XP Arcade: Donkey Kong 3

There is a whole lot of misinformation out there regarding Donkey Kong 3. There are claims that its commercial failure in North America caused the Donkey Kong series to be shelved for over a decade, even though ports of the arcade games were released for the Famicom and NES following Donkey Kong 3’s release in arcades — including DK3 itself — as well as a trio of original Donkey Kong Game & Watch handhelds. Donkey Kong’s absence from arcades had more to do with Nintendo’s own shift in focus to the Famicom and NES than anything: after Donkey Kong 3, Nintendo released Punch-Out!!, Super Punch-Out!!, and Arm Wrestling to arcades with dedicated cabinets, and from that point forward everything else in the 80s outside of distribution of Irem’s R-Type was a VS. System released designed to sell you on the concept of playing these games in your living room on a Famicom or NES, depending on your region. If all of that is Donkey Kong 3’s fault, then it’s even more powerful than its greatest supporters have realized.

The idea that Nintendo was distancing itself from Donkey Kong 3 is also a goofy one considering how much the Big N went in on its concept. The game released in arcades in October of 1983, and then was ported to the Famicom in July, 1984 and the NES in 1986. It had its own Game & Watch edition, which was different than the arcade game or console port in myriad ways, but was still attached to the name “Donkey Kong 3” and featured its protagonist, Stanley, instead of Mario. Hudson Soft developed a licensed sequel of sorts for Japanese computers, titled Donkey Kong 3: The Great Counterattack, that also utilized Stanley and once again had him fighting against Donkey Kong and his legions of insects intent on biting Stanley to death if not for his bug spray.

What’s much more likely is that Nintendo’s developers felt they had pushed the concept of Donkey Kong to the limits of what could be managed on the arcade hardware they were working with, and then as the teams began to focus more on what games should look like for consoles — and on Mario — no one figured out just what Donkey Kong should look like in that world until the early 90s. That’s when Rareware took on the task of making Donkey Kong into a 16-bit, scrolling 2D platformer with Donkey Kong Country, while an internal Nintendo team brought Donkey Kong ‘94 into the world on the Game Boy. Donkey Kong has always been just what Nintendo needed at the time, deployed as necessary to showcase hardware in the role of villain or hero, and that process was already in place by the time of Donkey Kong 3. DK was already flitting back and forth between those functions then: he was the villain of the original game bearing his name, in distress waiting to be rescued in the second, and back to being the villain again in the third.

Further proof of the idea that Nintendo was merely at the end of its arcade-based creativity with Donkey Kong at the time — and unsure of where to go with him in the console world just yet outside of ports of existing titles — was the switch in genre. Whereas the original Donkey Kong helped to usher in the age of the platformer, and its sequel Donkey Kong Jr. expanded on this idea with larger, more varied levels with even more obstacles to overcome, Donkey Kong 3 shifted focus to a smaller, closed setting, and, while it retained some platforming, had more in common with the likes of Galaga than its predecessors. And not just because of the bugs.

Donkey Kong 3 is a shooter and a platformer, with Stanley aiming his sprayer and his gaze ever upward at the foes being unleashed upon him in the greenhouse from above. Donkey Kong keeps convincing bugs to throw themselves at Stanley in waves so he can keep on hanging out in the greenhouses, both literally and figuratively, but if Stanley can spray DK enough to push him to the top of the screen — or kill every single bug in the level before time runs out — then Donkey Kong will have to move on to the next one and try again.

The list of Nintendo-developed shooting games is a short one. Sheriff, released in 1979, is a multidirectional shooter released in arcades. Solar Striker was an early Game Boy title co-developed by Nintendo R&D1 and Minakuchi Engineering, which was responsible for quite a few portable Mega Man games as well as Mega Man X3. As mentioned, Nintendo did distribute R-Type in arcades through a licensing deal — specifically, in North American arcades — but that was an existing game and a matter of regional publishing. There are shoot ‘em up-style levels in games like Super Mario Land as well as quite a few Kirby entries — including an entire STG nestled within Mass Attack — and Nintendo published Arika’s Metal Torrent as DSiWare in 2009 and 2010. There is also, of course, the series of on-rails shooters, Star Fox, which seems to have mostly scratched this particular itch for Nintendo for decades, even if it isn’t a more traditional shoot ‘em up. Donkey Kong 3 is part of that list, and while it’s non-traditional in that it is both a platformer and a vertically-oriented shooter, it’s certainly worthy of recognition within its genre.

