I sent him out on daily goose-chases for a product that may very well have been delayed or, worse yet, canceled completely.
That's how desperate I was to get my hands on it.
After a few weeks (and right around the time I was finishing up my final week of school), I was ready to give up on the effort and start refocusing my attention on SNES games that were releasing that summer. "It's just not going to happen," I thought. "I'm not going to be able to find and purchase a Super Game Boy anytime this year or probably ever. So I might as well move on."
That's when it happened: On one school day in particular, I jumped into my father's car as soon as he arrived to pick me up, and the first thing I saw was a plastic bag bearing the label "Electronics Boutique." And I knew right away what it contained!
There was, as I expected, a Super Game Boy inside! I quickly removed it from the bag, and then I began to intently examine its box cover and all of the images that were being displayed on it.
In that moment, I was thrilled to finally be holding it in my hands!
Curiously, though, there was also something else in that plastic bag--something square-shaped. Right as I was about to remove this mystery item and find out what it was, my father started explaining to me that Electronics Boutique was the only store that had the Super Game Boy in stock, and it had chosen to bundle the device with a game; so he had no choice but to lay out some extra cash and buy the bundled set.
The game in question was, you guessed it, Donkey Kong.
Upon seeing it, I groaned inaudibly. Because not only was I now the unwilling owner of a game that I had no interest in playing--I was now on the hook for an additional $40 on top of the $60 I was paying for the Super Game Boy!
Though, I quickly came to terms with the situation. "Oh well," I thought to myself. "It's better than not having the Super Game Boy at all."
When I got home, I tossed Donkey Kong aside and put all of my focus on what really mattered to me: my old Game Boy favorites. I immediately got to work testing them out on the Super Game Boy. And then I spent the next few days joyously replaying them in glorious TV-display form and having fun trying to match their color-schemes to their NES counterparts'.
The results varied. I was able to get Metroid II and Super Mario Land to closely resemble their respective NES counterparts, but I didn't have the same luck with all of the others. Most disappointingly, I couldn't get Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge's color-scheme to perfectly match the NES Mega Man games'. No matter how I colored its version of Mega Man, he'd always wind up looking like he had a blue 5 o'clock shadow (this was happening, I eventually noticed, because the sprite designer shaded the sides of his face to help him to stand out from the similarly colored background). Usually I had to settle for "fairly close."
And I always made sure to pair up my personalized Game Boy creations with my favorite border: the movie theater, whose accompaniment served to make my gaming experiences feel as though they were part of a grand production! Because I liked the idea of playing games in front of an audience and showing them how skilled I was! (Surely, I thought, there had to be people out there who were sad enough to want to come to a theater and spend two and a half hours watching me slowly and cautiously traverse my way around Planet SR388 for the 40th time.)
I was very happy with the Super Game Boy. It had provided me everything that I desired. It had allowed me to find new ways to enjoy my favorite Game Boy games and form connections with them. And for those reasons, I considered it to be a top-tier SNES product. I loved everything that it did.
The only problem was that I was fast running out of old games to enhance! I was down to second-tier games like The Amazing Spider-Man, DuckTales, WWF Superstars 2 and Golf, and I wasn't eager to give games of their type the Super Game Boy treatment because I didn't believe that doing so would allow me to extract any extra value from them. So I played around with them for only a brief period and then promptly abandoned them.
Consequently I exhausted all of my available options.
At that point, I got desperate and tried to find any reason that I could to continue having fun with the Super Game Boy. "I don't want this party to end," I thought.
That's when I remembered that there was one other game that I hadn't yet tested: Donkey Kong, whose box was still lying in the place in which I left it days earlier (on my small dresser). Having blown $40 on the game, I figured that I had nothing to lose by popping it into the device and trying to extract from it what little value I could.
At the least, I thought, it would be interesting to see what a "Super Game Boy exclusive" looked like and find out what its enhancements entailed.
