Nuts & Milk (Famicom Review) Includes Bonus Reviews of Nuts & Milk ROM Hacks

Nuts & Milk
Platform: Famicom
Released July 20, 1984
Designed by Kikuta Masaaki
Developed by Hudson Soft
Never Released Outside of Japan
NO MODERN RELEASE

“What about Nuts & Milk or Road Avenger and stuff… still nothing…? Speed up the update pace, will ya… I’m payin’ decent money for this…”
Hideki Kamiya (March 4, 2026), Director of Resident Evil 2 and Devil May Cry, on the lackluster Switch Online library updates.

Well, now I have to do one of those, so I flipped a coin and Nuts & Milk won.

You might not have heard of Nuts & Milk, but it’s one of the most historically significant games ever made. Alongside Hudson Soft’s port of Lode Runner, also released on July 20, 1984, it was the very first third party published game released on a Nintendo platform and Hudson Soft’s first console game. Had I not known that fact or anything else about it, I would have sworn this was an unreleased port of an unreleased Nintendo coin-op. It has the look of one. It has the feel of one. It has the personality of one. It even has a similar title screen with A and B games.

Seriously, remove the (c) 1984 Hudson Soft part of that screen and you would swear this is a first party Nintendo game, and one that slots in perfectly next to Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Popeye, and Mario Bros. Obviously Hudson Soft knew their target audience, a fact that’s even more apparent when you find out that the original PC Nuts & Milk, released in 1983/84 was an entirely different style game. That original game is a top-down maze chase similar to Mr. Do. You tunnel your way to fruit while avoiding enemies who always walk clockwise around the playfield. Going into this feature, I intended to review both versions of Nuts & Milk. But, that would actually require playing the MSX game for more than a couple minutes, and I didn’t want to. It’s boring.

Instead of porting THAT version of Nuts & Milk, Hudson Soft rebuilt the entire game. They kept the base concept of playing as the heroic Milk who must avoid the villainous Nuts, with the object being to collect all the fruit which will then open up the exit. However, since Nintendo-style 2D arcaders were the main draw of the Famicom in the days before Super Mario, Hudson reworked the entire game to be more like that. Although Nuts & Milk is still a maze chase, it’s now also a platformer played from a side view, with jumping and much more complicated rules that just favor the player. The most valuable advantage is that Milk can move through one side of the screen and come out the other, but the chasers can’t. Also, although there is no official attack method or “turn the tables” gameplay like energizers in Pac-Man, the chasers are dumb as a rock and easy to manipulate to their doom. While the Nuts are capable of SOME platforming, they’re bad at it. Really, really bad at it.

But, just because they’re dumb doesn’t mean they’re not a threat. They respawn very quickly and there could be as many as three of them on a stage. If you play in the B Mode, the game adds an additional threat in the form of blimps that spawn from the left side of the screen and functionally act like fireballs that are lethal to the touch. Which is a weird choice because the bonus rounds actually DO have red and green fireballs similar to the original Mario Bros. There’s also helicopters that spawn from the right side in the B mode, and I had no idea until I was about halfway through my main play session that helicopters are actually points that you’re meant to collect. Well f*ck. And I only found that out after I held my breath and tried to jump over one. Obviously I failed, and thank God for it. Of course, this meant I had to replay the entire f*cking game to recalibrate the difficulty. Read the damn instructions, Cathy. How many times has not doing so bit you in the ass?

I suspect the reason this didn’t get a global release is because of the controls. Nuts & Milk has some brutally tough movement and jumping physics that, even though I finished the game, I never fully got the hang of. Nuts & Milk has fixed jumping, and one of the main “puzzle” elements is often just sussing out where you must take off from using a whole lot of trial and error. You can’t move through the bricks and there’s no jumping allowed on the ladders (the logs). The only thing you can do with ladders is fall off them at angles, which the game heavily incorporates into the level design.

But finding the correct jumping angles, let alone actually executing the jumps that get you home, can be quite difficult and a tad bit frustrating. If you had told me before today that a game that leaned so heavily into last-pixel jumps would score a YES! from me, I’d have thought you were nuts. “I am! Nuts AND Milk that is!” I’d say over a third of the levels will come down to taking off at the last possible split second when you jump, but sometimes, it feels unresponsive. You’ll likely need more than one attempt at least a few times for these situations. This type of design is so common that it SHOULD be a deal breaker. In most games, it would be. Maybe it’s because this is a maze chase with some of the dumbest chasers in the genre’s history, but it didn’t bother me as much here. It adds tension for sure.