Donkey Kong 3 gets one of the most important things about an STG, even all the way back in 1983 when the genre was only just basking in the glow of Namco’s Xevious. You can focus on your survival, being as careful as possible and using up as much of the time allotted to get things just right, or you can go all-in on the risk-taking route and focus on racking up the highest score possible in limited time. This is the case both your approach to taking care of the various insects that descend upon you and your platforms — shoot them all as they come down to eventually rid the level of them all, or just enough to avoid dying while you train fire on Donkey Kong — as well as with the plants at the bottom of the screen that you’re protecting from the bugs. As you get deeper into the game, though, these two behaviors begin to intertwine, as the insects are more complex with behaviors you really need to actively engage with — they are moving faster and with more planned, aggressive movements, and the act of protecting the plants is also the act of protecting yourself, as in either case the bugs are trying to end you.

Donkey Kong 3 starts out with quick level completion if you want to rack up the most points, not ignoring but being mostly ambivalent to the presence of enemies in order to focus on getting DK up the vines as quickly as possible for the largest time bonus at the end of the stage: this bonus is where a big chunk of your points comes from, not defeating individual insects, so if you care about scoring it’s imperative that you move fast. You can park yourself underneath Donkey Kong and continually jump upward while firing to create the least amount of time between shots fired and shots hitting their mark, and see the time bonus points roll in as DK makes a swift retreat. This approach and level speed changes as new enemies show up with interests beyond stealing the plants below: there are bugs that target you specifically, ones that leave revenge bullets when you defeat them and follow you around so that you must do so or die, insects that move faster including in targeted horizontal bursts meant to catch you unawares, and the caterpillars that continually crawl and block shots, then stay there in place, in pain, keeping you from successfully firing upward at Donkey Kong from that spot until they decide to get moving again.

There is a boosted big spray canister found near Donkey Kong, that you can get him to knock down once you’ve pushed him high enough up the vines he’s holding onto. When you grab it, your range and shot power are both boosted, so you can fire DK up the vines much faster and more easily than before without needing to position yourself not just in line with him but high enough up the platforms to reach with your blasts. Here’s the thing with the canister of superior spray, however: it’s limited, and another can of it doesn’t show up again until after you die. So, when you get one, if you can move quickly enough, you can get all the way through one stage and well into the next before it runs out, but after that you’re back to the basic spray range and power until you die and get another chance for DK to tip his doom over and into your hands.

There are different strategies you can take in Donkey Kong 3 as things get more complicated and simply cheesing your way through a level with unimpeded speed, or the boosted spray, are not options. The basic bug is worth just 100 points, but if you let it grab one of the plants and then shoot it down, it’ll net you 400 instead. There’s a danger to that approach, much like in letting the titular invaders get closer to the bottom of the screen in Space Invaders in order to maximize scoring even though their reaching the bottom is what you’re actively trying to avoid, as any time you let one of these bugs live there is a chance it will end up making contact with Stanley and ending your run — if he is touched by any insect, he goes down and you use up an extend. There is also the question of whether it’s worth the modest point upgrade when the persistence of the plants is the most important thing you can do for your score in Donkey Kong 3 — is it worth the risk of losing one for an additional 300 points? Especially when you lose when all the plants have been taken?

These plants, if they are all still at the bottom of the screen where they should be at the end of a stage, grant you points. You’ll receive 500 points per plant, with additional bonuses if you manage to have all the plants and not just some: 2,000 at first, until they fully bloom, in which case they are worth 5,000. Losing a plant resets that process not just in terms of losing out on bonus points, but on having to wait for them to grow to full size for the full bonus — you can see how this would add up in terms of lost opportunities for points, in a game where the most you can score off a single enemy is 700… and that enemy is a comparative rarity.

