So I was just playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl on Wii (a magnificent game, incidentally), specifically an included 30 second demo of the original Donkey Kong, and I had a weird thought-memory.
I think, once, perhaps, I was able to play Donkey Kong (or at least one level) by ear!?! (Yes, I mean beat the level with my eyes closed)
Is this true? Can anyone remember? Bernard? Adam? Matthew? Please comment if you can remember me ever doing this, because I strongly suspect at some point I may have been able.
I seem to remember trying that on the Turtle Bridge Game & Watch. Each fish movement made a sound and the last sound just before the turtle went down to eat the fish was slightly different. Combined with the sounds of your character and the turtle sounds I think it was possible to play without looking. You couldn’t play perfectly though and it would only really work on game A where the middle turtle was always safe.
As for Colecovision Donkey Kong I seem to recall trying to find a pattern where you could just do the same moves all the time to complete the first level. I’m not sure we were successful.
It was possible on the Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr Game & Watches to just play the first level or two very quickly almost without looking.
Now that I think about it it we were probably just using specific timing more than the sound to play. Especially with Turtle Bridge on game A you could press right twice to get to the middle and then listen for the fish sounds to know when to press right three times and left three times to deliver the package and get back to the middle turtle.
Ah! I remember we definitely tried to play that yellow LED Pacman game you had without looking. And you could complete each screen without looking, although there were a few different screen types, so I don’t think it was possible to play multiple screens without looking. You’d have to quickly glance to see the screen type to know the pattern.
I remember even I was able to complete the game every time after many years of practice on difficulty I and II!
I kept that Pacman game, my Scramble game and Turtle Bridge for many years. I gave them to Phil with a bunch of other games and Atari carts when I left Australia.
On one of the GBA Wario Ware carts I was able to score much better on one level without looking than I could with. The action was so frantic the graphics actually became distracting, and I trained myself to play by ear only.
Also, though it’s not quite the same thing, I once beat the arcade version of the original Street Fighter 2 by doing nothing but Shoryuken (Dragon Punch) using Ken. Although I was watching, I never wavered or used any other move. Were there an audio queue to tell me when the opponent had jumped over me, I suspect I may have been able to beat the game without looking.
Tom Hirschfeld notes that for the Activision cart Dragster in How To Master The Home Video Games, ‘… you will be able to play even with your back to the TV set, as many of the best players can.’. I had Dragster but it never held my interest long enough to play without looking. Although considering the graphics, looking away was something I wanted to do.
As for restricting ones self to a single type of move to complete a game I once punched my way through the first 10 levels of Doom which was insanely difficult. Of course I couldn’t punch the final boss to death.
Actually I wasn’t explicit enough – I didn’t just use Shoryuken at the expense of other moves – that’s *all I did*. As in I just feverishly did F-D-DF+punch over and over again. I never timed the moves, just chained them as fast as possible (imagine Ken just dragon punching ad infinitum). Ken’s hitbox was so small during the move he was virtually invincible, especially against computer AI.
Honda had a similarly exploitable move – his torpedo. And in SSF2, Bison’s scissors kick was also broken to the point of easily being able to counter every enemy move.