I’m with Mr. Kamiya. Yeah, where the f*ck is Nuts & Milk on the Switch Online library? It’s the rare genre buffet that actually isn’t half bad. What is it? A maze chase? A platformer? A puzzler? It’s all of that blended in equal parts, which is genuinely remarkable given the time period and the fact that this was Hudson’s first console project. It’s not an easy game. There’s a very sharp learning curve to the action even after you learn how easy it is to dupe the Nuts into falling off the ladders or into the water, which shouldn’t take players more than three or four levels to figure out. It never got a global release, though it was apparently well known to American audiences who bought bootleg multicarts, as it was a mainstay of those. Now that a major game designer has publicly called for its re-release, I think there’s a good chance Nintendo will work something out with Hudson. Nuts & Milk isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch, but it’s a damn solid waste of an hour that should have probably been an NES launch game.
Verdict: YES!

BONUS REVIEWS

Nuts & Milk is also a popular mainstay of the ROM hacking scene. Most are just graphical changes, but I found two that completely changed the levels and even made some gameplay adjustments.

Donkey Kong 2
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released August 25, 2016
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Nuts & Milk
Original Concept & Graphics by elbobelo
Designed by Googie
Link to patch at ROMHacking.net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

Donkey Kong 2 is basically a fifty level expansion pack for Nuts & Milk. I imagine the next game will be as well. But hey, I liked Nuts & Milk and the game zips by really quickly so fifty new levels is a-okay with me. There’s some pretty ambitious level design in this one as well and a few new concepts, some that I liked and others I didn’t. In the bonus rounds, instead of simply trying to reach your girlfriend (who in Nuts & Milk is named Yogurt. I kept picturing Mel Brooks), you’re trying to grab an umbrella that continuously floats upward before it becomes out of reach. It’s not so fast that you should miss it, but it’s a nice touch that lends a sense of urgency.

A baffling change that I didn’t like was that, in the normal levels, when you grab the last item, the fireballs (replacing the nuts) die and start to float up to heaven. They’re not lethal at this point and you have a free pass to the end of the stage. I don’t know if this was done because the designer realized that a couple levels might be impossible to finish if they remain active. I started watching for that and I didn’t notice any stage that I thought I wouldn’t be able to avoid the fireballs if they remained active. It’s a strange choice that sucks the tension out of a key portion of the game that should, in theory, be the most tense: the final stretch before beating a stage.

The biggest change is in the level design mentality. Donkey Kong 2 is less puzzle-like and leans much heavier into the platforming part of the game. It utilizes the changing direction off the spring in mid-air technique to great effect and, at times, it makes for a more tense game than Nuts & Milk. But there’s also a sloppiness to Donkey Kong 2. The difficulty curve is all over the place. Some levels were very intense and took me a while to shake my chasers, but those levels might be followed by three or four cinches that took only seconds to beat and posed no challenge at all. Also, for some reason, the victory animation is the same sprite as Mario holding an umbrella. Only there is no umbrella, so instead it looks exactly like Mario is trying to give Pauline a Stone Cold Stunner and missing by a couple feet. Maybe he’s nearsighted?

While I had fun, I preferred Nuts & Milk’ near-perfect blending of three genres to Donkey Kong 2’s focus on platforming. It’s too bad that the “fireballs are defeated” concept wasn’t something used in the A mode that was dropped in the B mode. Nuts & Milk had uneven difficulty too, but it never felt like the game was outright surrendering to players. After a certain point, I wondered if the designer simply got bored with the project because, near the end of the game, there’s a stretch of multiple levels that felt phoned-in. Like this:

Honestly, I thought the first level was harder than a lot of the later stages. On the other hand, Googie did include a lot of stages that felt genuinely inspired. I wasn’t even sure I was going to bother finishing Donkey Kong 2 until I got to level seven. When I saw it, I sat up in my chair and said “yeah, I need to see this one all the way through to the end.” And I’m happy I did.