Between the plant bonuses and points awarded for time remaining, you should be able to pick up some extends, which are granted at progressively larger scoring intervals. You will end up needing them, too, as new enemy types with new strategies to counter are deployed along the way, and, eventually, Donkey Kong starts tossing coconuts down in every level and not just the specific, mostly-bug-free ones where you are aiming to get his head stuck in a hive to give him a taste of his own medicine and knock him from the vines entirely. Donkey Kong 3, at least in the arcades, goes from seeming overly simple and quick to fairly complicated in a hurry.

“At least in the arcades” is intentional wording there, since the NES port — which is the one that, until recently when the arcade edition made its way to Hamster’s Arcade Archives on the Nintendo Switch, is the one that was often reviewed retrospectively. And that is a much easier game that also lessens the need to climb high by cutting down on the number of platforms Stanley has to ascend to be able to reach Donkey Kong, by just cutting them out of the level entirely on occasion. It’s still a fun game, but the arcade iteration is the clearly superior offering if you want the game to avoid feeling repetitive or a little too simple, which were common critiques of its port as it started to arrive again via re-release in the modern age of digital distribution. The stakes are also lower, since points work differently: you get a flat 3,000 points for a “Perfect” round on the NES, as the plants have no cycle stages and are just grown from the start. With no potential pause in the maximum points that can be scored at the end of the level, there is less of a long-term drag on points in the NES port compared to the arcade original. That balance and tension is a significant part of what makes the game work as well as it does, so cutting into it hurts.

Outside of the level design changes that also impact the gameplay, the animation and coloring differences between the arcade edition and NES ports are stark. DK isn't nearly as expressive, and doesn't have as many animations, either. The arcade version has levels with backgrounds that make it clear you're in a greenhouse looking down at a ceiling and walls well into the background, creating an appearance of depth that isn’t actually there; the NES version only includes a black background and foreground staging.

If you want to take about serious changes, though, the VS. Series Game & Watch is actually a head-to-head game with one screen but two attached controllers. One player controls Stanley, the other Donkey Kong, and the two are basically playing a reverse tug-of-war where you spray insects to get them to move toward your opponent in order to sting them. Two versions of this game are included in Game & Watch Gallery 4 on the Game Boy Advance, one a modern recreation with Mario and the insect/spray elements replaced by more recognizable entities from that universe, and the other a port of the original.

Then there’s the aforementioned Hudson-developed sequel, which replicates parts of the Donkey Kong 3 experience — Donkey Kong is causing trouble for Stanley and must pay by spray — but now it’s more of a fixed shooter than a platformer since Stanley can no longer jump. Also sometimes you are in space.

This game was released for Japanese computers in a time before Nintendo decided to lock everything down to its consoles — Hudson put it on the PC-8801, PC-6601, and Sharp X1. And these were the only places you could play it for decades, until the Sharp X1 edition emerged via Yahoo! Auctions in 2017, and ended up acquired and put on the internet to be emulated. Two years later, the PC-88 edition was found, so you can get a taste of The Great Counterattack and another company’s take on Donkey Kong 3 without needing to go out and purchase the original hardware and game in the present.

If your only experience with Donkey Kong 3 is with the NES port — which is fine, mind you, but not necessarily special — then you should give the arcade edition a whirl. That one has the juice, as it has a perfect blend of tension and difficulty to make it a worthy successor to the Donkey Kong name, even if it swapped out Mario and obstacle-based platforming for shooting and bugs. It certainly didn’t kill the idea of Donkey Kong for Nintendo, which had shifting priorities elsewhere that paused the big guy in the arcades and kept a brand new console adventure from arriving, and playing it in the present isn’t going to kill your interest in DK, either, but expand what the idea of a Donkey Kong game can even be for you.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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