Bonk’s Adventure: Arcade Version (Arcade Review)

April 27, 2025 by 1 Comment

Bonk’s Adventure: Arcade Version
aka Kyuukyoku!! PC Genjin (Japan)
aka B.C. Kid: Arcade Version (Europe)
Platform: Arcade
Released in 1994
Developed by Kaneko
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Certainly a gorgeous game with impressive sprite work and memorable enemies.

Calling the arcade version of Bonk “the forgotten Bonk” kind of seems weird when the whole franchise is essentially forgotten at this point. Many of my older readers have talked about the original Bonk’s Adventure for the TurboGrafx-16 as a game that looked so enticing that they wanted to trade their NES in for a TG16. For a while, it looked like Bonk would be a mascot on the level of Mario and Sonic. It never happened. The last fully original Bonk game released in 1995, and the last console release happened exclusively in Japan with a PlayStation 2/GameCube remake of the original Bonk’s Adventure. Back in 2023, I had planned to do every Bonk game. I only finished two games, the original and its NES remake, before I needed a break. I have quite a few games left, including this extremely weird arcade take that’s built around co-op play, though the game is fine in single player.

This might be my new favorite screenshot ever. In the co-op game, Bonk’s girlfriend tags along and you and her can bonk each other till your heart’s content, though as seen in this pic, she might not like it. The dinosaur above Bonk is like “hooo, this will be fun to watch!”

If you’re expecting a close approximation of the console versions of Bonk, forget about it. You can’t even “glide” by rapidly doing and undoing the diving headbutt like in the original games. There’s also no exploration at all during the twenty-one levels, which are bite-sized. Seriously, in my first play through, I usually took about 40 to 45 seconds per stage. Speed is incentivized, as the game keeps track of the fastest times for each level. You don’t have to worry about gathering items, with the exception of the smiley faces. You’ll notice the smiley faces are stacked on Bonk’s head in most of the pictures. In the coin-op, they act as a sort of helmet that both protects you from some attacks and gives you extended reach on your headbutts. But, if you take damage, they go flying like the rings in Sonic. It sounds nice, but I never fully got a grasp on why some enemies were knocking the smileys off my head and others were damaged by them.

Sometimes the ball is a basketball. Sometimes it’s a soccer ball. Sometimes it’s a football. My non-American readers are ripping their hair out and/or screaming at their monitors after those last two.

You’re also expected to grab a sportsball and carry it to the finish line of each stage. You even score points for every second you carry it. The end of stages features a moving finish line straight out of Super Mario World, only the twist is the tape is a hoop that you dunk the ball through. It sounds more important than it is. Arcade Bonk is a straight-up platforming action game that’s based around simple enemy attacks and hazards like spikes or falling blades. Despite all the elements that have been added over the console Bonk titles, this is a much simpler game than those. Play the short stages, all of which are left-to-right scrolling. There’s no vertical stages and no set pieces. The only themed stage of note is a single stage with swimming. That old chestnut, and it sucks as much here as it normally does. Seriously, for all the whining I do about slippy-sliding ice stages (and those are here too) I’d rather be frustrated by them than bored with a swimming stage.

Funny enough, Bonk games tend to have better swimming stages than most platformers and the coin-op Bonk is no exception. But I’d still rather have a normal level. I’ve never understood the popularity of swimming stages in games. “It’s kind of like the game you’ve been playing this whole time, only slower. Much, much slower.”

The tiny stages are weird, but how they play out is even weirder. You can play the twenty-one levels in any order. After every three levels, you then fight one the seven bosses in any order. Normally this would be a sign of a game that doesn’t scale properly since, in theory, being able to choose any level and especially any boss means the levels need to be balanced. That’s not the case here. Bonk’s levels are numbered, and I’d say the sequential order scales as you would expect it to almost perfectly, with the final stages offering a pretty hefty challenge. I have no clue why they made this non-linear. Presumably it’s because this was kind of designed to be a ticket redemption game and, in theory, you can get more tickets on the harder levels since there’s more scoring opportunities. If you do play this, I strongly suggest you activate the SERVICE MODE in the dip switch settings and beef up the difficulty (you can also change the Japanese text to English). The default setting is set to 0 out of 3 in difficulty, but it should be set on 1 or 2, at least.

Some damn good boss fights too, including one against Evil Baby Bonk. Kind of redundant since all babies are evil until they work it out of their system.

Keeping it real, the coin-op version of Bonk is probably going to be one of the weaker games in the franchise. Despite all the effort to give this layers of complexity, it’s one of the most basic platformers to come out during this time frame. Thankfully, the action of the Bonk franchise is really, really good. The arcade game is proof of how good. It was a smart move to take away the ability to hover, as it would have allowed players to circumvent most of the challenge. By removing that, you’re left with a short and basic platformer that’s been polished to a mirror shine. Personality matters A LOT, and they really went all-out with making the sprites feel alive. Despite what the Wikis say, there’s even power-ups that turn you into a robotic skeleton or what appears to be a Native American warrior.

