In the rotund plumber Mario's first adventure, you have to help him reach the top of a perilous scaffolding to rescue a damsel in distress from the dastardly Donkey Kong. (Coleco, 1981)

Once upon a time, Nintendo didn't manufacture its own home video game system. Perhaps games like this convinced it to pick up the habit. Coleco did a very good job of translating Nintendo's first arcade hit into its first game for the higher-priced ColecoVision console, but truthfully, more people had an Atari 2600 at the time, and this is the version of Donkey Kong they got.

To give Coleco a little bit of credit, this simplified version of Donkey Kong wasn't quite the abortion that Atari's Pac-Man or Coleco's own Zaxxon cartridge turned out to be. Considering the hardware involved, this is actually a pretty good port of the game. (It was certainly better than Coleco's tabletop arcade version of the game, at any rate!)

Rating:  Two quarters - worth playing, but could use some more work.

Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster