Donkey Kong Jr. (Game & Watch)

Back when I was much younger, I recall browsing the toy aisle of a Walgreens and coming across a set of handheld gaming systems on keychains. These were the Nintendo Mini Classics, which consisted of many rereleases of games made for the much older LCD handhelds known as Game & Watches. Not only was this my first brush with the kind of games that began Nintendo’s push into handheld gaming, but I was able to play them, although not because I was meant to. The plastic covered the buttons on the systems, but they were still on, and with enough force, I could play a game like Donkey Kong Jr. reasonably well, enough to form some nostalgic attachments to it so that I’d later purchase it for the DSi and it became the first game I thought of when Game & Watch games came up. The feeling that I was getting away with something by playing this game for free probably was what made this moment so memorable, because now all these years later, as I can play Donkey Kong Jr.’s unique Game & Watch adaptation, I see that it is not a game worthy of the warm spot it once held in my heart.

 

Donkey Kong Jr. does not play the same as the arcade and NES games of the same name, but it does borrow their premise. The original Donkey Kong has been captured by Mario after the big ape ran wild in his self-titled debut game, but Donkey Kong’s son sets out to free his father. The player takes on the role of Donkey Kong Jr. here, the gorilla in a onesie needing to deliver keys to the cage holding his dad to free him from the usually heroic plumber’s clutches. It takes four keys to get Donkey Kong out of his cage, although since Donkey Kong Jr. is a game based around achieving a high score rather than a permanent victory, the poor ape ends up locked up immediately after you save him so you can keep repeating the task until you’ve been damaged three times, the game referring to these as Misses when they work rather similarly to lives.

It’s fairly easy to figure out how the platforming of Donkey Kong Jr. will unfold when you look at the game’s single stage. Donkey Kong Jr. needs to run right across the jungle floor, climb up a set of vines, and then cross a branch to reach the point where a key is dangling back and forth beside his father’s cage. The key needs to be in the right position when you leap for it or else the young ape will fail to grab it, instead plummeting back to the jungle floor and hurting himself in the process. Timing the jump can be a touch tough until you understand that the game wants you to do it a bit early, but if you do grab the key, DK Jr. plunges it into the lock, one quarter of the cage disappears, and you’re back at the bottom left corner meant to do it all over again.

 

The main obstacle to your success though will be two types of enemies. The Snapjaws start appearing first, little crocodile heads shaped like bear traps moving across the branch and the ground that make no effort to chase you but they are deadly to the touch. DK Jr. can jump over them to earn a point and avoid damage, and there are a few areas where you can grab onto some vines and hang there for a bit. Snapjaws on their own are easy enough to deal with, but things can start to get quite difficult when Nitpickers appear. These birds only appear in the lower section, flying right through those vines that you could hide from Snapjaws in. As the game goes on, Snapjaws and Nitpickers start appearing in greater numbers, it becoming harder and harder to find a gap between their movements to safely leap over them if you are in the lower area. You quickly learn that you want to spend as little time down below as possible, and unfortunately this leads to a play style that causes the entire game to collapse and become a boring slog.

 

Nitpickers only appear in the lower area, so if you stay on the branch above, all you have to worry about are Snapjaws. Snapjaws will always at least have a single space between them, meaning DK Jr. can leap over one and then quickly leap over the next one rather safely. If he was down below, standing in place and leaping over them could be contested by the Nitpickers, but up above, there’s nothing really forcing you to keep moving. Donkey Kong Jr. is overall a score focused game, and if you play the game with the intent of setting a high score, you can quite easily start to notice how safe the upper area is and realize there’s pretty much no chance you will die since standing in place and leaping over Snapjaws is relatively risk free.

Technically, many score-focused games can have a slow but safe way of earning points, the player often pressing on anyway since the risk of death is worth a high payout. The problem is, points aren’t exactly doled out for endangering the infant ape. Getting a key in the lock is worth five points at least, sometimes more if you can do it quickly, although once enemy numbers are too high there’s little chance you’ll get the bonuses. If you fully free Donkey Kong, you get 20 points, and there is a fruit up in the branches you can knock down that will grant you some points for any enemies it hits on the way down. The fruit only reappears after you take a Miss, but simply leaping over a Snapjaw earns you 1 point. There’s a perfect spot on the branch where you can jump in place and earn these points, and besides early on when the animals are slow moving and infrequent, it’s hard to justify running this little gauntlet to try and get points you’ll more easily earn jumping in one spot over and over.

