Eventually I'll start making YouTube videos of classic game reviews and one of my favorite things about them are the vague instruction manuals. Surprisingly the manual for Colecovision's "Donkey Kong" has examples of all three screens, all of them ass-backwards from the original game. In the original and all other home versions of DK, the gorilla is at the top left side of the screen and Pauline is facing to the right. On the Colecovision DK, he's at the top right of the screen, Pauline facing left. To top it off, Donkey Kong looks more like an overgrown monkey than he does a gorilla. The original arcade version of DK had four total screens - the Colecovision only includes three of them.
The main competitor at the time was the Atari 2600, and in that version of DK, the gorilla looks more like a gingerbread man, there's only two screens, is repetitive and gets old quickly. Aside from the extra screen, the Colecovision version isn't anything to write home about, either. Three years later, even Nintendo didn't get it right when the NES version came out, with only three screens, not the entire four levels. The elusive "cement pie factory" level has to this day never been included in any home version of "Donkey Kong", unless you count the first four levels of the Gameboy DK game, mini levels of the original arcade.
Just take a look at the Colecovision manual of DK and that pretty much sums up the presentation of the classic. It's far from the best but definitely not the worst. Atari 2600 wins THAT award for worst presentation of DK. AND Donkey Kong Junior too!
The main competitor at the time was the Atari 2600, and in that version of DK, the gorilla looks more like a gingerbread man, there's only two screens, is repetitive and gets old quickly. Aside from the extra screen, the Colecovision version isn't anything to write home about, either. Three years later, even Nintendo didn't get it right when the NES version came out, with only three screens, not the entire four levels. The elusive "cement pie factory" level has to this day never been included in any home version of "Donkey Kong", unless you count the first four levels of the Gameboy DK game, mini levels of the original arcade.
Just take a look at the Colecovision manual of DK and that pretty much sums up the presentation of the classic. It's far from the best but definitely not the worst. Atari 2600 wins THAT award for worst presentation of DK. AND Donkey Kong Junior too!
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