Donkey Kong Jr. (1983, Game & Watch/Coleco Tabletop)

Format: Game & Watch/Coleco Tabletop
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo (Coleco Tabletop version published by Coleco)
Release Date: 1983
Playtime: 20 minutes (played on easy difficult (game A); unlocked all four locks on Donkey Kong then played until I ran out of lives)

I'm trying to plow through all of the pre-Donkey Kong 3 titles in the series before moving onto something else. Little did I know that it would involve a lot of LCD games. This one is an entirely new game based on Donkey Kong Jr. To clear up any confusion, Nintendo made a single screen Game &Watch title based on the arcade game in 1982. In 1983 they made a separate game in the form of a small tabletop portable arcade machine which they called the "Game & Watch Tabletop". Coleco, instead of making their own Coleco Tabletop, ended up rebranding the tabletop as their own. The game is completely identical but is available in both forms. I played the Coleco one but it doesn't really matter.

In this game you start at the bottom left as Donkey Kong's son. You must grab a key a key and navigate to the top of the screen. From here you must grab onto a yellow umbrella (which move down) and then grab onto a red balloon (which go up). Then time it right to unlock the lock that Donkey Kong is holding out. From there you go back and grab another key and do it all over again until you've unlocked all four of the locks (at which point the game loops at higher difficulties). There are birds flying around the entire time which can make this difficult.

This is one of the more difficult Game & Watch games in my opinion, with only the other Donkey Kong Jr. title being harder. Although, that one was very luck based while this is actually about skill. The one thing that can be annoying about this game is that there are often long stretches where either the balloons or umbrellas do not appear. This left me in a spot where I had to continually dodge birds while waiting for them to appear so I could work my way across to the locks.

While I do think this is a decent game, I don't think that it is as good as the previous Coleco Tabletop game. It is sometimes hard to tell which direction the umbrellas or balloons are going due to the lack of fluid motion (which is just how LCD games are). Otherwise everything looks decent enough. Not a bad game, but not necessarily recommended either.