Years and years and years ago, this 1001 list said we must play Donkey Kong, a title that pits Jumpman against Donkey Kong in a series of platform puzzles and boss fights. Ten years after its release, Nintendo gave it a makeover for the Game Boy Advance, and finally got around to naming the main character, Mario, in Mario vs. Donkey Kong.
What can ten years do to a game?
Fun Times
Don't be fooled, the Game Boy Advance isn't spewing out CGI video of DK here, rather a slideshow of pre-rendered footage showing him chilling in front of the television, bananas for days. Channel hopping, he spots an advert for the latest craze in toys, the Mini Mario.
Disaster! They're already sold out! What's DK to do? His ape brain starts crunching the gears and settles on the only option.
And that's your set up. DK has stolen the entire supply of Mini Mario toys, and it's up to regular Mario to get them all back, one by one, over a series of platform puzzles full of switches, jumps, enemies and collectables.
Blue and red switches turn elements of the level on and off, allowing you to access previously closed off areas, or walk over what was too large a gap. The A button will enable you to jump around, be it off the floor or off springs, and the B button lets you pick up objects and move and throw them around the stage.
Carry the key to the door before you run out of time and you're golden.
Once you find a Mini Mario, trapped in a bubble at the end of a stage, you can pick up him and free him from his presumably plastic prison, ending the level for good, where you're awarded bonuses for things you've collected, enemies you've knocked out and so on.
It really does play like Donkey Kong, albeit with much, much more detailed graphics. Arguably harder to see things, but definitely more interesting to look at. The abilities you had in the original game are present here as well, including fighting fire with hammers. And yes, the hammer does come with that piece of music too.
Each level introduces something new, with a short cutscene tutorial showing you how to pull it off. Ducking, swinging on wires, chucking trashcans up to higher levels... bit by bit your skills improve and the piece by piece, the stages evolve to test them.
There were moments where I had a minor brain freeze or ended up making the levels longer by hitting the wrong switch at the wrong time, but Mario vs. Donkey Kong is, so far at least, a simple game. Your brain won't be burning.
Strangely, perhaps, while some skills are shown upfront with video examples, others are only shown in Help blocks, including the handstand jumps. As far as quibbles and gripes go, this is incredibly minor. It's not like I lost minutes to not being able to jump up two blocks until I read the Help block.
The handstand has a few uses. If anything is falling from above, letting it hit your feet as you handstand results in some bonus points. Letting it hit your head as you walk normally results in a headache, and/or a lost life. Don't do that. Don't handstand to avoid falling objects, either. Wear a hard hat in dangerous environments.
Oh, and remember to push the bloody button to free the key as well.
The penultimate stage tasks you with guiding all the Mini Mario toys you've collected back into the toybox, ready for shipping, I suppose. They'll follow you left or right as best they can, jumping when able, but you'll need to shepherd them together and push the right buttons to see them all safely through the level.
The more Mini Marios you put into the toybox, the more hits you'll be able to take in the last stage, the boss fight with Donkey Kong himself. At this stage of the game, it's an easy affair: grab a trash can, jump up and throw it in his face. Later on, they'll get a little more involved, I'm sure.
That felt like an appropriate time to end Mario vs. Donkey Kong - I got the gist of it, I felt. It's just like the original, only updated with fancy graphics and stuff, right?
But the next world is the DK world... I wonder what you could get up to in that one?
Damn, Mario. You zip up those vines. You've been practising. Sadly, I'm busy today. You'll have to show off some other time.
Final Word
I'm not a massive fan of these kinds of puzzle platformers. Mario vs. Donkey Kong is a well-made puzzle-platformer, as you would expect, but unless you're desperate to play it, I'm not sure quite what pulling power it has.
It hasn't wowed me, but it's far from an awful game. If you need small chunks of gameplay on your bus ride each day, yeah, this could do the job. Provided you're on board with puzzle-platformers, which I'm not.
Will I play some more? Perhaps. Will I finish it? Probably not, even if it is a short, portable game. I just want to fill my time with something better.
How about you? Was this the tenth anniversary remake of your dreams, or just another Mario title?
Fun Facts
Donkey Kong Plus was in the works, complete with level design capabilities, but by the time a game was ready for release, it was in the form of Mario vs. Donkey Kong, where level-editing was removed, though still available in the code.
Mario vs. Donkey Kong, developed by Nintendo Software Technology, first released in 2004.
Version played: Game Boy Advance, 2004, via emulation.