Before we get too much further with Octurbo-CD, we ought to revisit a little bald friend of ours. I covered the firsttwo Bonk games last year, so it feels only fitting that we tackle his third and final (well, as far as the TurboGrafx is concerned) adventure for the system, Bonk 3: Bonk's Big Adventure. Fortunately for our purposes, it was published as both a HuCard game and as an enhanced TurboGrafx-CD game, so we'll be checking out the latter version. Oddly enough, the CD version has no Japanese equivalent. My guess is that the TurboDuo crowd were reaching for new releases at that point: 45 licensed games total isn't a particularly impressive library.
Bonk became the de facto mascot for the PC Engine having been a character designed specifically for that purpose by developers Hudson Soft -- in Japan, he is known as "PC Genjin", where "genjin" means "primitive man". It may be a dumb pun, but it's easy to remember a character so nominally tied to their console of origin. To Hudson's credit, they attempted to create a platformer hero as distinct as possible, distancing itself from the obvious benchmark Mario in much the same way as Sega's Sonic did. Bonk has minimal jumping ability, but he has an array of offensive abilities like his trademark head bonk and various powered-up forms as well as a means to climb up walls and waterfalls. Stages in Bonk tend to be a little more open-ended for the sake of collectibles and secrets too.
I feel the new additions to Bonk III specifically are so minor that I might as well describe them in the screenshots themselves. And, of course, there's the new addition of redbook audio too.
The Little Round-Headed Buffoon That is Bonk
So that's Bonk 3. It's really more of the same, but it still holds up as well as its predecessors. I think the reason for why that is is because no game really tried to do what Bonk did before or after its heyday. 2D platformers underwent this odd evolution where the big games industry came to this spurious conclusion that they were no longer relevant: they had been usurped by 3D platformers, evidenced by how games of that format outside of the big mascot franchises continued to do less and less well. In actuality, and this is what all these Indie 2D platformer developers later discovered, the real reason 2D platformers went temporarily extinct is because no-one was making NEW ones. They were simply regurgitating the same tired elements of all the Mario also-rans that had come before and, with the occasional exception like Klonoa, the 2D format just wasn't seeing any innovative ideas.
So now we have a whole bunch of super successful Indie 2D platformers (which are getting a little a stale again, admittedly) and the reason is because they're all trying new things. Bonk persists because what it did still feels fresh and original.
Anyway, enough ranting about platformers. I don't have much to offer musically this time, since YouTube isn't being co-operative with finding soundtrack vids, so instead here's a Long Play of the CD version. You can enjoy the CD-quality music of the game with the added benefit of watching all the above screenshots in motion, kinda.