PC-DOS (included game)

The Good
first game to ever play in my dad's PC on 1986

The Bad
By the time I got to play the game, when I compared it to my Amstrad CPC 6128 games, it was already surpassed.

The Bottom Line
Now no more than a relic, a precursor to 3rd person racing games, has no uses, not even to train your 3 year old how to press the space bar. There are better programs to do that nowdays.

The Good
As a way to waste a minute, Donkey is nice. The controls are very simple--just one button. That the game progresses in difficulty as you proceed is nice as well.

The Bad
There's really nothing to hold your attention. While the difficulty does increase as the game progresses, it resets every few donkeys, so it doesn't stay at all difficult. Furthermore, Donkey only has one goal, and that goal just isn't interesting enough to be worth pursuing for more than a minute or so.

The Bottom Line
While interesting as a look at what Bill Gates was doing back in 1981, Donkey just isn't good enough a game to merit more than a passing glance.

The Good
Most will probably agree when I say that its "historical significance" is the only thing about this game that might spark some interest. Before it had that, I don't know if there was any reason to play it at all. The thing is that if you're a PC gamer today, it's certainly a nice thing to take a minute and start up this program, for one simple fact alone: there's no other game that's closer to the birth of the IBM Personal Computer than this one.

Microsoft Adventure is known to be the first retail game sold for the IBM PC. But Donkey can be considered an even earlier PC game, for two reasons. On one hand, Microsoft Adventure has not been developed specifically for the PC, it was basically a conversion of the TRS-80 implementation. And on the other hand, Donkey was not a retail game, but an example program that came with Microsoft's Advanced BASIC interpreter, which came with Microsoft DOS, which was the official operating system bundled with the IBM Personal Computer. So while you might have bought Microsoft Adventure after getting a PC, Donkey was the first PC game for all buyers of an IBM PC, because it came with the system. Hence Donkey's place as the first PC program that only served entertainment purposes.

There's not much to say about the game itself, though. Three colors, one button to be pressed when your car is on collision course with a donkey. Given the concept, there's not much the designers could have done wrong, nor exceptionally well. The game is so simple to the point that you can't say what's good or bad about it anymore. It's like rating tap water.

The Bad
You'd be hard pressed to find a game with less replay value, or play value for that matter, anywhere. Every simple Flash game will occupy you longer than this.

The Bottom Line
If you've got nothing better to do, it can't hurt to give this game a go. MobyGames has a link to a page where you can not only find the source-code, but also a compiled, ready-to-enjoy EXE version. You'll be done downloading, running and playing it one minute from now. You haven't got much to lose, but maybe you will enjoy this blast from the very past.