Introduction...
Donkey is a basic top-down reaction game.
Tell me a story...
You're cruising in your sports car when the little-used, dead-straight rural road suddenly becomes infested with donkeys.
The same procedure as every year?...
You are in your car near the bottom of the screen, and the road is scrolling through top-to-bottom with the donkeys randomly standing on it's lanes in equal distances. When a donkey appears at your side of the road, you switch to the other one. Every time you pass a donkey, you move a bit towards the top, so the reaction time becomes gradually shorter. After eleven donkeys you score one point and are beamed back to your initial position, where the procedure begins again. By tearing apart a donkey (and breaking apart your precious car) you endow the asinine family with one point.
Eyes and ears...
The graphics is CGA, mode 4, palette #1, high intensity (high magenta, high cyan, high white + high black/dark grey). Style = visually basic. No sounds except an internal speaker blip when you switch lanes, and a blip fanfare of the same origin when you crash you car.
After output now the input...
switch lanes - Spacebar (and nearly all other keys)
quit - Esc
Transduction...
A funny, action-packed classic, that get's boring quite quickly. It's absurd that there's no goal, not even a highscore table! That would have saved the two points. So it's ONE point! Recommended for hardheads, not recommended for players.
To say something nice: I still have a good laugh every time I'm imagining that it is always the same donkey (consistent with the display), wanting to annoy the driver by being so much faster than his racer (like The Tortoise and the Hare, if you know this fable attributed to Aesop). Also, I like the sprite of the donkey, with his somewhat smiling face (he looks like ALF, the Alien Life Form from the TV series, doesn't he?).
By the way...
- it's also known as DONKEY.BAS
- so, it's actually a game for BASIC, but here we have a compiled executable
- it's the first MS-DOS game
- ...since it was developed together with MS-DOS as a demonstration of product-bundled Microsoft BASIC
- the developers are Bill Gates, the guy from Microsoft, and Neil Konzen, the Apple-loving guy from Microsoft
- they sat at four in the morning with the prototype IBM PC in a locked closet at an over-body-room-temperature, because of IBM's secrecy & safety needs and the closet being the only lockable room they had
- in 2001, Microsoft released the three-dimensional Donkey.NET, a driving game which demonstrates the .NET Framwork and Visual Basic .NET
- in Donkey .NET you are supposed to hit donkeys
- Donkey seems to be a kind of inspiration for the WIP game Drivey
In DOSBOX.CONF, under the [dosbox] paragraph, change the parameter after machine= to cga. This will give you true colours (the right CGA palette) in any case.
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