The game, itself, was exactly what I was expecting it to be: a visually limited, exceptionally cramped version of the arcade classic. And it was, in some very obvious ways, even more stripped down than the NES version (most noticeably, its opening stage, the Construction Site, was comprised of only four layers of girders, whereas the arcade and NES versions of the stage were comprised of six).
As I was breezing my way through its four stages, I started to feel even more ripped off than I did originally. "I've just dumped $40 on a modern game that appears to have less content than some of the old 2600 games that I'm currently digging up," I was coming to realize. "I've been robbed!"
I mean, sure: The game's specially designed border; clean-looking, faithfully replicated color-scheme; and crisp-sounding voice samples (mainly Pauline's cries of "Help! Help!) were very nice enhancements, but they simply weren't enough to meaningfully increase the playability of a game that was as simple and as basic as Donkey Kong. "These are mere cosmetic changes," I felt, "and in no way do they justify the game's $40 price tag."
But right about then, Donkey Kong did something completely unexpected and suddenly hit me with one of the biggest surprises in gaming history.
When I cleared the fourth and "final" stage, I expected that Pauline would reunite with Mario and warmly embrace him, and then the game would simply loop back to the first stage. But that didn't happen. Instead, the ending scene was interrupted by an ominous-sounding ditty and Donkey Kong's unanticipated, earth-shaking kip-up, whose force was so powerful that it collapsed what was left of the building's frame and sent Mario and Pauline plunging down to the surface.
Whereas Mario splatted onto the ground, Pauline fell into the waiting arms of Donkey Kong, who threw her over his shoulder and swiftly fled the scene!
As I watched this sequence unfold, I had no idea what was happening or where any of this activity was leading. "Is this merely a revised, more-elaborate ending scene?" I wondered. "Is it that Nintendo threw in a few extra bonus stages to pad out the game? Or could it be that I am, as usual, so totally oblivious that I'm unaware of a major game element?"
I got my answer a few seconds later, when, suddenly, the scene shifted to the "Big City" and Donkey Kong proceeded to turn into an entirely different game--one that had an actual soundtrack, background visuals, and a newly exhibited energy.
"What the hell is this?" I sought to understand as I gauged what was being displayed on my TV screen.
In my confusion, I turned to the game's manual, which I neglected to read beforehand, and discovered the truth: This version of Donkey Kong was in fact a whole new game--a uniquely designed puzzle-platformer that was only using the arcade original's existing stage-set as a foundation and jumping-off point.
In this new version, I read, the goal in each stage was to gain possession of a key and use it to open the door through which Donkey Kong escaped moments earlier. The described process reminded me a lot of Super Mario Bros. 2, in which you had obtain Phanto-guarded keys and use them to open a locked door.
"Now that's an intriguing marriage of ideas!" I thought.
And from there, I began a long journey through one of the most wondrously atmospheric, lovingly crafted video games I'd ever played--in any format: portable, console, computer or arcade. And the best part was that I never saw it coming. The game's endeavoring to be one of the best puzzle-platformers ever made and succeeding in that mission was a total surprise to me.
It was honestly amazing how quickly my opinion began to shift as a game that I initially perceived to be an uninspired port of Donkey Kong suddenly turned into a wonderfully unique, top-tier action game. I went from thinking that it was cheaply produced, recycled trash to raving about how expansive and transcendently great it was.
Sadly, I don't have many specific memories of my first Donkey Kong play-through. I don't recall how I felt about each of its newly introduced worlds or ideas or how I went about mentally processing or solving its puzzles. So I can't give you a moment-by-moment account of my experience.
What I remember, more vividly, is how I felt during the journey and how I engaged with the game's different elements. I recall, for instance, how much I loved to observe and examine the stages' background images, which were simple in nature, yes, but still incredibly thought-provoking. I loved to use my imagination to give those images greater depth and form and visualize the types of environments and atmospheric qualities they were creating.
Otherwise, I recall how I enjoyed soaking in the game's distinctly calming vibe; how much fun I had maneuvering the acrobatic Mario around the delightfully varied stage environments; and how amazed I was that Nintendo managed to shove so much awesome content into such a tiny cartridge and consequently produce one of the most extraordinarily expansive platformers the medium had ever seen!
Now, I'll readily admit that most of my favorite Game Boy games weren't exactly top-shelf masterpieces. They were, rather, great "portable games," which is to say that they were fine games but simply not comparable to the best games that consoles and computers had to offer. They were clearly lower in quality.
But Donkey Kong was a totally different breed. It, much like Metroid II and Link's Awakening, showed that it had the power to stand among the best games on any platform. It was transcendently great. And that was true whether I was playing it on the SNES, in an enhanced form, or on the ol' gray brick, which, it turned out, still had a lot of life left in it--thanks largely to games like Donkey Kong, which was so good that I desired to play it anywhere that I went.
My history with Donkey Kong, through which I played multiple times on screens both large and small, is more about persistent feelings than memories of specific events.
I have, for example, always felt the same way about the Big City's background visuals: They're deeply alluring and wonder-inducing, and they form my favorite setting in the game. I love observing them because of the way in which they stand silently in the distance and imbue the stages' environments with a uniquely wondrous type of placidity. The noiseless buildings and their seemingly abandoned surroundings lend the action an air of detached isolation and fill you with the sense that the people who are resting behind the buildings' windows and moving about their in-between spaces wish to stay out of view and remain blissfully unaware of the craziness happening right in front of them.
At the same time, the stages' laid-back, jazzy tunes add a touch of mystery and invite you to wonder about what's actually going on back there on what looks to be a quiet, relaxing Sunday afternoon. "What is it that the city's inhabitants actually do on such a day?" they inspire you to imagine.
That's the power of the game's environmental conveyance.
Many of Donkey Kong's settings work to that effect. The secluded forest and jungle environments are permeated with a feeling of remote tranquility, and thus they fill you with the sense that their undisturbed trees and flora are the only knowing witnesses to Mario and Donkey Kong's antics. The pirate ship's atmosphere oozes serenity--a comforting influence that works to neutralize the presence of the ship's aggressive crew of monsters and make you feel as though you're experiencing an enjoyable, untroubled boat ride across a calm, peaceful sea.
At one point, you maneuver your way around the interior and exterior portions of an in-flight plane and thus bravely traverse its normally restricted, dangerous mechanical compartments and the windy, unsteady surfaces of its wings and rudders, and you do this while somehow never disturbing its flight or drawing the attention of the people who are occupying it.
And these are the types of thoughts and visualizations that the game's settings inspire. As you observe them, you become filled with a sense of ease and start to feel as though the world around you is a quietly wondrous, unsupervised playground.
For me, the game's settings and their musical accompaniment perfectly capture the atmosphere of the era in which Donkey Kong released. Their wondrous simplicity always reminds me of a period when life was easier and I had all of the time in the world to eagerly and intently examine 8-bit-games' backgrounds and environments and think and wonder about their meaning and use my imagination to embellish them and thus form grand visualizations of them.
All was right in the world when I could play Donkey Kong for several hours on a summer afternoon and let its serene vibes and conveyances wash over me and inspire me to think, wonder and imagine.
What also astounded me was Donkey Kong's depth of gameplay. There was so much to it. There were so many new and innovative ideas, and they were being introduced at a constant rate.
On the surface, Donkey Kong bore a strong resemblance to the arcade original, which all of us remembered as being limited in scope, but under its hood lied a game that was far more complex and multidimensional than its inspiration (and also 95% of the games that were on the market at the time). What it contained was a cleverly concealed convergence of newly designed gameplay mechanics and those that were borrowed from a number of classic Mario and Donkey Kong games.
And the borrowed mechanics were all updated and beautifully refined.
