Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

---

Did I... REALLY expect people to believe that Donkey Kong (1994) was just Donkey Kong? Even though it was literally JUST named Donkey Kong?

No, not really. But thanks for playing along for AN ENTIRE DAY before bursting my bubble that maybe it was slightly clever.

---

I get TWO paychecks this way!
twitter.com/yuugijoou
discord.gg/bKT9pRW

Oh, wait, no... ... ... I don't get even ONE of them. My mistake!

---

For extra funsies, how's about playing the thing WITHOUT the parts that ostensibly make it "Super" and not just "Game Boy"?

To get down to just the pixels and utterly defeat any purpose to playing it like this at all, try here:
youtu.be/25-gv0Fe7xE

I think it's pretty fun that the border is mocked up in the style of an old Donkey Kong arcade cabinet... although the details are a bit... strained... in order to fit within the limitations of the Super Nintendo video output with any degree of clarity.

---

I'm going to be super up-front about this... ... ... I screwed up.

I was super gung-ho about capturing this monstrosity of double-vision (since when am I not? and do you think it's a coincidence that multi-orientation DS gameplay videos so frequently stall out?!), because the Super Game Boy featues really make this game what it is... which naturally means that the border is... y'know... a significant artifact of the process of playing it.

So I rigged up a super... definitely-not-a-great-idea-by-any-sane-criterion capture method wherein I could get not only the full on-screen experience... but also the just-the-gameplay inner vision at play. A sort of hellish matryoshka nesting doll of video tomfoolery, if you will.

The PROBLEM is. When I did this. I was. very. WAY. too clever. about it. I guess. SOMEHOW.

...and as a result... I accidentlaly cropped out an entire row of pixels. Which, normally wouldn't be a total catastrophe... or whatever... but... ... ... well, the operative capture area is only 144 pixels tall. So the impact is quite a bit more pronounced than usual. A nearly 1% margin of error! Compared to ratios we deal in these days that are frequently a tenth of that!

(Really puts into different perspective the Vita cropping out 2 pixels from PSP native aspect ratio to be able to scale it up to the new screen resolution, huh?)

((No. No, it doesn't.))

Where this creates an issue is that the main gameplay interface has a particular width in mind for its content... and ONE element of it juts out just a little higher than the rest, the stylized staggered "SC" lingers one pixel higher than everything else. I didn't notice... and literally everything else seems to be edge-safe enough to have escaped unscathed.

The whole playthrough is a wash! Cancel it! Do it all over again! That'll only take another who-knows-how-long living on a shelf to get around to starting publication!

---

Anyway, all that notwithstanding, the original game is just a big ol' bait-and-switch introduction to the basic elements of what's to come. Compatible with the not-so-basic elements that remain Mario's expanded moveset, no less!

Being able to finish 25m or 50m in like three seconds is already worth the price of admission.

---

Big City

Surprise! This isn't an arcade style platformer! ...it's a PUZZLE platformer!

What do you mean it doesn't feel much like a puzzle? That's only because the game is still easing you into the flow of things with some cozy little micro-action management set pieces. But the very first, most crucial element necessary for making the entire game function... is the key. You need to find a key, grab it, and successfully take it to the door if you want to clear most stages from here on out.

The exception of course would appear to be every fourth stage, which is a "Donkey Kong" stage, wherein the big lug will attempt to thwart your efforts directly.

---

It is also here that we get our first glimpse behind the curtain. Of all the games Nintendo created for just one of its exceedingly numerous criminally neglected gadgets and peripherals, THIS would appear to be the poster child for the creative vision that was the Super Game Boy.

If you're not familiar with how it works on a technical level... that's not surprising! It's witchcraft, I tells ya!

Actually, put simply... it can colorize with independent palettes for each of the Game Boy sprite layers in oddly discrete square regions screenwide. Just not in actually realtime execution.

If that sounds nuts, both in sheer potential... and ALSO in bizarre limitation not especially suited to video gaming... both are right!

Of course, in a scant couple years, we would see the much more straightforward and less bizarrely cobbled together vision that was the Game Boy Color, so perhaps the lesson to be learned here isn't one of effort always paying off...

However, the Game Boy Color is backwards compatible with Game Boy games, not Super Game Boy games. That'd require access to a Super Nintendo's processing power...