Bonk's Revenge

~ BONK'S REVENGE ~

Hudson Soft / Red

HuCard

1991

Bonk's Revenge is highly reminiscent of its excellent predecessor in many surface-level regards, but being that the formerly smooth play system suddenly finds itself plagued by clunkiness, I've never been a big fan of the title. Still, whenever I power it up, I'm immediately struck by how appealing its cartoony graphics are. Bonk's Adventure is nice looking and colorful, but Revenge reaches an entirely different tier with its visuals. The difference in graphical quality is vast despite many of the games' respective stage themes and cast members being quite similar to one another.

Strip design also took a huge step forward. There are secrets to uncover all over the place along with great ideas at work in enemy placement and level structuring.

You can scour the stages to find entryways to bonus rounds, most of which are enjoyable, and as my brother Duomitri can tell you, it's lots of fun to see how many of the scattered-about smiley faces you can collect. The train-ride-based bonus scenes that the stages conclude with are also very cool.

The soundtrack is as good as you'd expect it to be, being that many of its tunes were borrowed from Adventure (although most of its original material is also quality stuff).

My only major complaint is that a brief delay takes place during each spin of Bonk's spin jump, which makes for choppy gameplay. There are two typical counters to this gripe:

1) The delay adds to the challenge.

Well, I always beat the game with lots of lives left no matter how terribly out of practice I am. It isn't challenging even with the delay.

2) The delay prevents people from leaping into the air and cannonballing their way through stages, as was possible in many levels of the first Bonk game.

Well, the level design is strong enough here to minimize that sort of tomfoolery anyway, and there's so much more incentive to explore this time.

It could be said that the boss battles are a little more interesting in Revenge because you can't just bounce around atop your adversaries' heads like you can in Adventure. This is a fairly minor point since the game's strengths lie in level design and aesthetic appeal rather than in strategic battling, so I still wish I could have the old spin back.

Speaking of the bosses, another (relatively minor) complaint I have is that the last battle is quite anticlimactic. Some of the earlier encounters are interesting, if not particularly difficult to emerge victorious from...

...but the last couple of bosses are bums.

I do enjoy Revenge more now than I did in years past, even though the spin delay still irks me. I guess I'm more patient these days, so I appreciate things like the level design and smiley scavenger hunts a lot more. I still find Adventure to be much more enjoyable, though.

Bonk's Adventure

~ BONK'S ADVENTURE ~

Hudson Soft / Atlus / Red

HuCard

1990

Although I'm not a fan of "mascot platformers" in general, I've always found Bonk's Adventure to be extremely enjoyable. It's a very likable and endearing game that features a charismatic and infectiously gleeful protagonist, a colorful enemy cast (the giant-dino bosses are particularly memorable), a cute ending, and neat visual elements. And I must mention that its soundtrack is one of the Turbo's finest.

I turn the game on from time to time expecting to play only a level or so--just enough to experience a good bit of nostalgia. I always end up immersed in the headbutt-administering caveman's amusing endeavors and wind up playing through the entire adventure. It's really nice when you revisit an old game and that sort of thing happens.

The eggshell-capped fellows are the low-ranking wretches of King Drool's army, but there's no question that they could slaughter any "Little Goomba"-type fodder-fool. One of the Bonk series's greatest strengths is its lineup of bad-guy dinosaurs, who are so much more fun to fight than Mario's mushrooms-and-turtles contingent or Sonic's "woodland robots."

The coolest villain of all is the awesome T. Ractorhead. Even Bonk seems happy to see him.

Most of the bosses are extremely vulnerable to noggin spin-slams. I'll still take 'em any day over the boring Bowser clan or Robotnik's stupid contraptions.

Kongo Zilla can fight pretty well, but he eventually softens up.

The best thing about the end-round battles is the dramatic tune that accompanies the combat; it ranks among the greatest boss tracks ever if you ask me. It can also be heard during the brief, action-packed, Triceratops-and-Pterodactyl-dominated fourth stage. Bonk doesn't seem to be coping with the intensity very well in this screen.

One thing he can handle well is swimming. The controls feel great whether you're underwater or under... whatever that orange stuff is.

Bonk is also a proficient climber. Being that these are prehistoric times, crazy ideas like using your hands and feet for climbing hadn't been invented yet, so clever Bonk uses his teeth.

There actually aren't all that many stretches that call for you to swim or climb. In fact, you can spin-jump your way right through many of the mostly linear levels. Even the more-restrictive zone constructions fail to meet the stage-design standards later set by Bonk's Revenge. But at least the action remains fast and fun here, while many similar titles slow everything down for the sake of including dull moving-platform sequences and the like.

BA isn't amazing graphically, but its backgrounds occasionally feature some very appealing visual embellishments, such as the enormous moon up in the sky in the screen on the left. And a number of levels are quite neat thematically; who needs "donut plains" and "marble zones" when we can explore dino innards?

