SUPER BIOMAN 1 (MASTER SYSTEM)

C’mon, you must know it. It’s the famous catchphrase of one of gaming’s most enduring icons, a jolly red chap who lives in a cartoon world of brick platforms and turtle-stomping. Why not shout it along with me? Ready? “It’s-a me, Bioman!”

Super Bioman 1, no less; an unlicensed Korean Master System game from 1992 that was (perhaps) developer by a company called Hello Soft. Not to be mistaken for a tie-in with the Super Sentai series Choudenshi Bioman, Super Bioman 1 is the story of what appears to be a pudgy alien child in a red babygrow who must travel the land to save a princess. At least, I assume princess-rescuing is the goal, what with Bioman being a complete rip-off of Super Mario.

A rip-off of the all-time NES classic Super Mario Bros. 3, to be precise. This is abundantly clear when you look at Bioman’s map screen, an image that makes you wonder how awkward it must have been for Bioman’s developers to draw on the tracing paper they’d tacked to their TV screens.
It’s got all the elements you’ll be familiar with if you’ve ever played SMB3 (and if you haven’t, go and play it right now, I guarantee you’ll have more fun than reading this article). Numbered stages in a mostly linear progression, bonus areas like the mushroom houses and a castle at the end – all terribly familiar, even when viewed through the extremely bootleg lens of Bioman’s graphics. But will the gameplay adhere to the same Super Mario formula?

Well, yes, obviously. As interesting as it would have been if Bioman’s Mario map screen had lead into a blood-drenched survival horror or something, what we’ve got here is Super Mario but on the Master System and not as good. Bioman can jump, smash blocks with his head, bounce on enemies, collect coins and all that jazz. Of course, Bioman has its own unique quirks, and we’ll get to those in due course.

For now, just take a good look at this off-brand Koopa Trooper. I know it looks like some mad scientist grafted a plucked chicken head onto an army helmet, but this is what passes for Koopa Troopers in Bioman and you can jump on them and kick their abandoned shells around the stage as you’d expect. That said, every time I kicked a turtle shell in Bioman it immediately ricocheted and killed me. I’ll let you decide whether that was down to karmic punishment or Bioman not controlling as nimbly as Mario does.

And so it goes, all the sights of SMB3 recreated in a copyright-infringing way that I honestly find rather charming. Question mark blocks are replaced by “Q” blocks, the coins are dollars rather than the gold-based economy of the Mushroom Kingdom and super mushrooms make Bioman big and cheerful. It all reminds me of a pound-shop toy line, the kind where sure, The Lion King is a Disney movie but there’s nothing to say that there can’t be a different and legally distinct Little King Lion who sings songs about looking forward to becoming a regent with his friends Tumbaa and Pimon. And hey, if you’re going to rip something of it might as well be the best, right?

Thus the first stage ends just as a stage in SMB3 does, with Bioman leaping up to collect one of the random icons in the end-of-stage box. Collect three for a bonus, collect three matching icons for a bigger bonus. I reckon you could make an interesting psychological survey of the split between SMB3 players that patiently try to match the icons and those (like me) who just run towards the goal as fast as possible. Okay, maybe “interesting” is too strong a word.

Here’s stage two, where Bioman has turned purple. It’s because he’s collected a fire flower, you see, and it’s not like they could make him more red. So now he looks grape-flavoured. I’m still at a loss as to what Bioman is supposed to be, honestly. There’s something... familiar about him. He reminds me of some half-remembered mascot character, although that might just be down to the cutesy, chubby style of a lot of Asian mascot characters. I feel like he should be advertising nappies or baby formula, not stomping on turtles.

The third stage is a bit different, because it’s a boss battle! It’s supposed to be the equivalent of the “fort” stages in SMB3 where you fight the mid boss Boom-Boom, but without the stage that precedes the actual fight. Instead you’re thrown straight into battle with this almost indecipherable thing. I once forgot about a bag of potatoes at the back of a cupboard for a couple of months, and it’s nice to see that bag of potatoes went on to get a job in the entertainment business.
With the power to throw fireballs from Bioman’s hands, I went into the battle feeling confident. Just waltz in, sling a few projectiles, claim the easy victory, bask in the cheers of the crowd and so forth. Except you can’t use fireballs in the boss battles. It’s not even that they don’t damage the enemy, either – you simply can’t throw fireballs at all. Let’s put it down to performance anxiety, and resort to jumping on the boss’ head. If that is a head.

