Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, a happy memory
Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Margaret Robertson looks back at Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, in which you control the action by banging on crappy electronic drums. Margaret is the former editor of Edge magazine and I am thrilled that she's now a regular columnist for Offworld. From "One More Go: Donkey Kong Jungle Beat":
One More Go: Donkey Kong Jungle BeatOne of the worst game ideas ever was embodied in Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat, which is a platform game you control with a pair of cheap electric bongos.
Not, please note, a modern, newfangled, automagic platform game like Assassin’s Creed. A proper, old-fashioned 2D platformer with ledges and enemies and timed swings and all the things that make you cry out for a nice crisp d-pad and a decently sprung jump button. Or, in the absence of those, perhaps at least something with more than two buttons which you can operate without having to pretend to be a toddler who just dropped a jam sandwich off his high chair.
So why go back to Jungle Beat? For a little reassuring schadenfreude that I’m not the only person who can have bad game ideas? No. Because it’s a dazzling, dizzying delight. Bad idea; brilliant game.
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As one of the greatest evar players of Donkey Kong Jr. in White Bear Lake, MN when I was growing up all I have to say about this is . .. . .
Beating on drums is kinda cool, as a controller it's kinda lame.
-abs is not impressed
This game was on ~26 hours a day in my dorm room for like a year.
I picked this up used a few months ago (inexplicably with two sets of bongos, even though it's a single-player game).
You'd think that the 13-year-old punk in my house would be jaded by superior games, such as Rock Band, and Force Unleashed... But he likes it! Mikey likes it!
I've been looking for this game! I have the bongos , but no game!
Gotta start going through the ebay again...
What does "PAN! PAN!" mean?
@coldspell
Japanese onomatopoeia, I'd bet, for a clapping or hitting sound, pronounced pahn.
When I was in college, a friend got this game. I'm not a big video gamer, or a big fan of crazy peripherals, or a big player of platform video games, but this game is super fun.
Was this not called Donkey Konga? It's been sitting in my basement for years.
Yes, Donkey Konga. Our household's revelation was that the microphone over which one was supposed to clap actually picked up a much wider range of sounds, leading to user specialization in the form of martial arts-style kiais, meaning that you could tell who was playing by their distinctively personalized clap-substitution yell. You could also tell when the game had them outmaneuvered, as the kiais devolved into a series of "CRAP! No!no!no!"s.
The webhost of Glorious Trainwrecks (hope of the infamous Klik of the Month Klub, where a small but loyal cadre of gamers take 2 hours one Saturday a month to each create an original game, usually using the ancient but twistedly brilliant gamemaking platform Klik & Play) ran with the physicality of the controllers and made the Wii homebrew Mike Tyson's Jungle Beat, which is the old Mike Tyson's Punch Out rewired to use the DK bongos. (Unfortunately you have to jailbreak your Wii.)
Promotional and Gameplay Video Here