Sadly the video has been made non-embedable, so it’s up to you to follow the link, if you care. The video encapsulates information on donkeykongforum.net (which it mislinks). That link is some hardcore geekery, of the kind beloved to Set Side B’s cadre of pixelated aliens, so please take a look.

Here’s the basics, in text form. Donkey Kong gets more difficult over the course of five “levels.” These are different from “boards,” a.k.a. “racks” or “screens.” In the corner of the screen there’s a notice, “L=X” where X is some number. That’s the Level. It goes up by one every time you finish a Rivets board.

The problem is, starting with Level 2, the spots at which the springs hit the ground is slightly randomized. The final climb up to Pauline’s platform is super dangerous, since Mario is vulnerable the whole way. Level 4 is the hardest difficulty for the springs on Elevators, and you have to handle it a very specific way: climb up to the first safe spot, wait for a spring that comes out bouncing at a specific location (near DK’s right foot) then running to another safe spot, then waiting for another specific spring speed to rush over and up the ladder.

So go forth and conquer the elevators, and as Coily the Sprite reminds us:

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Rob O’Hara on basic strategy (9½ minutes). Note that he’s playing on one of those multi-machine emulators so the sounds are a little off.

arcadeimpossible talks with former world record holder Hank Chen (22 minutes):

Getting deeper into the weeds now. Here’s a high-level strategy video on just the Barrel (a.k.a. Girders) boards (41 minutes!). All the following videos are from Chambers_N Gaming:

Was that a lot to say on this one subject? Well hold on, that was just part 1! Here’s part 2, which is another 42 minutes!

And here’s detailed strategy on the Rivets (a.k.a. Ziggurat) boards, although it’s “only” 19 minutes:

That a single game can inspire so much discussion so long after its release speaks volumes about the quality of its design. A lot of it has to do with how much randomness is in the game. Even the best players die sometimes! Donkey Kong is heavily resistant to rote patterns, although there’s still things the player can do to subtly affect each board, and make it more manageable. On the Barrels boards, on higher levels, you can affect when barrels decide to come down ladders by steering towards them as they reach their decision point.

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I hope this isn’t spoiling anything by now, but just in case here’s a bit of space….

In Donkey Kong Bananza, King K. Rool is the secret final boss, and not only that but at the end of the game the Mario and Donkey Kong series kind of cross over, as the final level and boss fight are in New Donk City, which is attacked(briefly) by K. Rool, but saved by Donkey Kong and Pauline. I wonder if this explains why streets in NDC, in Mario Odyssey, bear the names of Donkey Kong characters?

Anyway, I guess the only real take away is Mario’s world has a long-standing problem with big reptilian megalomaniacs stirring up trouble. And big primates too, but sometimes they’re heroic. Come to think of it, Mario’s been a villain too, and in a Donkey Kong game….

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Just a few days ago I linked to the complete two-season run of the CG Donkey Kong Country cartoon that got made and aired on Saturday mornings. Well, there’s more where that came from.

As it turns out the people who animated it, “Medialab,” had other plans for the character. It’s not very well known, but in France they made another show, a general cartoon anthology, with the characters performing in bumpers between them, like the original version of Cartoon Planet. It was originally called Donkey Kong Planet, and it’s both bizarre and entirely in French.

Then, the model who was the co-star, along with the DKC characters, left the show. They rebranded it to DKTV, and, um.

You have a choice. You can start off with this 10-minute explainer video by Carlito. It’s the standard Youtuber, “can you BELIEVE this happened??” video. It’s not really bad, I’ve definitely seen worse, but it’s not really a sterling example of the genre either. Here it is embedded:

Or, if you’re a jaded connoisseur of bizarre video like I am, you might want to just go ahead and jump into the deep end of the pool, unprepared. If you’re like that, I got you covered. This is what you want (41 minutes). Don’t say you weren’t warned.

More about this show is on the Super Mario Wiki.

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At Level 22 of Donkey Kong, there is a bug that causes the game to only give Mario (nèe Jumpman) 400 bonus timer points to complete the level. (The screen displays 4000, but that’s caused by a different glitch.) Playing normally, that’s not enough time to reach higher than the second girder on-screen.

However. If the player has Mario climb the first broken latter, then hold down for four frames then up for one, Mario will climb up off the top of it by one pixel. Continuing to do this, Mario can continue to ascend the screen. When he reaches Pauline’s height, the game will declare the level completed and move on to the next screen.

As it turns out, the bonus count on the Barrels screen is tied to the barrels that Donkey Kong throws, and the timing on those is somewhat random. If DK is slow at emitting those rolling obstacles, rarely, that will give Mario just enough time to reach Pauline at the top, and advance to the next level.

Doing this physically is essentially impossible. The player would have to waggle the joystick extremely quickly (and loudly), yet with the precise timing to consistently raise Mario’s position, to get him up the screen in time, and even if that worked, he’d still have to be lucky enough that Donkey Kong was slow at rolling barrels. But in emulation, with tool assistance, Kosmic managed to get to the top and finish the level. Then using other tricks and glitches, he managed to finish the next three levels (Elevators, Barrels again and Cement Factory) too, before his luck ran out at the next Barrels screen and he was unable to continue.

Here’s his 29 minute video explaining his feat. Or, if you’d like to avoid the general description of what this means, you could start at this point 11 minutes in.

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

People remember the DK Rap, the theme song from Donkey Kong 64 back on the Nintendo 64. It’s certainly memorable, and arguably iconic, although most would agree it’s not great as a rap? It was written by George Andreas (who wrote and sang the lyrics) and Grant Kirkhope (who composed the music).

We’re referred to it before here in a Sunday Sundry about brentalfloss’ excellent (but very dark) 2018 parody version, which kept most of the music the same. Well here’s an update that’s changes the music and lyrics, with the music from original composer Kirkhope, and the words written and sung by rapper Substantial, and by all rights it’s a much better song. Hear for yourself (3 minutes), it’s (puts on monocle) remarkably funky:

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Which is it precisely? Look, when you write a daily blog you don’t have time to hunt up Japanese legal records. What is important though is that this is why Nintendo doesn’t have the rights to just rerelease arcade Donkey Kong willy-nilly. To date, they have used it once since the classic arcade era: an inclusion in the N64 Rare title Donkey Kong 64. Mind, there has been an Arcade Archives release from Hamster; I presume they got the rights from both Nintendo and Ikegami Tsushinki. It’s for this reason that Nintendo almost always presents NES Donkey Kong in compilations, which is similar but differs from the arcade game in many important ways.

Hirohisa Komanome was one of the people at that company that worked in concert with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, and several other employees of Ikegami Tsushinki, to complete the design and implement Donkey Kong from Miyamoto’s notes, finishing it in only around three months. Donkey Kong came out in July of 1981, meaning it was probably began around the beginning of the year. The quickness of their work would prove to be essential: remember, the American arcade industry collapsed in 1983, when many promising games would be abandoned or released to greatly diminished profits. If Donkey Kong had been released a little later, it may not have become such a fondly remembered hit.

Kate Willaert commissioned the translation by Alex at Shumplations of an article written by Hirohisa Komanome that was published in 1997 in the Japanese publication bit. It’s up on their site here. Given that Nintendo tends to be very tight-lipped when letting their employees talk to the press, it’s probably good for us that Donkey Kong was implemented by an outside company, or else this account of the game’s creation may never have seen print, or our eyes.

Donkey Kong: A Record of a Struggle translated into English (shmuplations.com)

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Six years ago brentalfloss did a parody video of the infamous “DK Rap” from the opening of Donkey Kong 64, updated for the times. It’s hilarious, but also disturbing and sad. Summary: Donkey Kong became a gun nut, Diddy is a MRA incel jerk, because of Tiny bees are dying out, Lanky’s the reason this video is NSFW, and Chunky’s… well, you can find out for yourself.

It’s all pretty saddening, but truthfully in line with how game culture has gotten worse over the years too. Ah well, at least Parappa’s still good and pure!

DK Rap 2018, “Where are they now” (brentalfloss on Youtube, 4 minutes)

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On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

We’ve not done Romhack Thursday for a while. As the winds of the ‘net, and my attention, blow around randomly, sometimes there’s more things that seem worthy of posting than others. This one definitely fits the bill though.

We’ve posted about 10yard’s intriguing Donkey Kong hacks Galakong and Vector Kong before. I don’t think they’re actually hacks in the classic sense of the term, modifications of a game’s software intended to run on its original hardware, or at least an emulation or simulation of it. Galakong might, and Vector Kong definitely does, rely on Lua support in MAME to produce, respectively, a version of Donkey Kong where Mario teams up with the ship from Galaga, and another version of Donkey Kong limited to the Girders stage, a.k.a. Ramps, but with sharp colorful line-drawn artwork akin to that produced by Atari’s later Vectorscan monitors.

10yard let us know that they have produced a front-end to a variety of Donkey Kong romhacks, 90 in total. It runs on Windows an Raspberry Pi, although if it runs on the latter I suppose it must also be possible to get it to work on Linux? Maybe?

It’s not just a front end though. It presents all of its mods through an interface that itself plays like Donkey Kong! You move Mario around the levels of the classic arcade game (they’re connected vertically), and each is littered with arcade machines. You can play them with coins collected them as DK rolls them through the boards, and also earned by getting good scores in each game. Collecting more coins not only gives you more chances to play, but it unlocks further games in the collection.

You download the package from the Github page linked above. You must also provide the MAME-compatible romsets for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong 3. (It might work without without all of them, but fewer games will be available.) Of course, it’s up to you to rip, or otherwise provide, those files. If you provide them, it’ll handle all the patching for you automatically. It even includes its own custom version of MAME to play them.

Both Galakong and Vector Kong are among the hacks provided, but there’s so much more to see and play besides those, including Halloween, Christmas and Doctor Who themes hacks. There’s really too many to mention here, and I’ve only started unlocking games myself. I’ll leave you with the closing link, and some screenshots of the hacks included that I’ve managed to unlock so far.

DKAFE (by 10yard, for Windows and Raspberry Pi, on Github)

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Most of the posts by weight recently have concerned the lawsuit by Billy Mitchell to force Twin Galaxies to retain his scores in Donkey Kong, which as the evidence mounts up against him, much of it recounted on the blog, became increasingly unlikely to prevail. According to the blog, there are several major discrepancies in the footage he provided of his scores, that made it evident that they were produced in MAME, which for various reasons disqualifies them for the category he was aiming for. That evidence is recounted on this subpage, but among the most telling is that Donkey Kong’s software draws its levels in a way that interacts with the CRT redraw to produce, on arcade hardware, a couple of frames where the boards are incompletely drawn in a distinctive way, that is not evident in Mitchell’s tapes.

By this point Mitchell’s name seems to be mud in classic gaming circles, so presumably coverage of this topic is nearing its end on their blog. That’s probably for the best, as their other major beat is covering gaming challenges that Twin Galaxies offers bounties on, like escaping Midgar in FFVII without using Materia, or getting as many Gold Skulltulas as a player can in Ocarina of Time without taking damage. That’s the kind of gaming geekery we can get behind!

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Exploring the World of Nintendo Manga (Youtube, 20 minutes)

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Whether it’s intentional or not, if you ask Dall-E to depict a number of classic video game characters or elements, it’ll show itself to be surprisingly clueless. Here’s what I got from it:

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Another LUA-based game hack from 10yard! This one’s a mashup of two perennial arcade favorites, Galaga and Donkey Kong. Each level has a chevron powerup somewhere in it. When Jumpman picks it up, he’s joined by the spaceship from Galaga. The jump button is also the fire button! Further, the ship’s shots are piercing, and can destroy more than one enemy with a single blast.

You’d think it’d make the game much easier, but the difficulty of the game has been subtly increased to make up for it, plus controlling the ship as well as ol’ Jumpy is a distraction, so it’s still pretty challenging.

In addition to Donkey Kong, the hack’s github page notes that it works in Donkey Kong Jr. as well!

Galakong (github)

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Vector Kong is not a romhack of Donkey Kong. Instead, it’s a LUA script, run through MAME’s plugin support, that makes the graphics display as if they were on a vector monitor.

It doesn’t leave the game unaltered otherwise: the only boards playable are Girders, and it also skips over the scene at the opening. Still though, it definitely looks sharp! Here’s hoping creator 10yard applies this treatment to the rest of it someday!

Vector Kong (github)

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Let’s make it quick this week-

Oli Welsh at Polygon tells us what we already knew, that No Zelda Game is Closer to Breath of the Wild Than The 1986 Original. We can’t recommend it whole-heartedly though because it gets in some digs on the older game, saying it’s nowhere near as much fun as Link to the Past, a statement I disagree with.

Hope Bellingham at GamesRadar tells us that U.S. Customs wrecked a sealed-in-box copy of Pokemon Yellow valued at over $10,000. I rather disagree with that valuation too. I thought all the misguided young people were losing their money in crypto these days? (Note: GamesRadar is one of those sites that waits until you start reading an article then puts up a blocking box begging you to subscribe. Hint to GamesRadar: NO, and if I were interested in subscribing my generous impulse would have been destroyed by your prompt!)

