Donkey Kong - 7/15/83

One of three games released on 7/15/83, Donkey Kong was part of the opening shots of the Famicom. Why not start out with an arcade classic? Donkey Kong is an enjoyable port of the arcade classic. The graphics are certainly nice, it has as many levels as most of the versions that came before it (no pie factory), and the sound is pretty decent. One thing that I missed was the "How High Can You Go?" screen. The opening of Donkey Kong carrying away Pauline was absent as well, but I figure something like that could get old pretty fast when you've got the game at home and can play all the "quarters" that you want. The option of choosing between "Game A" and "Game B" is something that many of the early releases had. Game A gives you Easy difficulty and Game B gives you hard. Nice option for people who got tired of playing through the easy levels. Of course, there is little motivation other than score to play through these old arcade style games, and when you still start at zero points on Game B...it's obviously harder to get the high scores. Overall, a solid first effort for a console.