 

Donkey Kong Jr. incentivizes the slow and safe approach further with a bonus only paid out if you haven’t earned any Misses by point 300. If you have lost a life before then, reaching a score of 300 clears them out, but if you make it that far safely, instead all point values are doubled until you potentially get a miss. This means each Snapjaw jump is now worth two points, still not a huge score but considering the low effort required to continuously accrue points through this method, it’s fairly inevitable your Game & Watch’s high score will come from this safe form of play rather than trying to engage with the full breadth of the challenge. What’s more, when the Nitpickers grow too numerous, the area down below is just annoying to navigate in general since your options are limited and you can feel trapped as the only vines you can use to go upwards can often be blocked by Snapjaws making the transition to the jungle floor. Once the game actually starts making things difficult it loses its appeal if played as intended, so while it’s not fun to do so, standing in place and hopping over enemies to earn a hollow score ends up the smartest approach if you actually care about the game’s goal.

THE VERDICT: Donkey Kong Jr. on Game & Watch makes a huge mistake in designing its score challenge, creating a small safe zone where you can earn points endlessly with little effort and thus cheapening any attempts to accrue them through more honest play. What’s worse, if you do start trying to go for high scoring objectives like grabbing keys and freeing Donkey Kong, the enemies eventually become so overwhelming it becomes far too difficult to try and go for less tedious strategies. A spot of safety robs the high score chase of its thrill, but even if it didn’t exist, the surge of enemies after the game has had time to get going isn’t an interesting challenge to overcome either.

 

And so, I give Donkey Kong Jr. for Game & Watch…

A TERRIBLE rating. Sometimes you can learn a glitch or exploit that completely robs a game of its intended difficulty, and if you have to search deeply for it or work hard to set it up, it doesn’t really feel fair to denigrate the game for something that isn’t exactly practical. Other times, a certain behavior may make it easy to win in the game but it’s something people only really learn about thanks to decompiling the code well after the release. The problem with Donkey Kong Jr. was I barely needed much time to notice the one safe spot where points could be earned in perpetuity and the game did little to dissuade me from relying on it for setting a score. Technically, you can stand in two spaces where the only danger is the easily handled Snapjaws, but that safezone could have been lightly altered to prevent this problem. There is a third space on the branch you can try the tactic, but since there is a vine above, it’s hard to keep up the rhythm necessary for easy points. Putting a vine over the other safe spaces wouldn’t work the best, especially since it removes the fruit, but it would at least be preferable over the spots being so easily exploited. However, the answer may lie below, the Nitpickers sticking to the jungle floor area the main reason you’d want to use the branch exclusively for earning points. If Nitpickers covered both areas then you’d be motivated to keep focused on the main goal, although then the game should definitely lower the density of enemies on screen later on since already the area below the branch can become so filled with foes it’s hard to figure out on the fly the one safe way to survive the onslaught. The Snapjaws being able to cover the vines you need to climb upwards feels like an unfortunate barrier as well, the player’s escape from the awful lower area so often blocked if they try to play fair that they’re stuck in the chaos that all but guarantees that even if they make it to free Donkey Kong, the time it takes will be much slower for earning points than if they just stood in place on the branch and jumped over and over.

 

Nostalgia can help shield a game from scrutiny, but it’s hard to look past Donkey Kong Jr.’s design that at once feels like it’s trying to force losses so the game doesn’t go on infinitely yet it crafts a perfect spot where you can easily build up points without much trouble. I liked Donkey Kong Jr. back in that Walgreens aisle partly because of the way I played it, and partly because it meant I couldn’t exactly see the game for what it is. Too often a game someone plays only for a bit can become beloved only for them to realize the broader experience isn’t as good as the opener, but a Game & Watch game isn’t even a long varied adventure. Besides having a clock you can set an alarm for, it’s just the one game, the one stage, and the one goal of earning points, and a little stumble can take away from the entertainment once it’s realized. I almost wish I didn’t have to mention the safe spot since it might help preserve what little fun there is for others in just getting to know the game when you first pick it up, but it feels like anyone whose time with it is more than a quick brush in a toy aisle might make the same observations. Better to not play it at all than hunting it down and learning too late the game’s either going to be shallow or ruthless depending on how you approach it, and neither way to play Donkey Kong Jr. is going to be fun in the end.