Stage 5-8 is a fairly tall one, folks–at least two scrollable screens in height–and it’s clogged to the gills with careening barrels. This is another one of those rare moments in the game when Donkey Kong and Pauline, not unlike one of Vancouver’s drug dealer-and-sleazy-girlfriend duos–practically a staple in every apartment building in this city–put in a rare appearance in public.

The stage opens with me standing next to a pair of steel barrels. A wooden barrel promptly plummets from the top of the screen, and when it strikes the steel barrels, a fireball with eyes pops out and gives chase. There are no problems to solve here, no switches to suss out or shuttered barriers to un-shutter. This stage is all action from start to finish. It’s about making the right choices and quality jumps. In fact, I actually hear the words “quality jump” whenever I jump over a barrel. Three barrels coming at me? Quality jump, quality jump, quality jump. Barrels do come at you from all sorts of crazy angles here. Sometimes they fall in a linear pattern, rolling downward like pachinko balls. Other times, they fly in from some oblique angle and careen straight for Mario. Pro tip: Stay on your toes at all times during this stage, folks.

You have two fundamental choices here: one, you can grab the hammers–there are two in the stage–and destroy as many barrels as possible, which gives your score a nice bump; two, you can avoid the barrels altogether by jumping, moving, and climbing out of the way and staying light on your feet. Me, I chose the hammer path and bashed as many barrels as possible. But that’s just me.

I successfully completed this stage on my first try. Impressive, I know. I kept climbing, kept making the right choices, all the way to the top. Once again, after 52 days, I’m certain that I’ve developed some pretty formidable Donkey Kong instincts. No kidding, sometimes I can almost feel where the barrels are going to go before they go there. That’s because playing a videogame, in a strange way, is a way to get to know the people who made the game. And, at this point, I’ve gotten to know the people who made Donkey Kong, at least a little. No, I don’t know what kind of sandwich meats these people enjoy or what their pets look like. But I do have a good idea of what their do’s and don’t’s are when it comes to constructing a stage and when they’re in the mood to be cruel or kind. In the same way that Boo Radley leaves handmade toys for Scout and Jem inside the hollow of a tree in To Kill A Mockingbird, videogames, at their best, can feel like personal messages from another time and place.

I confess, things did get a little hairy for me at the very top. I was standing too close to D.K. when he rolled a barrel in my direction. I pulled off a quality jump–yet another one–and cleared the barrel, but only just barely. The game would have been well within its rights to dock me a Mario here. It didn’t. Sometimes in videogames things go your way, even when they shouldn’t.

The final totals for this section:

Stage 5-5: 52 seconds.

Stage 5-6: 85 seconds.

Stage 5-7: 65 seconds.

Stage 5-8: 120 seconds.

Total: 322 seconds. Number of Marios in my Mario reserve: 34.