Donkey King
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Donkey King is one of those shameless Donkey Kong clones, for systems that never received an official port. For those that don't know Nintendo's original, it is the first game where Mario appears, and one of the earliest platformers. On each level, high up on a building site, Mario must climb his way up to the big ape and free a damsel in distress. The giant ape throws obstacles which Mario must avoid, in addition to the hostile environment containing fires and conveyor belts. Donkey King has all the stages of the original Donkey Kong, known here as the Barrels, Pins, Jacks and Conveyor screens. It has even retained the cut scenes and the hair style of Mario's beloved.
A feature unique to this version is the option to play in three different colour modes: green, buff or black and white.
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Average score: 66% (based on 3 ratings)
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Average score: 2.6 out of 5 (based on 6 ratings with 1 reviews)
Probably the best arcade transfer to either Dragon or Co-Co- official or not.
The Good
Whilst the Dragon and especially the Co-Co had their fair share of official various coin-op conversions, this one is probably the closest copy of any arcade game. Microdeal changed the name because it is a ridiculously close copy of the Nintendo original. Considering that they were successfully sued over Cuthbert in the Jungle by Activision, it shows just how close this game is to the original 4 level game.The collision detection is excellent, the control lends itself to potentiometer joysticks commonly used by the Dragon and Co-Co machines, whilst the sound is an excellent use of the machine's capabilities. A perfectly pitched conversion.
The Bad
Presented with the usual choice of Dragon colour sets, unless you are using a color artifacted TANO Dragon, or NTSC Co-Co, its either monochrome black/white or 4 colour green/red/blue/yellow, as the buff colour set is basically unusable, inducing headaches in seconds. It works well in both these sets, but the BW monochrome color set can also be produced as a black/green color set, which would have been lovely to see.
The Bottom Line
Its Donkey Kong. On a Dragon. And its charmingly good, even if you are used to superior machines.
Dragon 32/64 · by drmarkb (105) · 2015
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Game added by Игги Друге.
Game added September 28, 2006. Last modified March 7, 2023.