E3 2003: Hands-on: Mario and Donkey Kong

One of the mystery games Nintendo revealed at its press conference on Tuesday was Mario and Donkey Kong. The company never formally announced the game, yet it handed over screenshots without any actual details on the design. And while we thought we saw everything at Nintendo's booth, we saw it. One lone system playing Mario and Donkey Kong.

The game features a storyline where Mario opens up a toy factory manufacturing Mini Mario wind-up dolls. Donkey Kong feels left out since Mario never made a DK doll, so the monkey has infiltrated the factory and stolen many of the toys before hopping off deeper into the factory. It's up to Mario to traverse the hazards of his factory to grab the lost toys and head to the next part of the building.

The game is, essentially, a remake of Donkey Kong released on the Game Boy several years ago. Players, as Mario, can jump, pick up objects, and handspring to reach higher platforms. And all of these abilities are put to use in clever level layouts that have conveyer belts, switches that cause walls to erect or disappear, and tons of spikes that will kill off Mario. The idea is to get Mario through the factory, grabbing the lost Mini-Mario toy to exit the level. There are also three different colored presents scattered around the level, and if players grab all three before exiting a level, they can play a roulette-type mini-game that will randomly open up one of the presents. Players can be awarded extra lives, or get zonked with nothing at all.

Mario and Donkey Kong is a really fun little game that features a lot of good GBA effects, including transparencies and a ton of scrolling backgrounds. Character sprites are rendered with several frames of animation, making them much more detailed than the basic sprites of the classic Game Boy game.

Nintendo currently has no release information for Mario and Donkey Kong, but the demo at E3 looked very close to finished...other than the overall lack of game interface before the level begins.

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