Friday, June 26, 2020

Game #8: Donkey Kong Junior (Aug. 1982)

Background

Developer: Nintendo R&D1, Iwasaki Engineering
Publisher: Nintendo
Debut: Aug 1982 (JP)
Platform: Arcade

Home Ports: NES, Famicom and Famicom Disk System, Atari 2600/7800/8-bit PCs, ColecoVision/Adam, Intellivision, BBC Micro, Virtual Console, and probably 10,000 others I'm forgetting.

Highs and Lows

From the outside looking in, Nintendo often seems to have no idea what it's doing. From sticking with cartridges on the N64 instead of switching to the (admittedly easier to pirate) CD-ROM format, to the bumbling transition from Wii to Wii U, to everything about the Virtual Boy, to its reliance on Friend Codes for online play on the Switch, the "Big N" has plenty of misses. We forgive it, though, because its hits are home runs.


There's another reason I and countless other Nintendo diehards give it a pass: More than most other video game publishers, developers, and hardware manufacturers, Nintendo has shown a willingness, even an eagerness, to experiment. Look no further than Donkey Kong Junior, a follow-up to its seminal Donkey Kong game. Donkey Kong Junior could have been an easy cash-in. Build four or more stages for Mario--then Jumpman--to run and jump around in, have Donkey Kong kidnap poor Pauline again, and watch the quarters flow. Instead, upstart designer Shigeru Miyamoto turned almost everything about his breakout classic on its head. For starters, Mario is the villain, and he's dastardly.

(Shigeru Miyamoto famously classified Mario and friends as actors able to play the wide variety of roles in which he casts them. I like that analogy, but could you imagine Mario being the big bad today? It would never happen. Of course, I'm writing this in 2020, the Year of Ugly and Awful Things, so a monkey's paw lying forgotten in one of Miyamoto's desk drawers probably just curled. Sorry in advance.)

The game begins with a cutscene showing two Marios trapping Donkey Kong in a cage and carrying him off, ostensibly to transport him back to the zoo so he'll stop wrecking construction sites and kidnapping women. (Some fans speculate that the second Mario may have served as the inspiration for Luigi, who made his debut in a game we'll discuss soon.) That leaves Donkey Kong Junior, the big ape's diapered kiddo, to save his papa.

Donkey Kong Junior comprises four stages, but with major changes to Donkey Kong's critically and commercially successful formula. You'll do some running and jumping as Junior, and I'll get to why that's the weakest part of the game soon. Kiddie Kong distinguishes himself from his dad by going back to the platforming genre's roots: Climbing.

We know from the genre's earliest games that climbing went hand in hand with running; jumping didn't arrive on the scene until later. Donkey Kong Junior's stages resemble jungles more than construction sites, with vines hanging from treetops and other platforms that Junior can use to reach Mario, who holds Donkey Kong prisoner at the top of each board. Donkey can shimmy up one vine at a time, or stretch to grab an adjacent vine and shoot upward and double speed. Climbing down also comes in two flavors: grab two vines and descend at the same speed, or stick to one and slide down twice as fast.

This variety in climbing speeds feeds into Donkey Kong Junior's more puzzle-oriented composition. Mario climbed ladders in the first game, but spent most of his time jumping over barrels, fireballs, and pits. In Donkey Kong Junior, you climb, descend, and move across vines while avoiding enemies: some that climb up and down to get at you, others that fly at varying altitudes while dropping eggs. You'll spend most of your time clutching a vine or two and scooting up, down, and from side to side to avoid obstacles while making your way across screens to areas that lead to the top of the screen and the passage to the next stage.

Figuring out the safest route to the top is the highlight of Donkey Kong Junior. While the first game centered on execution--run and jump your way to the top--this follow-up wants you to plan and then execute. No plan survives the battlefield: You can stand around observing the birds on stage two as long as you need, learning when and where they'll descend, and how often they'll drop eggs. Nintendo also evolved fruit from optional items worth a few extra points, the role apples and bananas and other sugary goodies have played in platformers into weapons. Touching a fruit earns you points and causes it to drop. Time your movements well, and you can drop fruit on enemies, buying yourself a temporary reprieve before Mario unleashes a new minion to take its place.

Inevitably, you'll find yourself in the thick of vines, frantically moving from one to the other and climbing and descending to dodge them as you inch your way to the right and, finally, up to the platform where Mario awaits. The game shines at this junction: You've finally reached the top and are as proud of the way you devised to get there as you are of executing your plan and adapting to the chaos that awaits at the top of most stages.