Consequently there were a number of familiar and fun things that Mario could do: He could climb ropes and vines with either one or two hands, just as the younger Kong could in Donkey Kong Jr. He could pick up and carry keys, objects and enemies, as he was able to do in Super Mario Bros. 2, and toss them around. If he collided with a mushroom, he'd shrink down to half his size, much like he did when he made contact with poison mushrooms in the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2, and gain the ability to access and move through narrow passages. And he could even execute acrobatic moves like the cartwheel flip and the momentum-powered double jump, both of which were seemingly ripped from the future Super Mario 64 (this was likely Nintendo's way of giving us a preview of things to come)!
There were also a host of new abilities like the multifaceted handstand, using which allowed you to walk on your hands and thus block falling objects with your legs and execute two progressively aerial high-jumps in a row; and the spin move, which allowed you to swing in circles while you hanging onto wires and toss yourself long distances.
Mario was more versatile than he'd ever been, and as a result, there were so many cool and interesting things that you could do with him!
If you weren't the experimental type, you might have thought that Donkey Kong's transition scenes were introducing new moves and mechanics that weren't previously available for use, but the truth was that you had access to all of them from the very start! You were free to put them to use whenever you wanted and play through stages however you liked!
And for me, this was the main source of the game's replayability: Once I knew that you could execute high-flying jumps at any time, I could approach the early stages in a different way and have fun using my array of acrobatic moves to clear them faster!
That, I realized, is what the developers wanted you to do. They were keen on the idea of allowing you to improvise your own solutions and solve puzzles in any way that you could.
Resultantly, I had the freedom to toss myself around however I wanted to!
I tended to rely on the cartwheel flip because it helped me to trivialize certain challenges. Though, it never broke the game. It couldn't because there was no such thing as "breaking the game" in Donkey Kong! That's why it was so fun to play: It encouraged you to find the quickest solutions using any means necessary!
The game did a terrific job of blending all of these elements together while simultaneously coming up with brilliant solutions to old problems. Take Mario's endurance, for instance: He wasn't as durable as he was in the Super Mario games, but at the same time, he wasn't anywhere near as fragile as he was in the original Donkey Kong. That was the case because the developers found a way to reconcile the two series' divergent design philosophies.
They came up with an inventive compromise: Mario wouldn't die after falling three inches, no. Rather, there was now a threshold for how far he could fall before his descent would turn fatal. If he dropped two or three stories, he'd simply tumble over, and the control loss would be minimal. If he dropped four or five stories, he'd violently splat on the ground, and you'd have to wait a few seconds for him to recover. And if he fell from any distance higher than that, he'd die as soon as he hit the ground.
This system gave you the leeway that you needed to take risks, which I appreciated, and it only punished you if you decided to get too crazy. It created the perfect middle ground!
That's what the game was apt to do.
But the truth was that dying in Donkey Kong wasn't really a great concern, anyway, because the game liked to hand out extra lives like Quaaludes at a Bill Cosby meet-and-greet. Because this was the point in Mario history when extra lives became so comically abundant that life-totals became a sort of secondary scoring system and basically a new measure of achievement.
So part of the fun of Donkey Kong, resultantly, was trying to reach the 99-lives limit and doing so as quickly as possible! (I considered my play-through a failure if hadn't yet earned 99 lives by the time I reached the jungle world's midpoint.)
And like I said: I was astounded by how relentlessly ambitious the game was. The average action-puzzle game was content to introduce one new mechanic or enemy type per world, but Donkey Kong had no desire to restrain itself in such a manner or, really, in any manner at all! It was determined to constantly introduce new things!
Its teaching me something new during a transitional scene--like, say, clearing gaps by jumping on falling icicles--wasn't an indication that the following four stages would lack other surprises, no. It was just a demonstration of one of the multiple new things that you could do in those stages! In one of the subsequent stages, you were likely to learn other tricks, like using switches to extend or retract bridges and thus manipulate the playing field in ways that were advantageous to you.
