Pretty interesting to go back to actually playing some of the earlier examples of an actual video game amongst the sea of pretty much a mess of a medium by that time, Donkey Kong is iconic and remembered by many, but does it hold up as A Video Game decades past? Well, kinda...?

Donkey Kong is an arcade game for sure, it is excruciatingly difficult and made to run your pockets at the arcade machines so you'd have to put in coins to get more and more credits, it's a tactic for sure games like these pulled very intentionally and it introduces a very thick layer of competitiveness to go for high scores against others. The game itself is fine, the controls to move Mario (then known as "Jumpman") are very stiff and it has a very unfair fall damage system that requires you to make your jumps precisely as a fall of little height and be game over, but it sorta makes up for the limited variety of levels that make you use them in different ways, some of these are mainstays of gaming even nowadays as they're referenced in Every Pop Culture Thing Ever, so it's nice seeing the source material for an extended period of time.

It gets boring after a few loops, once you've played those four levels you have indeed played 1981's own original Donkey Kong, and that's fine. This game is just fine.