The less time you spend with your feet on the ground, the better. Platforming is the weakest part of Donkey Kong Junior. Fortunately, three of the four stages favor climbing, but the third is heavy on running and jumping, which combines with a franticness to enemy population and movement patterns that proves too much to handle. But there's more wrong with the platforming than The game's namesake moves stiffly, just like Mario in the previous game, but that's more detrimental here, and I needed time to understand why. The answer, as games historian and Nintendo expert Jeremy Parish reveals in episode 20 of his "NES Works" series documenting the chronological release of NES games, lies in sprite proportions.

In short, Junior is wider than Mario. As he should be. He's an ape, and Nintendo gave him an aptly stooped posture as he stands and walks. His dimensions are problematic, however, because they make judging distance difficult. Junior's width and reach often fools you into thinking he can clear a gap when he can't, or that a vine is in reach when it isn't. It's a problem so subtle that most players might not put their finger on why the game feels slightly off. I couldn't, and I've been playing platforms since my single-digit years.

The game suffers from a few smaller issues that add up to a larger problem. Namely, Donkey Kong Junior spans only four stages. Once you finish them, you cycle through them again and again until you run out of quarters or interest. (Seeing Mario die by falling from the top of the last stage to the ground with a halo above his head is a shock the first time it happens, though.)

Climbing, while the game's greatest strength, is a tad cumbersome. You've got to tap the joystick--or your d-pad, depending on how you play--to move not just from vine to vine, but to stretch out and grip an adjacent vine so Junior can climb or descend two at once. I'm not audacious enough to suggest a better method, but sometimes you'll know what you need to do but won't have the reflexes or wrist power to tap-tap-tap your way across vines to pull it off.

Donkey Kong Junior the Wii U of Nintendo's early platformers. Hey, I loved my Wii U! I'd put its first-party lineup against those of the Xbox One and PS4 any day of the week. It differed from the Wii… kind of. Not different enough. Same deal with Donkey Kong Junior. Its highs, namely figuring out what to do and pulling it off, are higher than Nintendo's and Shigeru Miyamoto's first success, but it lacks the freshness and easy-to-pick-up gameplay of its monolithic predecessor.

One More Thing

I'm a historian by nature, so I can't move on from Donkey Kong Junior without putting the game into a historical context. In short, Junior was almost as litigious as the first game, in which Nintendo became embroiled in a lawsuit filed by Universal Studios claiming Nintendo had ripped off the movie studio's King Kong character and concept.

The legal scuffle around Donkey Kong Junior isn't nearly as well known, probably because Nintendo would prefer to keep it buried. Through the '70s and '80s, a Japanese company called Ikegami Tsushinki manufactured arcade games for Nintendo. Ikegami and Nintendo signed an eight-game contract. Per the agreement, Ikegami would develop and manufacture arcade games, and Nintendo could pass them off as its own creations. The first title Ikegami's engineers made was Radar Scope, which took off in Japan but flopped in the United States. Left with a warehouse full of unsold hardware, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi ordered Nintendo of America president (and Yamauchi's son-in-law) Minoru Arakawa to come up with a new game to use all those cabinets and monitors.

From here, Nintendo's history diverges from actual history, as it often does. Nintendo touts Shigeru Miyamoto as the brain behind Donkey Kong, and that's true. He designed its characters, artwork, and gameplay, but he didn't program it. The onus for that fell on Ikegami, since it had the tech and knowhow to write games. Six of Ikegami's engineers--credited under the names Komonora, Iinuma Minoru, Nishida Mitsuhiro, Murata Yasuhiro, Shigeru Kudo and Kenzo Sekiguchi--followed Miyamoto's design and got the job done, and Ikegami sold Nintendo between 8,000 and 20,000 PCBs, the circuit board that plugs into arcade cabinets.

Back in the '80s, before publishers and developers publicized the programmers, artists, designers, and musicians behind their game, programmers had the habit of leaving signatures in the games they made. A secret room in Adventure for the Atari 2600 in which the sole programmer arranged colored blocks to spell out his name may be the most famous. Ikegami's engineers would engrave their names in the tile sets of some games, or leave a text message. In Donkey Kong, they wrote CONGRATULATION !IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU.*****TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN 044(244)2151 EXTENTION 304 SYSTEM DESIGN IKEGAMI CO. LIM.

