Welcome to Day 2 of Octurbo. I probably won't stick to a daily schedule; the idea was to do this whenever I had an hour free to make it all happen. Still, spreading it out seems like it would preferable to dumping two or three on everyone on the same day. My boredom needn't correlate to everyone else's irritation, after all.
Bonk's Revenge is, of course, the sequel to Hudson's Bonk's Adventure - or PC-Genjin, a pun that doesn't quite work as well in a different language on a renamed platform - which I covered back in May. While Bonk is perhaps famous for being the mascot and face of the TurboGrafx-16, I didn't particularly want to cover any direct sequels for TurboMento-12. Wasn't really in the spirit of the feature to keep it so narrowly-focused. But hey, this is Octurbo, so now there's no excuse. As a direct sequel, I'll be focusing most of my attention on changes between this game and its predecessor.
Revenge for What? Didn't He Win the Last Game?
Welcome to Bonk's Revenge! I like this Wind Waker-esque wall scroll the intro/title screen has going on.So this is curious take on a difficulty system - it does that kinda bullshit thing of barricading off the rest of the game if you're on a wussier challenge level, but at least it tells you up front.So here's a comparison shot. Revenge definitely has more going on in the background, and Bonk himself is a little more detailed and cartoonish. They're functionally identical by any metric that matters, though.Fortunately I remembered he could do this with waterfalls to get higher. Would've been a short game otherwise.So this flower has decided to kidnap me. No wait, it's a bonus stage. Floret Sprungs, as we saw in the last game's credits, are the yellow springy flowers. I messed this bonus stage up pretty quickly though. I really need a wired 360 controller for this thing.Bonk still attacks the same way he always does: using his head. By which I don't mean he's outwitting his enemies or anything so cerebral, just that he has an array of headbutt moves.It's definitely a pleasant-looking game. The Genesis had been out a few years (and the Super Famicom had just been released) at this point, though, so there was a lot of competition for good-looking 16-bit stuff.You can headbutt the springy plants to move them to where they're most needed. That's kind of clever. I ought to keep in mind that Super Mario World was out at this point though, so maybe this doesn't cut it.Talking of headbutts from earlier, now Bonk has a butt head. This is his customary meat-eating powered-up mode. He's indestructible right now (hence the odd color) and can breath fire, if the whole invulnerability thing wasn't enough.Oh and these guys are back. I hate these guys. Springy a-holes.Veiny Bonk is the mid-tier power-up level. He's no longer invincible and fires ice instead of fire, which just stuns enemies instead of incinerating them. Still, better than nothing.So I guess this game has an odd sense of humor. The only way to get out of that pond is to let yourself be caught by the fisherdino. Bonk just looks so damn indignant at the ignominy of it all.I neglected to mention: Powered up Bonk can create tremors when he head-bonks the ground, killing everything on screen. It's worth chasing after those meats, to say the least.So now we have the shell-head dinosaurs' leader riding what appears to be a developmentally-challenged raptor. The raptor himself is invulnerable, so the idea is to jump over and bonk the rider.Can't say I emerged unscathed from that one, but he was dealt with pretty quickly. Maybe it's not the real boss of this world?Next stage is an underground level with brick walls to harmlessly head-butt through. I bet Bonk's skull is going to give archaeologists pause for thought.Ominous bones floating in lava: the nightmare Bonk lives every day of his life.There's still dinosaurs that you eat you noggin-first, too. It doesn't look like this purple guy's heart is in it though. Poor little homicidal carnivore.I love that there are shell-wearing dinosaurs that have protective gear on top of those shells. When you share your land with Bonk, though, it's absolutely explicable to be paranoid about head trauma. I'm also showing off Bonk's new wall-jump here. I think it replaced his old tactic of simply biting his way up walls.Yeah, I think "Volcano Castle" is probably a good point to give Bonk's vengeance to a temporary respite.
Bonk's Revenge is every bit the platformer the old Bonk was. The designers, Red Company, wisely decided not to mess with the formula too much and simply threw in a few tweaks and graphical improvements. I didn't get too far into the game, but it seems the level numbers have been dropped for a more freeform sort of progression. I also wonder if I'm skipping a lot of levels by playing on the medium difficulty's "Four Stage Game" (I wasn't going to beat the whole game in one sitting anyway).
Really, the game's just more Bonk. Nothing more (well, a little bit more), nothing less. Though a decent enough game, it doesn't seem like it would be worth covering something so similar to Bonk's Adventure yet again. Next game.
@slag: Both the Bonk games I've covered are okay. It was a little old-fashioned even back when it was released, but the controls are pleasingly precise (something that's not obvious in screenshots) and it has a cartoonish, vivid sense of slapstick humor. Can't help but feel it's just a little too dated for its own good though. I could see a talented designer relaunching it and doing something interesting with all the precision head-bonking, or balancing the levels in such a way that you can bounce from power-up to power-up and rack up huge combos or something.
Ultimately Bonk is that sort of benignly solid game where you can't really fault it for any single aspect, but it isn't all that interesting either. It fits nicely in that "forgettable" grey zone between the mascot platformers that were so good they began a whole trend (Mario, Sonic) and those which are remembered for being notoriously bad knock-offs (Bubsy, Awesome Possum).
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