Donkey Kong 64 - Four-Player Battle Arena (Actual N64 Capture)

This is a capture of me and three friends playing the Battle Arena mode in Donkey Kong 64 on the Nintendo 64. This is not an emulator. This footage was captured directly from my Nintendo 64. I'm player one, Luke is player two, Michael is player three and John is player four.

I received Donkey Kong 64 back in Christmas of 1999 and quickly played through all of the single player portion. Of course, anyone who is familiar with that game undoubtedly knows about the battle mode. It's a ton of fun, especially if you have four players. I probably only played the four-player mode once or twice back in the day, but I did several two-player battles.

There are two battle modes in this game. The first one, which I'm showing here, is the Battle Arena where you just try to knock each other off a circular platform or do enough damage to kill someone. You can adjust the rule set to be based on lives, time limit, coin collecting, etc. We did one match based on lives and another based on time.

This mode is a bit mindless but that's what makes it so fun. You can just mash buttons and laugh as the chaos unfolds on screen. That's exactly what I did here.

One neat thing about Donkey Kong 64 is that it has native widescreen support, just like Perfect Dark. So we played with widescreen enabled, which helped increase the viewing area.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and an S-video connection. I used a Toshiba model D-R550 DVD Recorder to upconvert the N64's native 240p signal to 480i so that the Hauppauge could capture the console's audio/video signal.

I'm using an Arcade Shark joystick, Luke is using a Sharkpad Pro 64 turbo controller, and Michael and John are using standard Nintendo 64 controllers.