A review of Bonk’s Revenge, a game originally made for the TurboGrafx 16 in 1991.
Childhood nostalgia
Not everyone has a childhood video game, but it’s common enough trait for those of us who grew up after the 80s that it’s become a cultural cliché. Bonk’s Revenge was mine. I owned the original and this sequel, but Revenge imprinted on me, probably due to it being a little easier to control and delivering a much brighter colour palette.
Bonk is a Mario-like platformer positioned in the same was Mario was: a mascot to make this video game system something a kid would want their parents to buy. You traverse to the right, finish levels, find power-ups, defeat enemies and bosses, and eventually save[1] a princess.
It’s fun, pretty breezy for most of it, colourful, kid-friendly, and memorable. It takes the average player two hours to beat it. Much like the TurboGrafx 16, it’s barely remembered. I think there’s a reason for that beyond bad marketing, though.
Controls
With most mascot platformers, there’s a proper noun, and a verb. Mario jumps. Sonic spins. With Bonk, the character and the action are not two things. Bonk bonks.
The instruction book calls this action a headbutt. But, dear reader, please understand: it is a bonk. The game, in at least one mini-game, instructs you to defeat enemies by bonking. This is the correct word.
In Bonk games, there’s two actions. You can jump, and you can bonk. Pressing the bonk button while just standing there makes Bonk bonk. If there’s an enemy right in front of him, they’ll die. That’s simple enough. Hit the jump button, then hit the bonk button, and Bonk dives in the direction you push the controller. Now you’re using both hands, setting up and guiding an attack.
Hit the bonk button once in the air, and Bonk dives head-first into anything you point him at. If it’s an enemy, they usually die. But when they die, Bonk ricochets off the enemy, gaining height. You determine the direction Bonk ricochets by determining his initial direction. It works really well and feels really good, but this takes time to get used to.
But the TurboGrafx 16 controller didn’t just have buttons. It also had switches. There were two buttons and two switches, and the switches had three notches each. In the instruction book, it says “Experiment with the turbo switches. Different settings will help you out at different points in the game.” This is pretty obtuse! This is not a design people are just going to get.
If the switch is flicked down, the button will press once. If the switch is flicked to the middle, the button will press repeatedly about as fast as a human and repeatedly press the button. If the switch is flicked all the way up, the button will press repeatedly faster than most humans can repeatedly press a button.
Most of the time you need the switch flicked all the way down so pressing the bonk button while midair makes Bonk dive. If you jump at a wall and hit the bonk button, Bonk performs a wall jump. There’s a lot of goodies and secret stages seemingly just out of reach, so you’ve got to get good at these ricochet moves pretty early.
But sometimes you need the switch flicked all the way up, so holding the bonk button hold down the Bonk button. If you’re in midair, Bonk will spin. Spinning in turbo mode makes him spin a lot faster and, with enough inertia, can go farther. But you have to be careful here, because this spin isn’t like, say, Sonic’s. You’re really vulnerable to enemies, because only the head part of your sprite will hit them. With some bosses, there’s a solid method of quickly spinning around their weak points, but you’ll also be taking damage.
I think this level of finicky precision probably turned a lot of people off Bonk even during the TurboGrafx run. It just doesn’t feel as intuitive as a Mario or Sonic game. But I bet it turned off even more people later, when trying to emulate the game using other controllers.
Emulation
The TurboGrafx/PC Engine has been something you could emulate for a long time. Officially, you could buy TG-16 games on the Wii in 2007. Before that, I saw emulators on pc and in the browser running pretty well. Getting the games to play didn’t seem to be the hard part; it was getting the controls to feel right.
On the Wii, if you played Bonk, there were two buttons that acted normally, and two buttons that acted as if the switch was flicked all the way up. This was okay, but it neglected the middle switch option. It seems like, if you want to buy a good TG-16 controller these days, this four-button scheme seems to be the norm. It’s never felt totally right for me.
With this play-through of Bonk’s Revenge, I created a control scheme in Retroarch that works like this: I had the jump button and bonk button set to the A and B buttons on my 3DS. The Y button became the “turbo” button, and I would hold down the bonk and turbo buttons at the same time in order to spin continuously. This felt natural enough, but even here I found a limitation: the “rapid fire” setting in Retroarch only gave me the “middle switch” amount of rapid fire for a TG-16 controller. I could never actually reach full spin speed with the bonk button.
It was enough to beat the game because Bonk is not a hard game, but I couldn’t 100% it because of this. I don’t think it would fly with other TG-16 games that require the switch flicked all the way up. For that, I’d probably invest in the 8-bit do controller.
Difficulty
The game asks you if you want easy, medium, or hard. The difficulty isn’t communicated by number of enemies or how much damage Bonk can take, but by how many levels you want to play. I like this approach. Maybe you’ve only got half an hour and want to see a game to completion. Bonk’s got you. Maybe you only want to play through the fun easy first few levels that are absolutely stuffed with 1-ups and heart pieces, smiley faces, and mini games.
At first you don’t see the point to all these mini games. Why am I collecting these little smiley faces everywhere? But you get it after you defeat the first boss. Bonk rides a little elevator, and it goes higher based on the number of smiley faces you collect. Every 10 smileys gets you one level higher, and you ride a cute little train full of cheerleading animals that refill your hearts or give you 1-ups.
Collect 50 smiley faces, and the princess warps you past a whole world.
I like this approach. The easier levels at the beginning are so full of opportunities to collect 1-ups and extra heart pieces (you begin with three and collect up to eight, and you keep them after death, like Zelda) to equip you for getting through the tougher levels later.
A great player could probably skip all the mini-games in the first few worlds and breeze through the end-game, especially if they’re good at switch management.
Fun
The word “Bonk” is so fun to say that someone made a social network[2] where it’s the only word available.
Bonk’s Revenge is a fun action platformer. There’s enough going on in each world that you feel you’re getting a lot out of it, and its short runtime means there’s no filler. The game never runs out of ideas and rarely repeats sections. I wish it was better known.
More screenshots: https://parosilience.tumblr.com/tagged/Bonk%27s%20Revenge
[1] In Bonk’s Adventure, the princess has been brainwashed into being one of the bosses and requires rescue. In Bonk’s Revenge, she assists you in the same and gives you a smooch at the end, but doesn’t seem to be in much peril herself.
K Sawyer Paul 