At the Guardian, the very British-named Oliver Wainwright reviews Super Mario World, not the game but the theme park in California, a part of Universal Studios Hollywood. The verdict: 8/10, good graphics, some replay value. I’ve been in a melancholy frame of mind as of late, so seeing those brightly-painted dioramas makes me wonder what they’ll look like in twenty years, when Universal Studios’ attentions have drifted to another big thing. Nothing ages quite as badly as a happy prop painted in primary colors.

I said I was going to make this quick, let’s keep moving. Maya Posch at hackaday talks about a project to build a Commodore 64 using new parts.

Ollie Reynolds found some Donkey Kong design documents on Twitter, from the days when it was planned to be a Popeye game. He found them retweeted by blogfriend Mike Mika of Digital Eclipse, who in turn found them looking through Mario history site Forest of Illusion.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Quite a bit to get through today! Pull up a florb and moop for a bit!

Luke Plunkett at Kotaku informs us of Nintendo pulling support from the third-party tournament Smash World Tour, leaving them in a gigantic financial hole. This will severely harm tournaments’ willingness to trust Nintendo in the future, and the esports scene around future Nintendo products. Nintendo’s response at the end is especially frustrating, claiming they did not request any events be cancelled while still denying SWT a license, forcing them to cancel anyway.

Benj Edwards at Ars Technica: an AI from Nvidia can play Minecraft now, performing tasks based on text prompts. Congrats, you’ve invented a 10-year-old!

After our initial post, I’ve purposely been trying not to talk up the Super Mario Bros. movie, but I do think this post from Ryan Leson at IGN is of interest, about Shigeru Miyamoto noting that Donkey Kong’s been a bit redesigned for the movie, still recognizably the Rare-made version of the character, but with some adjustments to more resemble the original version.

Here’s Rich Stanton at PC Gamer on the effort to preserve a Ridge Racer Full Scale, a version of the arcade game that featured an actual car chassis the player would sit it, had triple ultra-wide display, and cost operators $250,000. Very few were sold, and it’s possible only one survives, which was in Blackpool. After an arcade museum sought to purchase it, but refused when they learned of damage to the frame, it was thought lost, but although the physical structure of the unit has not been salvageable, the car portion and the hardware have been saved, and its code dumped. More can be read at Arcade Blogger.

Richael Watts at Rock Paper Shotgun has a piece up on Dabloontok, an RPG-ish thing a bunch of people are doing on TikTok, involving cat videos trading an imaginary currency called “dabloons.” This isn’t imaginary in the sense of crptocurrency, or indeed all money when you think about it; this is really imaginary. How many you have is completely on the honor system. Participants use it to “trade” with these cats, and they can also be “stolen” by them. The whole thing seems pretty silly overall, but it’s entertaining to learn about!

And at Engadget, I. Bonifacic remarks upon Pong turning 50 years old. Yeah, that number isn’t getting any smaller. It’s a useful retrospective, although I take issue with them saying that without Pong Nintendo would not exist. Nintendo is over a century old, originally making playing cards. What is more likely is they wouldn’t exist as we know them today-they may not have gotten into video games at all. (By the way, they make traditional Japanese game playing equipment too, like go boards!)

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This is a real rarity. Saturday Supercade has, to my knowledge, never been officially released on any media format. All of the tapes of this show date back to their original broadcasts in 1983-5. I’m sorry for the poor quality, but this is from a tape almost certainly recorded off of live television nearly 40 years ago.

The year 1983 was such a weird time in media history. Take for instance the movie Joysticks. A cheaply-made culture cash-in, essentially the Supervan of its decade, it was a teen sex comedy themed around arcades, and it could only have been released in 1983. In 1982 games were big, but it takes time for a movie to be made. In 1984, US arcades and consoles had crashed calamitously, and any projects in production would have been cancelled. Saturday Supercade also dates from 1983.

Saturday Supercade was a Saturday morning cartoon show that hosted a variety of different game characters and universes. By no means a classic of animation, there’s still a lot of interesting things about it. Donkey Kong gives Mario and Pauline their modern names (decided on around the time of Donkey Kong Jr’s arcade release), and Donkey Kong is voiced by legendary early TV children’s entertainer Soupy Sales.

