There are a lot of people who will love you for awhile and then stop loving you in this world. Donkey Kong was my first and the effect was so deep that when it happens now in my forties i still think of math problems and how even if i solve them it will cause my pink soul-self to hurt and make a bad noise. Today’s review is Donkey Kong Jr. Math.
Donkey kong Jr. Math is a “game” your parents buy you when they are tired of getting notes sent home from your teacher telling them about how you are restless in class and can’t focus on your school work and the homework you turn in is a confusing mess that is only half done.
Your parents decide that the only thing to do is to use the things that you love like nintendo tapes and donkey kong to hurt you until your’e fixed. They hand you the Hill’s bag and you already know it is a nintendo tape because your hands are nintendo tape sensing experts by 1987 when youre’ ten years old but your brain is also by this age an expert at sensing traps because you know the only time you feel a brand new nintendo tape is christmas and birthdays and one pretty awesome easter in 1988. (awesome until you find out that easter game is deadly towers)
So when your dad hands you the tape wrapped in the shopping bag you are immediately happy but also suspicieous and guess what, you are right to be because when you open it it says donky kong jr. (good news) but beside that part it says “math” (bad news”).
You don’t know what it means right away but you can already feel the sense of dread in your gut like the time Ellis convinced you to steal the stack of news papers that get dropped off daily at 4 am to your friend bill who has a paper route and toss them down the hill under the pine trees.
(monkey see: 1984) (bad)
As soon as you turn on the game you see words like “calculate” and another “calculate” and thanks to movies you are already good at cussing so you say mother fu*cker but quiet so your parents dont hear you.
Then the game makes you climb vines like in the good donkey kong jr. except instead of avoiding birds and dropping fruit on snapjaws you just go around and touch numbers and plus signs and divide signs until you make the number that dad donkey kong is holding on his sign at the top of the screen. The second worse part of the game (after math) is there is a pink color copy of you on the side of the screen and i never knew if that was girl donkey kong jr (in the old days pink version or bow in hair meant girl) or if it was your soul that was removed from your body.
So the girl donkey kong jr, or maybe soul self just stands there quiet while you do math problems and if you solve one then it starts doing the awful “you died” noise and animation from the regular good donkey kong jr. so your reward is making someone else or maybe your own soul feel pain. I never understood why it did that but i always felt like it was only natural for that awful feature to be a part of this torture game.
I only played it when mom and dad made me and would check on me to make sure i was still playing it. my brain would think about star trek next generation or river city ransom while my thumbs just made donkey kong jr move around and i dropped all pretence of attemping to actually complete the game. if you can’t get good at something it is best to just stop doing it and focus on dealing with the guilt at being different and worthless.
my grades never got better and i guess it was decided that if donky kong couldnt reach me no one could so i continued to hide my midterm deficiency reports in the little hollow part on the bottom of my nintendo and mostly spent my year dreading actual report card time. but at least the donky kong jr part of my failure was done and that was the best part.
After a few months everyone forgot about the failed donky kong jr math accelarated learning experiment and I was able to pass the tape off to some other unlucky kid whos parents were at the end of the math rope.
I used that twenty dollars to buy rygar which i beat and then traded for megaman 2 and those are two of the best tapes you can play.
So I give Donky Kong Jr. Math a 10/10
