This is the eighth and final level of the Big City levels, which means I’ll be leaving the urbana, i.e. the trash cans, behind after today. What sort of new milieu lies ahead? Who knows. This is also one of those once-every-four-levels boss fights with Donkey Kong. First impressions of today’s level: it’s a fairly traditional-looking level. It has three tiers of girders, Pauline (screaming, per usual) at the top, Kong in the middle, and Mario (me) at the very bottom. Let’s begin.

D.K. is hurling barrels, the first of which falls straight down and crushes Mario (me) (I was busy taking a sip of coffee at the time) resulting in a do-over. I have 11 Marios to spare, so I’m not too anxious about losing a Mario like that right off the bat.

What I wind up doing is this: I observe Kong’s barrel tosses. One barrel lands in the center, the second to the far left, and the third to the far right. The barrels are intact when they land. They right themselves, then sit there, until a subsequent center/right/left barrel comes along and destroys and replaces it.

I’m not exactly sure what to do, so I climb the girders, reach Kong, then bump into him. He grabs me, as he has before, slams me into the ground a few times, then hurls me away. Usually what happens after one of Kong’s slam-hurls is this: Mario’s leg twitches for a few seconds before he gets back to his feet and continues climbing. But this time, on this particular level, the result is a quick death and another do-over, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Number of Marios now remaining in my Mario reserves: 10.

During my next attempt, I note that the barrels, before they are destroyed by another barrel, are approximately the same height as the oversized keys I’ve been collecting in the game. Like the keys, I attempt to pick up a barrel by standing on it and pressing the B button. Mario hoists the barrel above his head. I bound up the girders, approach D.K. when his back is turned, then toss the barrel at him. He does a fairly typical I’m-damaged dance that I’ve seen hundreds, maybe even thousands, of videogame characters do before. I repeat this act–grab barrel, re-climb girders, throw barrel–twice more, because, by universal law, all enemies must be damaged not once, not twice, but three times before they are officially defeated.

Kong collapses in a gray-yellow heap for a few seconds–thank you, LCD-era graphics–before he rises again, composes himself, grabs Pauline, then does his climb-through-the-screen-top thing.

Final results from these four levels, in seconds:

1-5: 115 seconds

1-6: 159 seconds

1-7: 121 seconds

1-8: 101 seconds (today’s level)

Grand total, in seconds: 496. My Mario reserves are now up to 15, thanks to some bonus Marios that I was awarded for my performance.

At the end of the level, a brief cutscene is triggered showing Kong crossing a bridge then pressing a bridge-retracting switch on the farside leaving Mario stranded. Mario presses a switch on the nearside, un-retracting the bridge, crosses the bridge, and gives chase. On the nearside, which both characters have left behind, are the faint outlines of skyscrapers. On the farside are a pair of stout-looking trees. It looks like we’re heading into some sort of forest region, folks.

Once today’s level was over, I saved my game, then quit to the game’s introductory screen. A brief animation plays showing bricks flying out of a wall, which look less like bricks and more like a swarm of gnats. Two blinking eyes shift back and forth inside the dark space left in the brick wall. Then Donkey Kong emerges, revealing himself as the brick-breaker. He strikes a muscle-beach pose. The grin on his face is both menacing and goofy. His necktie flops over the remaining bricks like a weary phallus. Also: Weary Phallus would be an excellent handle for an Xbox Live gamer. Someone please go ahead and claim it.

I wanted to see if this 1994 Game Boy game featured an attract mode. “Attract mode,” for those who don’t know, is a relic from the arcade era when idle arcade machines needed to show passing customers what gameplay would look like. Attract mode, in other words, was designed to attract quarter-wielding gamers. The subtext of attract mode was always this: “Play me! Look how cool I am! I have awesome graphics! You will have so much fun if you play me, I promise!”

But when games moved out of arcades and into homes in the 80’s and 90’s, attract mode inexplicably came with them. One thing I do when I review games is this: I put the controller down and leave the game alone for a few minutes, to see what it does. Usually, even now, even though games haven’t really needed attract modes in over two decades (if you bought a game for $60, presumably you were attracted enough already), games still, out of habit or homage or both, cycle through cutscenes or a series of gameplay vignettes.

Yesterday I played/reviewed two games–Marvel Superhero Squad: The Infinity Gauntlet (PS3) and All Zombies Must Die (PSN)–that, to my surprise, did not have attract modes built into them. Each game just sat there lethargically, like a fat person eating corn chips, doing nothing at all, apparently stuck forever on their static press-start screens.

Donkey Kong circa 1994, of course, has an very robust attract mode for no reason whatsoever. In addition to cycling through three- and four-second snippets of gameplay from various levels in the game–and yes, I did learn that my next stop tomorrow is a series of levels called FOREST in which I will apparently be riding around on a ladybug–the game also has a very strange attract-mode moment. The scene shows Mario performing alone on a stage for an audience (you can see the heads and necks of the observing audience members). Mario jumps up to a clothesline/trapeze, spins a few times, lands, then takes a deep, dramatic bow. Then he runs through all of his moves in the game–super jumps, handstands, etc.–taking bows after each one. Finally, at the end of the scene, he is slowly, dramatically lowered down into the stage like Arnold Schwarzenegger is lowered into the lava at the end of Terminator 2. After this, the swarm of gnat-bricks fly about, eyes peer from darkness, D.K. emerges, penis tie flipping and flopping everywhere, and the whole attract-mode cycle beings all over again.