Recently, I have been playing the original arcade version of Donkey Kong. I started playing it after watching King of Kong on G4. King of Kong is a documentary about the battle between Steve Weibe and Billy Mitchell for the Donkey Kong world record. It is a very entertaining film, but it takes many liberties when portraying the people and storyline linking them together. For instance, it makes Billy Mitchell out to be the villain and Steve Weibe to be the hero of the story, but in actuality it appears that both are nice guys that just really like a game of Donkey Kong (there is a bit of bad blood between them though). The film also seems to raise questions about the official videogame recordholder’s (Twin Galaxies) apparent bias towards Billy Mitchell whom they have had a long history with. However, After reading the official statement from Twin Galaxies, it is clear that the film has only been edited to make it appear that Twin Galaxies was biased, when they actually were very fair.
I have been playing Donkey Kong on my laptop using WolfMamePlus 0.106. There are more recent versions, but 0.106 is the official version that TwinGalaxies will accept record submissions for. I use it because it is probably the most stable GUI version of MAME available. I have played a lot of classic emulated games with my friends from college, and we had a ton of fun getting high scores in Geometry Wars on the Xbox 360, but I never actually played Donkey Kong for more than a few minutes total. I have found out that is not only a really challenging game to play, but it is really fun to figure out ways to survive in such a difficult game. New games are so much different from these classic ones, but they are not necessarily better. Classic arcade games are still a ton of fun to play, and in most cases they are much more challenging than current games.
In Donkey Kong, I am currently trying to teach myself how to get the highest possible score on the first level. I feel that this is a good place to begin challenging myself, because learning how to get good at the whole game will take much more time. However, getting a lot of points on the first level of Donkey Kong is proving to be a very difficult task. The levels are on a timer, and there are only so many barrels or flames to use for points. It seems that the key to getting your points up in the first level is the timing and use of the two hammers you are allowed to use. If I can learn how to get the maximum points out of the hammers on the first level, I might have a shot at it. The best I have done so far is 7000 points after using only the bottom hammer (I died while picking up the top hammer). The current record for points on the first level of Donkey Kong (*on MAME) is 11,300 by Joe Cain. I probably won’t beat that, but It is fun to try.
