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Bonk's Adventure (Turbografx-16)

Developed/Published by: Hudson Soft Released: 15/12/1989 Completion: Finished it. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Here's beloved-by-a-certain-section-of-the-population (the ones that owned a Turbografx 16?) mascot Bonk, aka PC Genjin, aka BC Kid. As I never owned a TG16 (in fact, my entire memory of the system in the era, more or less, is about reading about Toilet Kids in an issue of Games-X) this is my first time playing through Bonk, and... it's a weird one, chums! On one hand, Bonk is very charming! There are lots of nice touches in the animation and world design that probably stood out at the time (love it when they do stuff like one level is you on a dinosaur's back, then the next is inside their guts, etc.) and it's a (fairly) breezy wee game to get through that doesn't outstay its welcome. On the other hand, Bonk himself is a bit annoying to control (his attack takes time to recover from) collision detection isn't the greatest (you get hurt often when you think you've succeeded in your attack) and because Bonk has a quite granular health bar there are loads of points where it's nearly impossible to not take a hit and it's pretty bullshit to be honest. Not least the final boss where, like... the idea seems to be just attrition? Having said all that it's not like I had a bad time or anything, it's just quite... you know, dated.

Will I ever play it again? Nope, but maybe one day I'll play the Gamecube remake, because I love that sort of nonsense.

Final Thought: I'm also kind of interested in the fact that there's an Amiga version of this (reviewed extremely positively by Gary Penn in Amiga Power, fact fans!) developed by Factor 5. I'm probably not going to play it, but I wonder if it fixes any of the issues with Bonk's controls/collision detection. Hmm!