Now we’re back to the regular stages, and you might have noticed a few things. One is that all the stages look the same, and yes, apart from the boss battles they all take place in this strange twilight version of the Mushroom Kingdom, where the only light that reaches the ground is the baleful glow of a distant nebula. Again, it’s a look that I do like, but over the course of a whole game a bit more variety would have been nice.
Another thing is that, for a Master System game, the graphics look a bit... crap. On a technical level, I mean. I don’t know much about the Master System hardware, but I believe Bioman is running on an SG-1000 graphics mode. I’m also fairly sure that Bioman was ported from the MSX. There are Bioman games available on the MSX, and as an extra piece of evidence:

I’m pretty sure the Master System doesn’t have a space bar to press. That said, there was a keyboard for the SG-1000, although that definitely wasn’t the intended control scheme for this game.
This is one of Toad’s bonus game houses by the way, now staffed by one of Toad’s distant cousins from the rural backwaters of the Mushroom Kingdom - the kind of place where they keep things in the family, if you get my drift. It’s a slot machine with items as rewards, but the true reward of this screen is that the phrase “god speed you” reminded me to listen to some Guitar Wolf.

At the end of the world is, of course, the castle. Just like the fort there’s no actual stage here, just a boss battle. Bioman replaces Bowser’s Koopa Kids with a grumpy tomato, and it’s definitely a distinct downgrade. Neither of the characters look like they want to be here. I don’t particularly want to be here. The inevitable stomping has taken on the grim air of duty. The tomato offers little resistance as it waddles back and forth along the ground. It yearns for this to end beneath the heel of Bioman’s bootees. In the end, there is only silence.

Holy shit, a talking chair!
I was actually quite surprised that this first world isn’t all there is to the game, but the princess (told you there’d be a princess) isn’t here so there must be more to it. I’m hoping there aren’t eight worlds. Bioman is running out of steam already, it surely cannot sustain itself for another forty-odd stages.  But the talking chair’s unwavering believe in Bioman’s strength gives me the confidence to forge ahead, so let’s see what else the game has to offer.

Well would you look at that, it’s more of the same. I think we all saw this coming.
Now that I’ve cleared the first world, I suppose I should talk a bit about how Super Bioman 1 actually plays. In a word: ehh. Wait, that’s not a word, that’s the noise you make when someone asks you to hang out with people you don’t really know that well. It’s a perfectly suitable noise for describing Bioman, though.

The game works, just about, but it doesn’t work well. There’s a lot of sprite flickering, to the point that it can be difficult to spot enemies sometimes. Bioman himself moves in a fairly slippery manner, often moving a step further than you’d expect when letting go of the directional buttons. Probably the worst aspect of the game is that the left-to-right scrolling is often choppy and sluggish, and not being able to move smoothly from left to right is a real killer for what is essentially a Super Mario game. Weirdly, it never seems to be an issue when moving from right to left, presumably because the game isn’t loading in new sprites and thus slowing things down.

As well as technical deficiencies, Bioman also has some strange quirks in its design. Unlike the set items of Mario games, the contents of each question block are random, which means that if you’re unlucky you can potentially go a long time without finding any power-ups. Then there are changes to enemy behaviour that throw a spanner in the works because I (and pretty much everyone else) am so used to how Mario games work. For instance, in Mario games, if you stand on a pipe that has a Piranha Plant popping out if it, the enemy won’t jump up and bite you on the arse while you’re standing there. Not so in Bioman, and the non-official bitey flowers will keep chomping from right underneath you. Or there are the Boos, which normally won’t move towards Mario while he’s looking at them – but in Bioman the ghosts have overcome their shyness and will move, seemingly at random, whenever they goddamn feel like. Perhaps the most baffling feature is that sometimes the corpses of stomped enemies can hurt you. That’s bad enough, but it gets worse: sometimes harmful enemy corpses will fall out of question boxes, resulting in almost unavoidable death.