The combat is chaotic and visually loud, but always satisfying, and the levels are well constructed. Including all the downtime between stages, it’ll only take you a little over a half hour to beat Bonk even if you die several times. If you play co-op, since you can attack and bounce off each other, it might take longer. I didn’t get to play it co-op as much as I would have liked, but fans of New Super Mario’s co-op should get a kick out of it. So, will we ever see Bonk Arcade get an official release? I wouldn’t bet on it, but then again, I have no idea what the rights situation is with this one. I assume a Bonk collection is coming soon, but either way, I wouldn’t be shocked if this is missing from it. Hell, as far as I can tell, nobody even knows the fate of Kaneko or its library. I do hope that coin-op Bonk can be plucked from obscurity some day, because as short and strange as it is, it’s actually a lot of fun. Maybe not quite the Bonk you’d hope for, but still Bonk and still fun nonetheless.
Verdict: YES!

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Retro Runner: Princess Power

April 30, 2014 by Leave a comment

In Retro Runner: Princess Power (“RR:PP”), you play the role of a princess who no longer desires to wait for a prince to rescue her from captivity and plans to make her escape. Along the way she encounters enemies and bosses who try to stop her, as well as weapons and powerups to destroy them, in this storied version of an endless runner.

rrpp01Ever since Temple Run and Jetpack Joyride became big, endless runners have been showing up more and more. Many are clones with their own graphics, such as Agent Ride or Pitfall! (the runner version), and some try to add a bit of their own flavor into the mix. Retro Runner is one of the latter, and the game differentiates itself from most endless runners in a few ways.

The first is that the playfield changes as you progress through the story, traveling with the princess through different eras of gaming, from the Atari generation, through the SNES/Genesis consoles, and the current period. This means that your character and the environment gain better graphics and sound along each leg of the adventure. Each stage plays the same, but the advancing graphics is a fun trek through time.

Most endless runners have some sort of currency collection as a carrot to keep you playing and let you gain powers, and this game is no different; however, RR:PP also includes weaponry to fight enemies along the way. With the point of a finger, you chuck knives, energy shields, throwing stars, and homing pigeons at your foes. Yeah, homing pigeons. They’re deadly! At the end of each stage is a boss that takes a different strategy to defeat.

The story is fun (yay for a princess taking care of herself!) and the gameplay is a joy, but there are some things in the game that I felt could use improvement, most of which left me confused when I first encountered them.rrpp02

In the tutorial, you encounter what seems to be the final boss of the game who is undefeatable in this mission. At this point I had no way of knowing that and spent a considerable amount of time avoiding his attacks and hitting him, unsure if I was doing any damage. The game made it sound as if I was hitting armor, but again, at this point there wasn’t a way for me to know this wasn’t the default “hitting a big enemy” sound. Finally I got hit again and the story advanced. It turns out that I was supposed to “die”.

Games such as these allow you to collect or purchase currency to use in-game to buy powerups that make the game “easier”. But in RR:PP, the amounts required to purchase anything after the first level of any category are enormous and made me feel that I had to purchase in-game currency if I had any intention of boosting my character. I don’t want a free ride, and in-game purchases are the driving force as to why games like this exist these days, but the initial curve feels extremely steep.

A few of some very important things to me in a game is both control and the UI. Control in this game is fine, it’s hard to go wrong with a runner really though admittedly, sometimes incoming enemies are difficult to see because you need to have a finger on the right side of the screen, covering some of the playfield.

Outside of gameplay, the UI for the game needs improvement. Level selection shows you all of the stages in the game, but there is no indicator as to which levels are open to the player; they are all the same color and clickable. When it comes to the powerup purchase menu, it isn’t intuitive what you can click on to gain a skill without randomly pressing around and seeing what happens as, again, everything is clickable, but you don’t find out what you can click on without trial and error. On the bright side, since I started writing this review, a patch has come out that makes the powerup purchase menu brighter, but to a new user it is still not particularly easy to understand.

rrpp03While I like that the game asks the player a quiz after each death as a chance to gain bonus currency, no matter if I failed or not, the question stayed up and allowed me to keep clicking on answers in a now-dead interface.

I encountered three bugs that I hope are easily squashed. The first is that once I purchased some currency, I still received ads until I restarted my device. Secondly, after one death, the second end boss joined my next run. It didn’t attack me, but it hovered ominously up and down while I tried to make my way through the stage again. Finally, before I made a purchase to remove ads, I confused the game by turning on airplane mode. Naturally it couldn’t load the ads and gave me a blank screen, but in order to be able to keep playing, I had to open the home screen and return to the game.

The thing about mobile games is that you need to be able to entice users right away as they tend to be fickle. Leaving them to hunt and peck their way through your interface is a surefire way to lose many of them which is a shame because the game underneath here is pretty fun. Keep it clean and simple. I want to suggest the game but not just yet. Let them get a few things worked out and I would gladly do a IGC Second Chance.

RR:PPRetro Runner: Princess Power was developed by Stratum Games

The game is free, supported by in-game ads and in-game currency purchases, and on iOS, Android, and soon the desktop. Oh and the game is fucking hard, too! Fuck!

Filed under Android Reviews, iPhone and iPad Reviews, PC Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,