Donkey Kong 64

Overall: B
Violence: C+
Sexual Content: A-
Language: A-
Drugs/Alcohol: A

Platform reviewed: Nintendo 64
Publisher: Rareware
ESRB rating: E

You may remember playing the original Donkey Kong while standing in front of some quarter swallowing arcade unit. Now for the price of about two hundred plays, you can take home a little yellow cartridge that turns your Nintendo 64 game system into a three dimensional Donkey Kong jungle.

No more do you merely climb ladders to rescue the damsel from Kong. Now, Kong and four of his relatives are in the hero seat. Their job is to work through various jungle-like worlds seeking elusive golden bananas. Of course, during their quest they also meet up with an incredible variety of puzzles, enemies, and situations that require precise button pushing.

Between bullying beavers, dangerous dominos, and testy tomatoes, the Kong gang has all they can do to keep their watermelons whole. Watermelons? Yup... a full watermelon with no slices removed is an indication of a healthy monkey. As the melon disappears, you risk losing a life. To refresh the melon, you have to bulldoze an enemy using bashes, slides, jumps, or punches. If contact battles aren't your style, you can try a handy orange grenade. But while you can punch all day long, the oranges are in limited supply. Later through trading items, the gang can become armed with such implements as coconut cannons, feather bows, or high-powered saxophones and trombones.

Without a doubt, this is the usual video game scenario, however the non-explicit violence never involves humans, and amongst the punches, there are a couple of welcome twists. Each of the five members has different abilities, and only one can be played at a time. It's a stretch, but a small teamwork lesson may be buried in between the bananas. In other areas, there are time limits demanding you to forget about bashing enemies and concentrate on solving the puzzle instead. It's not exactly a Nintendo peace accord, but at least there's a lull in the bashin'.

Other content concerns include a minor profanity in the rap song during the opening "movie" and Kong's scantily clad girlfriend Candy. With a figure like that, she could be accused of shoplifting a couple of coconuts.

Essentially this is a one-player game. The multi-player mode is only available after you win a turn at a battle arena. I didn't have the hours required to get to this point, but I understand there is a two-player battle game and a four-player game called "Monkey Smash". Personally, I wish programmers would stop playing games and allow these multi-player modes to work from the start, giving children the option to interact with each other or parents.

In every other regard, this extensive game has good quality surround sound, a wide screen mode, and fairly intelligent 3-D graphics. I found the "camera" moved tightly to the characters, making game play more enjoyable. If you're prepared to leave your children alone with five apes for weeks at a time, Donkey Kong 64 may be of interest. Just make sure the power is interrupted every now and again, or someone may go bananas

Rod Gustafson

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