If you ever lose sight of what makes the NES Mario games such genre-defining classics, I suggest you go and play a sub-par Mario bootleg. Then you’ll understand. It’s not like Bioman is awful, especially for a pirate game, but there’s enough wonkiness and technical problems to stop it being all that much fun. I do find the graphics quite pleasant in their simplicity and the music – recreations of famous SMB3 tracks, naturally – is quite good.

But by the time I’d reached the end of the second – and as it turns out, final – world, Super Bioman 1 had more than worn out its welcome. More variety would have gone a long way towards keeping things interesting, even if it was just some stages that didn’t take place during an eternal eclipse, but what you get is the same backgrounds, the same simple action and the exact same boss battle before the game limps unconvincingly over the finish line.

I’m glad I got to the ending, though. It’s hard not to be charmed by these thoroughly wrong versions of Mario and Peach. It was kind of the royal jeweller to find such a minuscule crown that wouldn’t draw attention to not-Peach’s tiny, tiny head and hang on, was Bioman supposed to be Mario all along? Or is the plumber just taking all the plaudits for Bioman’s hard work? I say let him have the applause. Judging by the unfortunate shape of his body, iI don't think he's long for this world.
And that’s Super Bioman 1, a Super Mario game on the Master System. It’s certainly something. I’m not the biggest fan of the Alex Kidd games but if you want to stick with those, that’d probably be a good decision.

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DRAGON FIGHTER (NES)

Today’s article is about Dragon Fighter, a 1990 NES adventure by Natsume starring a main character who can transform into a… what? We’re doing the other Dragon Fighter? Well, that seems like an extremely bad idea but okay, here we go – it’s Dragon Fighter, a mid-nineties NES / Famicom fighting game cobbled together from stolen parts and published by a company called Flying Star. If you’re upset because you thought you were going to be reading about Natsume’s Dragon Fighter, then all I can say is I’m definitely about to be punished for misleading you.

Disclaimer: you don’t fight any dragons in this game. Actually, I suppose that’s not technically true, but you certainly don’t get to clobber a giant fire-breathing lizard or anything like that. What you do get on the title screen is a picture of a dragon that’s probably been ripped from a different game, a logo that’s definitely ripped from Street Fighter II and a filthy lie in the phrase “Difficulty: Normal.” There ain’t nothing normal about this game’s difficulty level.

So the first thing you’re going to notice about Dragon Fighter is the character roster. There’s a lot of familiar faces here, to say the least. We’ll meet each of them in turn, but for now I need to pick a character. I’m going to go with the chap at the top-left, for two reasons. The main one is that he’s at the top-left of the character select screen, and the other is that his name is Dragon Lee and, well, this game is called Dragon Fighter. It seems appropriate.

With no other story or set-up it’s straight into the battle once you pick your character, and here’s the big reveal: Dragon Lee isn’t Dragon Lee, he’s Fei Long from Street Fighter. I have no idea why they bothered to change his name. Did they think Capcom were going to look at this game and say “well, we were going to sue for blatant copyright infringement but that guy’s actually called Dragon Lee, sorry about the mistake, please continue”? It’s especially strange because I’m fighting against Terry. Terry Bogard from SNK’s King of Fighters / Fatal Fury games, specifically, and they didn’t bother changing his name.

So yeah, this is one of those bootleg fighting game – a wonky combat engine packed with characters lifted from other games, their sprites crudely redrawn to accommodate the NES’s lower graphical power. At least they made some effort to keep the characters’ special moves intact: as you can see above, Terry can perform his Burn Knuckle dashing punch, as well as his Rising Tackle, although there are no super moves and he’s missing his Power Wave projectile. For Dragon Lee’s part, well, I think of all the characters he might have come out the worst when the special moves were being handed out. He’s got his rising dragon kick thing that he had in the Street Fighter games, except it’s much more vertical now and therefore much less useful, and it also doesn’t set his leg on fire when he performs it which makes it much less cool. As for his other special move, the developers took his forward-and-hard-kick attack, which makes Fei Long perform two kicks while stepping forward, and converted into a weird dashing kick thing where he prances across the screen waving his legs like a ballet dancer performing on a stage covered in upturned drawing pins. It’s kinda weird.