(In one stage, memorably, you could manipulate a patrolling monkey's movement and get it to travel over to a whole different stage area, and then you could use its hanging tail to cross over a spike pit that was, at first, seemingly impossible to clear. Though, I was always cautious not to restrain the monkey in any way because I knew that doing so would cause it to emit a sad-sounding squeal, which I couldn't stand to hear. "Poor little fella," I'd always think when it'd make that sound.)
Otherwise, you might have found yourself building your own path to the goal using either one or a series of time-based do-it-yourself contraptions (arrangeable platforms, ladders, springs and blocks); tossing a hammer into the air and catching it on a higher or lower level and thereafter continuing to harness its destructive power; using a set of manipulatable conveyors to transport a key to a desired location; launching yourself far across a stage after furiously swinging around a diagonally aligned wire; using a handstand to deflect falling debris or halt the movement of descending barrels; strategically baiting charge-happy enemies into pushing a crouching Mario through narrow passages that he normally couldn't enter; or trying to find the exact location of an invisible doorway whose position was revealed during the stage's intro via an audio cue.
Obviously they included invisible doors just to see if you were paying attention. And in my case, I usually wasn't. I had to walk all around while holding the key and hope that I'd eventually pass over the correct background tile.
That's what Donkey Kong did: It kept hitting me with one inventive idea after another. It kept introducing moves, abilities and mechanics that allowed me to continuously engage with its world in fun new ways.
It had a lot of the usual Mario conventions, of course: swimming segments, collapsing and disintegrating blocks, momentum-influencing winds, and such. But none of them were presented in a standard manner. The designers put a creative twist on each one of them.
So this time, I wasn't simply swimming along and maneuvering my way around the occasional obstructive fish, no, but rather tactically riding waterfalls while cunningly evading aggressive piranha-like creatures and trying to strategically carry a sunken key to the surface. I was platforming across falling blocks, climbing on ropes, riding on conveyors, and fighting fierce winds in ways that I never had before!
And worlds' stages weren't limited to single themes. Some were comprised purely of platforming challenges. Others were heavily puzzle-based and required you to engage in observation and experimentation and use your deductive skills. And a few of them were designed to test your reflexes and dexterity.
Donkey Kong refused to be bound by formula. It did whatever it wanted whenever it wanted, and resultantly it made you excited to see what it was going to throw at you next.
I loved that it included Donkey Kong Jr.-style stages in which you had to navigate your way around the playing field by climbing on vines or ropes. It was, I thought, such a great way to incorporate elements from a game that had sadly become an overlooked entry in the Donkey Kong series. And the best part was that the stages in question used Jr.'s established rule-set: You swiftly climbed upward when you were grasping two parallel vines or ropes, you speedily descended downward when you were hanging on to a single vine or rope, and you eliminated enemies by dropping fruit on them.
I appreciated how faithful and respectful all of it was.
And I especially loved how the second-to-last Donkey Kong battle reprised Donkey Kong Jr.'s final stage and challenged you to push a number of low-lying keys up into the locks placed above them. "What a clever way to honor the original game!" I thought. The only difference, this time, was that the script was flipped: You were Mario trying to cage the meddlesome DK Jr.!
There couldn't have been a more appropriate penultimate battle!
And the final world's other seven stages, too, were cleverly remixed versions of stages that appeared in earlier games! That, obviously, was the product of Donkey Kong's strong desire to pay tribute to its inspirations and build on them with the intention of allowing long-time series enthusiasts to re-experience them in exciting new ways.
As I observed all of this, I was amazed at how Donkey Kong managed to cram so much great content into such a tiny cartridge. I couldn't think of many other games that were able to accomplish anything similar.
But now that I think about it, I do have one solid memory of my first play-through of Donkey Kong: I recall how much I struggled with the game's final battle against the giant-sized Donkey Kong! It was aggravating as hell, and it frustrated me in ways that few boss battles ever had.
