Well, today I had a completely average outing. I hit a top score of 92,500, which isn’t great, but isn’t irritating. I got stopped at the third elevator screen again, but I did try out a technique from YouTube that seemed to have promise. I only had one shot at it, though, and didn’t quite do it right. Anyway, since I was staring at Donkey Kong, thinking about Donkey Kong related things, I realized how many times you have to see the conclusion of the game’s “story.”

I might not have considered it a story at all had it not been for Chris Kohler’s Power Up book wherein he uses Donkey Kong’s proto-narrative as the basis for an expansive thesis on the Japanese cinematic video game. It’s a pretty well-written book that I’d recommend even if you aren’t interesting in Donkey Kong. He gets into Final Fantasy and other series to show the evolution of movie-like story telling in Japanese games. It’s a pretty interesting and justified thesis. The book sort of falls apart once he starts discussing shopping for games in Japan and other side topics that feel like filler to get up to some page count. That’s alright; the rest of it is still worthwhile.

As you might have noticed when I laid out the screen ordering for the game, each of the games “levels” ends with the blue screen (a.k.a. rivet screen). On all of the other screens, when Jumpan reaches the top, Donkey Kong picks Pauline up and takes her off once again. At the end of the blue screen, DK falls to his painful, temporary doom -- which appears to be a serious concussion. After that, he recaptures Pauline and everything starts anew, but cramming any sort of story into such an early game is quite an accomplishment. Let’s give Miyamoto a little bit of credit for this one. There’s a chance he might have some sort of talent for making games.