Frogger is depicted by the show as a reporter for a swamp’s newspaper. Q*Bert is a student in a 50s-styled high school, and other characters (including a girl Q*Bert, “Q*Tee,” not seen in the game) are imagined as his friends and rivals. Donkey Kong Jr has the young ape searching for his father, while assisted by a greaser. Pitfall’s cartoon is not only the sole home-original game to be featured on the show, but also lent two of its characters, Pitfall Harry’s niece Rhonda and mountain lion pet Quickclaw, to cameo roles in the game’s sequel Pitfall II: Lost Caverns. Kangaroo and Space Ace were introduced in the show’s second season. Yes, somehow, it got a second season.

The Wikipedia page of the show notes that episodes of Space Ace were once shown late at night on Cartoon Network, and once in a while can be spotted between shows on Boomerang, while “The Best of Q*Bert” is available as a print-on-demand DVD from Amazon. Other than that, many episodes are lost outside of master reels held by whatever company owns Ruby-Spears’ output these days, which I expect is Warner Media. There’s tons of Saturday Morning shows that are lost; this one only survives to us in any form because classic video games have oddly persisted in this weird cultural cul-de-sac, the same one that made Wreck-It-Ralph an improbably hit for Disney.

So please, enjoy, or else, experience whatever substitute for enjoyment you can bring yourself to feel while watching an old old kids cartoon from the classic arcade era. Queasiness? Unease? Existential dread?

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It’s a great article! It starts out covering the classic-era games everyone remembers, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Mario Bros., and then slowly gets less and less well-known. It even mentions the two Gottlieb pinball games!

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

From Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at The Verge. More news on Billy Mitchell, retro game record holder and villain of King of Kong. Now, in addition to having his Donkey Kong record stripped from him then reinstated, he has been accused by forensics experts of having used MAME to achieve two of his Donkey Kong scores that were represented as coming from arcade hardware. It has to do with differences between how MAME and the arcade machine build their game playfields for display when a level begins. It’s interesting reading! Mitchell has sued Twin Galaxies over defamation over how he achieved his records, which this evidence could play a role in.

At NicheGamer, Fingal Belmont presents a list of 24 3DS games to get before its eShop closes. There are ways to get new software on a 3DS after the store closes, but they aren’t legal means, and won’t get any income to the games’ creators, and we all want that!

Ryan Gilliam writing for Polygon tells us that Velma in the WB Smashlike Multiversus no longer “calls the cops” on opponents, instead bringing in her friends’ van the Mystery Machine to carry them off. To explain: Velma has a special game mechanism where her opponents sometimes drop clues when they perform attacks. If Velma can collect enough of them, it summons a vehicle (formerly the police, now the van) to cart that opponent away.

It’s at Kotaku that Ashley Bardham reports that Twitch is ending their “Host Mode” feature. Through this feature, a channel that isn’t stream itself can choose to host another stream, a loved feature that enables one channel to “raid” another, granting them all its viewers. Twitch says the feature is going away on October 3.

Blogfriend Benj Edwards writing at Ars Technica informs us of a new coding font by Idrees Hassan based off of the typeface used in Minecraft. It’s an OpenType font called Monocraft, so it should work in Windows, macOS and Linux, and it’s available here.

Andy Chalk writing through PC Gamer explains that Crystal Dynamics has managed to reclaim ownership of the Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain franchises after Square Enix let them go, and Eidos Montreal owns the Deus Ex and Thief series.

And at VG247, Alex Donaldson tells us of an Indiegogo project to make an updated version of the Dreamcast’s iconic VMU memory cards. The updated devices will be compatible with the Dreamcast and the original cards, which had an LCD screen that could run simple games, and could even be connected to each other to trade information, but will have more powerful hardware and better screen resolution. The project is here.

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The website Donkey Kong Hacks has a number of interesting modifications of the original Donkey Kong arcade game. Some of these are intended for use in training, such as Free Run Edition (which removes all the enemies and deadly obstacles) and Skipstart (begins play at maximum difficulty). There are versions that only contain randomly-selected versions of the Girders (a.k.a. Barrels) screen, versions that change the maps, and more. Some, like Donkey Kong Wizardry, change the graphics and change the cutscenes too! The Readme for the Crazy Barrels version explains how to play these hacks in emulators.

There are other fan-made hacks floating around, some available as installable kits from the site DK Remix. Deranged Edition keeps getting harder after difficulty level 5, and Remix and Christmas Remix change the game up a lot, adding alternate maps, bonus stages, and some Rivets stages that fall apart as you remove rivets.

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