Nintendo made 80,000 copies of Donkey Kong's PCB without permission, likely to meet overwhelming demand for the game in Japan and the US. Here's where the story gets slippery. Donkey Kong was not part of the contract between Nintendo and Ikegami. I'm not exactly sure why, but my guess is because the game originated from Radar Scope. Whatever the reason, it slipped through the cracks, and because it wasn't explicitly named in that contract, Ikegami kept the game's source code. That's why Nintendo cloned the PCB board: Its developers had no other way to access the code that made Donkey Kong tick.

Donkey Kong's success moved Nintendo to call for a sequel. The problem was it had no way to make such a game in-house. Then and now, sequels often involved taking the first game's source code and repurposing it--adding new systems, new artwork, and so on--into a "new game." Think Zelda: Majora's Mask and every Call of Duty after 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Ha, ha! Just kidding! Mostly.) Rather than ask Ikegami to fulfill another game in its contract, Nintendo hired a contractor by the name of Hiroji Iwasaki to reverse-engineer Donkey Kong and work it into a follow-up. Shigeru Miyamoto crafted the game's design and got help from in-house artist and future Metroid co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto to finish up the artwork.

This process grants Donkey Kong Junior two distinctions: it was the first game made entirely in-house at Nintendo; and yet not entirely in-house, since Nintendo blatantly and unabashedly ripped off Ikegami's code to make it. Ikegami was less than pleased by this, as you'd expect, and sued Nintendo in 1983 for copyright infringement to the tune of 580,000,000 yen. Ikegami's basis for the lawsuit was that it owned the code for Donkey Kong, and yes, it totally did. The legal brawl lasted until 1990, when the companies settled out of court. No one knows the terms of the settlement, but another trial that same year concluded that Nintendo did not own the code for Donkey Kong.

Ikegami is still around as a manufacturer from equipment used in professional settings such as broadcast cameras and TV monitors. Its executives talk little about the company's work with Nintendo during those troubling early years. Perhaps because they would rather focus on more modern success stories, and/or because the terms of the settlement forbid it. Either way, Ikegami has unbreakable ties to Nintendo's success.


Score

Graphics: 4/5. Colorful and more varied than Donkey Kong's. The technology (or lack thereof) of the day worked in the game's favor: Platforms and vines stand out against the plain black backdrop, so there's never any confusion over where you should go or what you can climb.
Gameplay: 3/5. The puzzle-focused design sets Donkey Kong Junior apart from big daddy, but there are only four stages and the controls make navigating them less fun than figuring out how to navigate them.
Sound: 3/5. A few tunes and good effects such as the thunder-like boom of Junior landing on platforms. Nothing memorable aside from that, but all sounds serve the gameplay, and I'm all about that.
Overall: 3/5. Inventive but ultimately falls flat. If the controls were tighter, I'd probably prefer this over Donkey Kong.

Ranking

This list is subjective, based on my experiences. I also can't promise I'll expand this ranking to include every platformer ever made. It may be simpler, and fairer, to rank platformers within the same "generation" of releases. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Without further ado, here are my rankings as of this entry. Click a game's title to read its review.
1.      Donkey Kong
2.      Ponpoko
3.      Kangaroo
4.      Donkey Kong Junior
5.      Jump Bug
6.      Space Panic
7.      Canyon Climber
8.      Crazy Climbers

References cited in this chapter:

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Friday, June 19, 2020

Game #7: Ponpoko (Nov. 1982)

Background

Developer: Sigma Enterprises
Publisher: Sigma Enterprises (JP), Venture Line (NA)
Debut: Nov. 1982 (JP), Jan '83 (NA)
Platform: Arcade
Home Ports: N/A

Tacky

Ponpoko marks a rare occurrence in these reviews. It's the first platformer I've played in the genre's chronology that originated in arcades and never made its way to home systems. If you want to play it from the comfort of your living room or desk, you must download MAME or another arcade emulator (are there others? I honestly have no idea).

It's also significant for me as the second video game property to feature a tanuki, the first in my experience being Super Mario Bros. 3. My love for Japan's raccoon-dog hybrid dates back to 1989 when my grandparents bought me SMB 3 for Christmas and I first witnessed Mario and Luigi donning a tanuki suit, which let them fly--same as the leaf power-up--and transform into a stone statue that rendered them invincible for a few seconds. You could also bop baddies with your tail. That statue bit seems incongruous unless you understand the lore of the bake-danuki, a breed of tanuki chronicled in Japanese folklore and immortalized as stone statues found throughout Japan.

Another fun fact: Ponpoko is an onomatopoeia for the sound a tanuki makes! What's not to love about tanuki?!

Anyway. Ponpoko, named after its titular tanuki player-character, isn't as multifaceted as Mario's suit, but you still do all the things you'd expect a platformer to allow by this stage of the genre's evolution. You run, you jump, and you climb ladders in your quest to gather fruit sprinkled over platforms guarded by animals and riddled with tacks and pits. Clear all fruit from the board, and you proceed to the next stage.

You know the drill by now, but Ponpoko holds your interest through fast and responsive controls and its functionality as a Trojan horse: Ponpoko is a puzzle game disguised as a platformer. The animals patrolling each platform do not respond to your actions. They move back and forth, leaving you to figure out when and how to maneuver around them to grab fruit and continue upward. You've also got two types of jumps at your disposal, a running leap that carries you further but feels floatier than the faster but shorter stationary jump, good for skipping over pits and tacks, and you must master these intricacies to call on the right move at the right time.

A timer ticks down, and you need to pick up all that fruit before it expires. You want to be cautious, but not slow, since getting stuck behind a slow-moving enemy wastes precious seconds. The rate of enemy movement never changes, so you must factor things such as whether to approach an animal from behind or from its front, and its speed relative to yours. Finally, there are pots that contain either bonus fruit or a snake that moves at an excruciatingly slow pace, further holding you up if you get stuck behind it.

Ponpoko's complexity lies in its combination of these variables: enemy placement and how they move, the positions of fruit and traps, and deciding whether to break open pots and risk a snake emerging or ignoring them. I cannot stress enough the glacial pace at which these buggers slither around. It's the worst, but that's intentional.

Unleashing a snake on a platform inhabited by a normal enemy/animal forces you to rethink how you'll navigate their terrain given their varying speeds, and you'll usually lose several seconds waiting for a snake or regular animal or both to get the heck out of your way.

Playing Ponpoko is fun, but the downside is the levels never change. Everything about the first stage, for instance, remains static: the platforms, the positions of enemies and traps and fruit and pots, where enemies move and how fast they move there. This means a stage won't give you much trouble when you replay it, assuming you remember the optimal route around animals. But enemies moving at the same rate means there's really only one solution to a level.

Some areas are inaccessible until a bug moves beyond a certain point, such as platforms with a piece of fruit on the far left and a ladder leading to the next platform on the far right. Missing a step is like missing the train or bus to work. The next ride is due in a few seconds, not nearly enough time to do anything other than stand around and wait for it to pull up.

Pots present an opportunity to cut down on each level's play time. Remember, their contents never change. If the third pot on the left side of the second platform on level 5 contains a piece of fruit, it will always contain that piece of fruit. Since you're not dropping quarters into MAME, you could crack open every pot your first time through to memorize their contents, then only break open those that hold bonus fruit when you play. Or you could do what I did and just ignore pots. You earn bonus points for clearing a board quickly, so I concentrated on gathering fruit as fast as possible rather than risk upsetting slithering serpents, or worse, getting stuck behind one in traffic.

If this sounds like a major turnoff, it's not. Getting better-navigating stages faster--is a key factor in platformer games. Ponpoko's audiovisuals are lackluster, especially when compared to those of a certain 800-pound gorilla, but the responsiveness of controls and the fun challenge of improving as I played kept me coming back to this one more than any other game I've reviewed so far save for Donkey Kong.

And if I'm being honest, most of these primeval platformers suffered from repetition. We're still a few years away from the Mario game that cracked the genre wide open. Until then, Ponpoko is worth a download and your time. Its rudimentary presentation belies intricate controls and an addictive puzzle-oriented challenge that lays a foundation for future puzzle-platformers like Prince of Persia.

Score

Graphics: 2/5. Rudimentary bordering on ugly, but they get the job done.
Gameplay: 4/5. Repetitive at its core. But I have no problem overlooking that each time I lay hands on the controls and beat my top score.
Sound: 1/5. Hardly worth a mention.

Overall: 4/5. Ponpoko is a gem buried deep in the primordial ooze of platformers. Its relative rarity compared to the countless ports of games like Donkey Kong make it a novelty, but its (slightly more) complex gameplay elevates it above most competitors of its era.

Ranking

This list is subjective, based on my experiences. I also can't promise I'll expand this ranking to include every platformer ever made. It may be simpler, and fairer, to rank platformers within the same "generation" of releases. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Without further ado, here are my rankings as of this entry. Click a game's title to read its review.

*I thought I should explain why Crazy Climbers has occupied the last slot in my rankings since I debuted my little chart a few entries/chapters ago. Crazy Climbers is a fine game, but it's not really a platformer. I don't foresee it moving from this spot unless a terrible game comes along and gives it a boost.
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