What’s even more interesting is that, had I never known about Nuts & Milk, I think I could have bought this as a legit unreleased sequel to Donkey Kong. Maybe. I mean if not for the graphical weirdness like the victory pose. I think making this a Donkey Kong Jr. game would have made a lot more sense. The heavy jumping physics and the spring physics feel more like that game than the original Donkey Kong. On a related note, one of the most famous “lost” games is one that never had so much as a single screenshot. In the mid-80s, Nintendo themselves promoted that they were working on a game called Donkey Kong Returns. Not only did nothing come of it, but nothing has been said about it in nearly forty years. I assume that Nintendo was going to re-sprite a Japanese game that never got a US release, perhaps even Konami’s King Kong (which I will be reviewing soon). If not for the fact that contemporary reports mentioned throwing barrels, I’d think a reworking of Nuts & Milk was the potential identity of Donkey Kong Returns. Had that happened, I think consumers would have believed it. That’s what Googie and elbobelo have proven. Good job, guys.
Verdict: YES!

How about one more?

Drasle Family – Pochi & Bochi
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released April 20, 2025
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Nuts & Milk
Designed by Aether Knight
Link to patch at ROMhacking.net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

I actually played many more ROM hacks of Nuts & Milk than the two I did for this feature. There’s quite a few, but only Donkey Kong 2 and Drasle Family – Pochi & Bochi were really worth mentioning. Of the two, Pochi & Bochi was hands down the best one. It’s really just another fifty-stage level pack with graphics inspired by Legacy of the Wizard (which I reviewed in Namco Museum Archives Volume 2: The Definitive Review), but the quality of level design is not only professional but incredibly clever. Whereas Donkey Kong 2 leaned into the platforming aspect of Nuts & Milk, Pochi opted to focus on the puzzle element. Designer Aether Knight especially utilized the screen-wrap to accomplish this. Most levels require a lot of carefully nabbing one fruit (now an item from Legacy of the Wizard) one at a time, then repeating a series of processes, all while trying to manipulate the Nuts (now clones of Pochi).

The end result is a game that easily outshines the original. Had Nuts & Milk been a more popular game, I have no doubt this would be known as one of the best level pack styles of ROM hacks ever made. It’s so well done. Now, in fairness to Hudson Soft, Mr. Knight had a lifetime of games like this, plus based on his Solomon’s Key hack (that I’ll do one of these days but HOLY F*CK, it’s brutal), he seems to have a knack for complicated puzzle design. In fact, I think he takes things a little too far at times by over-utilizing last-pixel jumps. He’s certainly not guilty of anything Hudson didn’t do themselves, but since his levels are so much more optimized to make the chasers a threat, you likely won’t get a second chance if you short a jump here.

And, like both Hudson Soft and Googie before him, Aether Knight struggled with difficulty scaling. Like the level in the above picture, which took me multiple attempts to work out and then a couple minutes to finish in the run that succeeded. But then, I aced the next level with minimum brain power. Then the level after it was yet another “repeat the same process X amount of times” puzzle. In that level, pictured below, the three items above Pochi’s head (aka the pink one) can only be picked up one at a time, meaning you have to go through this entire gauntlet four full cycles to beat the level. Yes, four times. Don’t forget returning to the house, which is actually what beats the stage. And that’s assuming you don’t screw up a jump along the way.  

No matter how tightly designed a level like this is, backtracking ALWAYS gets old after a while. I would have preferred if this style puzzle design was limited to two passes at most. Luckily for Pochi & Bochi, the maze chase element is there to save the day. Sometimes. Knight might have done TOO good a job engineering these levels in a way designed to prevent the chasers from auditioning for a role in Lemmings. You might have to do quite a lot of shimming to be able to give yourself enough space to operate with the damn enemies. But if you crave the close calls of a maze chase, there’s a LOT more of those moments in Pochi & Bochi than there is in Nuts & Milk.

As repetitive and sometimes frustrating as it can be, I’m SO happy I ditched reviewing the MSX version of Nuts & Milk in favor of NES ROM hacks. I feel lucky that I got to experience Drasle Family – Pochi & Bochi. It’s a MAJOR upgrade over Nuts & Milk and one of my favorite ROM hacks ever. It also speaks to the tragedy of Nuts & Milk not getting a global release. Who knows? Maybe the game would have been a major hit and sequels or spin-offs would have resembled this. There’s also a sadness to Knight’s effort. I love reviewing ROM hacks, but even with the really good ones, there’s always this heartbreaking voice in the back of my head saying “hardly anyone will ever play this, no matter how glowing your review.” If Konami ever does want to do something with Nuts & Milk, you don’t need to design another fifty levels in-house. The ones designed for this game are damn good puzzle/maze-chase levels that are every bit as professional as anything you could crank out.
Verdict: YES!