I can agree with DK 3 being the least memorable of the three for sure. Stanley the Bugman has zero personality, and Donkey Kong is just sorta there.
Yeah, they definitely were trying out different tactics to get the consoles into people's homes. They dropped the educational games really early on, though, even in Japan.
I think we exchanged notes on DK3 before -- I really don't like the game. It feels more like C- territory to me. Maybe it's because it's like a SHMUP in which progress can be lost (without dying), because of the way the big ape can work his way back down if you don't keep up the pressure. A normal SHMUP has two priorities: don't die and kill the things. That's about right. DK3 adds a third priority (a fourth if you argue it's also an escort mission for the plants), and it doesn't even have power-ups. Not a fun combination for me.
But I'll also admit that I haven't sat and played it for long sessions. If I'm forced to choose between playing it or DK Jr. for an hour, I can see how I might prefer DK3. But if it's a choice between playing them for 5-10 minutes each, DK Jr. is going to win easily every time.
As for DK Jr. Math, I'll admit that as a kid I was fascinated by its possibilities. IIRC there was a picture of it on the back of my NES box, or maybe on a marketing insert in the box. This is the only place I ever heard of it. I never saw it for rent or for sale. It was never mentioned in any magazine. I never knew anyone who had played it. It was even more mythical than R.O.B. I still wonder how much I, a fan of DK Jr., might have enjoyed DK Jr. Math at just the right age. I don't think I'd have given it a D-. A few years later, I played Number Munchers a lot on our school's DOS PC.
Interesting thought about DK3 being closer to a shoot-em-up. Perhaps that's why I like it more.
I think early arcade shoot-em-ups are still more fun to play these days than the early platformers, like DK and DK Jr. DK 3 has one power-up, an upgrade to your gas that's far too over-powered; probably why it's short-lived and doesn't appear very often.
There's a place for excellent edutainment games. Number Munchers is definitely one of them (I grew up with that one as well). Donkey Kong Jr. Math is not. Number Munchers still has game elements, whereas DK Jr. Math is just "solve the math problem by shimmying DK Jr. up a vine." Halfhearted execution.
Agreed. I wonder if Nintendo in the mid-80s didn't believe that the Mario platformers and a Donkey Kong platformer could exist side-by-side with one another. Like they would be glutting the market or something. Seems crazy now.
I suspect it was largely about Nintendo only having so much development capacity to spare. I'm sure these single-screen arcade-style games were MUCH quicker to develop than a proper side-scrolling platformer. IIRC their ROM files are tiny which is probably an indication of development time and cost.
Once you get beyond the initial NES launch, and especially after 1987 in the US, I think Nintendo-developed titles are pretty sporadic, and basically none of them are nearly as simple or cheap to develop as your average black box title.
If I were Nintendo, I wouldn't want another big-name platformer to be under development at the same time as SMB3, splitting my resources. But that ends up eating up most of the rest of the NES lifespan.
I guess the real question we could ask is whether a new DK project should have received the resources of Kirby, on Game Boy and NES. Should Kirby have never been born?
I've never been a big fan of Kirby games; in my eyes they're the weakest of Nintendo's main lines of platformers. But yeah, I still don't want to wish him out of existence.
Just as an addition to my comment, I saw this list of ROM file sizes:
The black box games mostly seem to come in around 24-40kb. SMB 3 is at 384kb. Kirby's Adventure is at 768kb! So roughly 30x the size of a basic black box game. I don't think you can correlate that 1:1 to development requirements, but I bet there was a loose correlation.
Thinking on it, because of the near-total asset re-use, DK Jr. Math had to be about the cheapest game to develop on NES. Imagine if DK Jr. Math was just a bonus mode on the DK Jr. cartridge (like Balloon Trip). We would probably look back on it fondly as a quirky little addition.
Kirby either hits hard or misses for me. Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Return to Dreamland are both home-runs, but some of his games are just too simple for me. But the character is great!
Crazy about the game sizes. Totally makes sense how they just kept getting bigger and bigger. Kirby's Adventure was a visual marvel when it released in '93, but I never thought it'd be double the size of SMB3!
If a Math mode was featured in Donkey Kong Jr.'s cartridge, yeah, we probably wouldn't be so hard on DK Jr. Math. But asking parents to shell out $40 for the latter alone is a bridge too far.
DK3 is certainly the easiest of the original DK games to hop back into, although it’s also the least memorable of the three.
DK Jr Math shows how hard Nintendo was trying to push the Famicom and NES as something more than a games system, at least in those early days.
I can agree with DK 3 being the least memorable of the three for sure. Stanley the Bugman has zero personality, and Donkey Kong is just sorta there.
Yeah, they definitely were trying out different tactics to get the consoles into people's homes. They dropped the educational games really early on, though, even in Japan.
I think we exchanged notes on DK3 before -- I really don't like the game. It feels more like C- territory to me. Maybe it's because it's like a SHMUP in which progress can be lost (without dying), because of the way the big ape can work his way back down if you don't keep up the pressure. A normal SHMUP has two priorities: don't die and kill the things. That's about right. DK3 adds a third priority (a fourth if you argue it's also an escort mission for the plants), and it doesn't even have power-ups. Not a fun combination for me.
But I'll also admit that I haven't sat and played it for long sessions. If I'm forced to choose between playing it or DK Jr. for an hour, I can see how I might prefer DK3. But if it's a choice between playing them for 5-10 minutes each, DK Jr. is going to win easily every time.
As for DK Jr. Math, I'll admit that as a kid I was fascinated by its possibilities. IIRC there was a picture of it on the back of my NES box, or maybe on a marketing insert in the box. This is the only place I ever heard of it. I never saw it for rent or for sale. It was never mentioned in any magazine. I never knew anyone who had played it. It was even more mythical than R.O.B. I still wonder how much I, a fan of DK Jr., might have enjoyed DK Jr. Math at just the right age. I don't think I'd have given it a D-. A few years later, I played Number Munchers a lot on our school's DOS PC.
Interesting thought about DK3 being closer to a shoot-em-up. Perhaps that's why I like it more.
I think early arcade shoot-em-ups are still more fun to play these days than the early platformers, like DK and DK Jr. DK 3 has one power-up, an upgrade to your gas that's far too over-powered; probably why it's short-lived and doesn't appear very often.
There's a place for excellent edutainment games. Number Munchers is definitely one of them (I grew up with that one as well). Donkey Kong Jr. Math is not. Number Munchers still has game elements, whereas DK Jr. Math is just "solve the math problem by shimmying DK Jr. up a vine." Halfhearted execution.
Agreed. I wonder if Nintendo in the mid-80s didn't believe that the Mario platformers and a Donkey Kong platformer could exist side-by-side with one another. Like they would be glutting the market or something. Seems crazy now.
I suspect it was largely about Nintendo only having so much development capacity to spare. I'm sure these single-screen arcade-style games were MUCH quicker to develop than a proper side-scrolling platformer. IIRC their ROM files are tiny which is probably an indication of development time and cost.
Once you get beyond the initial NES launch, and especially after 1987 in the US, I think Nintendo-developed titles are pretty sporadic, and basically none of them are nearly as simple or cheap to develop as your average black box title.
If I were Nintendo, I wouldn't want another big-name platformer to be under development at the same time as SMB3, splitting my resources. But that ends up eating up most of the rest of the NES lifespan.
I guess the real question we could ask is whether a new DK project should have received the resources of Kirby, on Game Boy and NES. Should Kirby have never been born?
That's true. It's easy to forget how small Nintendo - and most game development companies, honestly - was in the 80s and even 90s.
As for Kirby, I'm glad he was born, and I'm glad Rare and later Retro handled the DK games.
I've never been a big fan of Kirby games; in my eyes they're the weakest of Nintendo's main lines of platformers. But yeah, I still don't want to wish him out of existence.
Just as an addition to my comment, I saw this list of ROM file sizes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nes/comments/gcexyw/famous_nes_games_by_cartridge_size_new_and/
The black box games mostly seem to come in around 24-40kb. SMB 3 is at 384kb. Kirby's Adventure is at 768kb! So roughly 30x the size of a basic black box game. I don't think you can correlate that 1:1 to development requirements, but I bet there was a loose correlation.
Thinking on it, because of the near-total asset re-use, DK Jr. Math had to be about the cheapest game to develop on NES. Imagine if DK Jr. Math was just a bonus mode on the DK Jr. cartridge (like Balloon Trip). We would probably look back on it fondly as a quirky little addition.
Kirby either hits hard or misses for me. Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Return to Dreamland are both home-runs, but some of his games are just too simple for me. But the character is great!
Crazy about the game sizes. Totally makes sense how they just kept getting bigger and bigger. Kirby's Adventure was a visual marvel when it released in '93, but I never thought it'd be double the size of SMB3!
If a Math mode was featured in Donkey Kong Jr.'s cartridge, yeah, we probably wouldn't be so hard on DK Jr. Math. But asking parents to shell out $40 for the latter alone is a bridge too far.