Do make sure to explore each stage thoroughly, as you can stumble upon lots of secret entryways...

...most of which lead to bonus rounds or rooms full of goodies.

The best goody of all is meat. Upon nabbing a piece, Bonk blows his top and becomes super strong, eager to steamroll all who stand in his way.

Aw.

Schbibin Man 3

~ SCHBIBIN MAN 3 ~

NCS/Masaya

CD-ROM

1992

It isn't often that a line of games is given until its third episode to achieve greatness. Most companies are more than happy to put an engine to sleep following a single unimpressive outing--a repeat performance typically signals certain death, usually displaying prudence on the part of the executioners. The first two Schbibin Man games hardly made marks on the world, but NCS/Masaya stuck to their guns and finally unleashed brilliance in the form of the sidescrolling torpedo Schbibin Man 3, an insanely fast-paced hack-and-slash platformer propelled by adrenaline-pumping senses of urgency and sheer madness. Dash through futuristic metropolises and penetrate enormous airships; shatter crystal monsters and annihilate faceless flame-throwing magicians. There are no level breaks here; it's just one crazy scenario after another--a "parade of insanity," as my impressed cousin Zigfriederov once called the procession.

One minute you're commandeering a mecha and blasting your way through a city, the next you're riding a strange beast in outer space as a huge red dragon pursues you.

Hop onto floating platforms and fight off circling cannons until a group of gargoyles wrecks your ride and sends you plummeting to the land of killer snowmen!

You won't ever know what to expect here. Plus, the graphics are remarkably good, the red book soundtrack is incredibly dynamic, and the cinemas are wonderfully dramatic.

Sadly, copious strength restorers and the blazing baubles our heroes unleash make Schbibin Man 3 one of the easiest 16-bit platformers available--much easier than even Shinobi III, which is usually viewed as the poster child for games with a forgivable lack of challenge. The difficulty can be boosted a notch, but the difference is hardly noticeable. It's not as if the elements necessary for a challenging experience weren't all in place; some enemies are capable of attacking you in plenty of different ways. But a simple trade-off of shots will take care of most bosses, as they never approach relentlessness with their attack strategies.

Still, Schbibin Man 3 is very memorable. Unlike, say, Chiki Chiki Boys, it's not the sort of super-easy game that you forget about a day after beating it. The events and tunes in SM3 have stuck with me; and back when I first bought it, I played through it lots of times before moving on. It's one of the PC Engine's must-own action titles, without question.

Drop Off

~ DROP OFF ~

Data East / NEC

HuCard

1990

I've always hated Breakout and most of its many imitators. The only title along those lines I'd ever enjoyed was an ancient LCD handheld game called Spitball Sparky, which stars a likable Q*bert-like character and plays better than its "paddle"-featuring peers. Of course, I haven't had the pleasure of giving SS a go since I was about seven years old; if it's actually crap and my memories are horribly distorted by nostalgia, well, I'm none the wiser. And this didn't bode well for Drop Off: I'm inclined to despise its ilk to begin with, and there wasn't any chance it could compete with the masterpiece that I recall Spitball Sparky being. With things looking grim, DO actually brought a quick smile to my face with its opening cinematics, which can boast of very cool music accompanying very goofy text that relays a "go inside a mind" plot reminiscent of Psychosis'.

The weaving of this intriguing tale continues with melodramatic text-based intermissions. It's funny... the original PCE version features mangled English during these scenes, so whoever localized the title decided to fix that... but still came up with gibberish.

The story-related stuff is certainly entertaining, but then there's the game itself. Well, let's try to cover this quickly. You control a blue thing and destroy objects with a ball. You can "open up" your blue thing to deflect the ball at sharper angles. There are plenty of different objects to obliterate, including apples, crystals, eyeballs, and amoebas. If you hit the right spot in a chain and break off a bunch of objects at once, you're rewarded with bonus points. The "interesting" thing is that the chains of objects gradually descend. This is no Space Invaders; you don't have to annihilate every link to finish a round. You just have to hang in there until the chains have fully descended. But if an object touches your blue thing, you die. And if the ball bashes its way through the floor, you die. You can repel the chains a limited number of times to create a little breathing room, and a steamroller-type thing occasionally shows up to perform floor repair.

That's about all there is to the affair, aside from the occasional instance of silliness.

Drop Off is not excellent. It's not based on a wonderful concept, and it isn't executed particularly well. In fact, it's often said to be a disaster. Well, even though I was predisposed to hate it, I really can't say that I do. It gets kind of intense, I suppose, when objects come down and crowd the deflector. The nice music makes me want to like the game, as does the amusing story. I came in expecting about a billion levels, but there are only sixteen, which is just fine. And DO does have something that even Spitball Sparky doesn't: a final boss.