Every attempt played out the same way: I'd clear the battle's first two phases without much trouble, but then, in the final phase, Donkey Kong would find a way to score a cheap hit on me and thus force me to redo the entire battle. And that was extremely annoying because the battle was so damn lengthy (it lasted about three minutes, which was a very long time for a boss fight in a platformer)!
I must've dumped 20-30 lives in my effort to win the fight.
My struggles with this battle didn't at all dampen what was otherwise an amazing gaming experience, no, but it did leave me feeling angry at the end--for a few minutes, at least.
But despite my being a bit pouty at the time, I did enjoy how the game's ending scene created continuity between the Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. series. I was always interested in finding out how Mario gained access to the Mushroom Kingdom and became "super," and this ending provided me that answer. And I was happy with what it showed me. (This was of course back during an era when I still believed that there was an official Mario canon and a clear chronology of events.)
And that credits theme, man. I loved it! It was a wonderfully evocative tune, and it did a beautiful job of permeating the space around me with feel-good vibes.
So it turned out that Donkey Kong '94, as I would come to call it, wasn't at all the cheaply made "port" that I originally thought it to be. It was, rather, an incredibly expansive reimagining of an arcade classic and one of the most original puzzle-platformers to ever come around.
I considered it to be one of the greatest video games I'd ever played.
Also, it was a game that I simply couldn't put down. I loved it so much that I couldn't help but return to it constantly. And I played it any way that I could: on the Game Boy, on the Super Game Boy, and both on the road and at home. No matter where I was, I'd always find a way to gain access to it and enjoy its stellar puzzle-action.
In fact, Donkey Kong '94 holds the distinction of being the only portable game that I ever slotted as both a "home game" and a "road game." Because it was so good that it deserved to be played everywhere. And because it transcended classification in the same way that its quality transcended the Super Game Boy's so-called "essential enhancement." Its innate greatness was the only thing that defined it. (Though, honestly, I do have a slight preference for the colorized version because of how its unique color-schemes help to make stages' backgrounds and settings feel more distinct.)
Had my Game Boy not died on me in the mid-90s, my tradition of playing Donkey Kong '94 once every two or three months would have no doubt continued on for decades.
My being separated from Donkey Kong '94 for such a painfully long period was the reason why I jumped at the chance to repurchase it when it came to the 3DS Virtual Console in June of 2011. I was eager to reconnect with it because it was just too damn good to be neglected for 15-plus years. It was one of the best video games ever made, and thus it needed and deserved to be played regularly.
And ever since then, I've been able to do something wonderful: play through and enjoy a cherished favorite on a semi-monthly basis and do so on what has since become my preferred platform for video games! (My only disappointment is that portable Virtual Console releases lack Super Game Boy-style customization options. It'd be nice to have the ability to colorize Game Boy games and create special borders for them and thus have fun with them in different ways. That would only increase their value! Hopefully Nintendo realizes that and is currently working to implement such options.)
With any luck, the game's increased availability will help it to garner the attention that it deserves and show the gaming world that it deserves to recognized as one of Nintendo's best creations.
Because if Donkey Kong '94, one of gaming's all-time-greatest works, continues to go overlooked, it'll be an absolute travesty.
Donkey Kong '94 is one of the best portable games ever made, but I don't classify at as a "quintessential Game Boy game," no. Because, like I said, it rises above classification. Its visual, aural and spiritual qualities may be intrinsically linked to the Game Boy's unmistakable specifications, but the truth is that hardware, alone, could never accurately define what it is. It's a game whose greatness speaks for itself, and it says, in an emphatic manner, that Donkey Kong '94 is an outstanding video game wherever or however it's being played.
And if you haven't yet played it, then you should absolutely make it a point to do so. Because you're definitely missing out on something special.
For the big ape, the labor of love affectionately known as Donkey Kong '94 was the first show in a comeback tour that would find its greatest success in the months that followed. For me, it was a reintroduction to an iconic antagonist whose games, I came to learn, were very much deserving of my attention and my appreciation.
And for the medium at large, it was further proof that amazing games come in all shapes and sizes.
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