As for the gameplay, at a basic level it’s just your standard one-on-one fighter. Hit the other guy more times than they hit you, best of three rounds, special moves are performed with the usual quarter-circle-and-button type controller inputs, no win quotes, no bonus rounds and nothing else that might make the game a bit more interesting. I put the years I’ve spent playing this type of game to good use by repeatedly kicking Terry in the toes once I’d managed to get him in the corner. He didn’t seem to have much of a response to that, so I kept kicking him in the toes over and over. Eventually it began to feel like a scientific study into just how many times you have to kick someone’s foot before they’re knocked unconscious. It felt like the answer was “about fifty thousand times, good lord this is taking forever.”

On to the next fight, a gruelling battle against Missingno except the infamous glitched Pokemon now has a sword. No, of course not, this random agglomeration of pixels and graphical errors is supposed to be Haohmaru from SNK’s Samurai Spirits games. Dragon Fighter offers a valuable lesson about the folly of trying to compress SNK’s huge, detailed fighting game sprites into a NES game without completely redrawing them like they did with Terry. A result of Haohmaru looking like sentient computer virus from nineties kid’s cartoon is that it’s difficult to tell what he’s doing. Knowing what your opponent is doing is pretty important in a fighting game, right?

Fortunately, this is less of a problem than it could have been because Haohmaru only does one thing anyway. He uses his dash-across-the-screen special move over and over again, a move that’s incredibly fast, does a lot of damage and hits multiple time so even if you manage to block it you’re still going to take a considerable amount of chip damage. Once again, my only recourse was to trap my opponent in the corner. This time I used Fei Long’s – sorry, Dragon Lee’s – charging kick special move as often as I could get the damned game to recognise my controller inputs, so about one out of every ten attempts.

It’s Mortal Kombat’s Sonya Blade next, adding a third visual style to Dragon Fighter’s character roster; after the “realistic” Dragon Lee and the more cartoony Terry, Sonya has a look that’s sort of a midpoint of the two. Presumably this is a result of the original game sprites that Flying Star cannibalised for Dragon Fighter being of wildly different visual styles to start with, what with Mortal Kombat having digitised sprites and all. This results in an ugly mish-mash of styles, where the characters are recognisable as their “inspirations” but that’s the best you can say about them.

Also, there’s some intense sprite flickering in this game, it’s like trying to play Street Fighter with your head jammed inside a bucket full of strobe lights.
But is the gameplay any good? Well, here’s something that’s illustrated by the screenshot above. In almost every 2D fighting game, if your opponent fires a projectile at you and you jump over it quickly enough, that gives you the chance to land a free blow on your opponent while they’re recovering from throwing the projectile, right? That is a basic, iron-clad concept in fighting games. However, that is not how things work in Dragon Fighter, because the CPU characters don’t have to recover from their attacks. They can simply do whatever they want, whenever they want, and jumping over a fireball is a sure-fire way to get hit by some anti-air special move with a ridiculously large hitbox, like Sonya’s extremely weird-looking move where she climbs into the air by pedalling an imaginary bicycle with holding her lower back.

Now it’s time to face Super Woman. I had a bit of trouble placing her, but thanks to the Bootleg Games Wiki I now know that she’s supposed to be Wonder Woman, having been ripped from the Megadrive fighting game Justice League Task Force. If you want to get deeply nerdy about it – and I assume you do, if you’re reading about bootleg NES fighting games – then you could pretend that this is Wonder Woman’s alternate-reality evil duplicate and Crime Syndicate of America member Superwoman. Either way, she loves throwing boomerangs at you and performing flying punches. It was around this time that I realised you can press B for kick or A for punch, but if you hold the button you do a more powerful punch or kick. This meant I suddenly had access to Dragon Lee’s jumping hard kick, a wide, spinning affair that must be murder on his hips and against which Superwoman seemingly had no defence. Holding the button down for more powerful attacks might not be the most elegant solution to the NES controller’s lack of buttons, but it’s still better than only having one strength of attack.

Next up is Mortal Kombat’s Liu Kang, and what is it about Mortal Kombat characters and invisible bicycles? Liu Kang wants to ride his bicycle, he wants to ride his bike, and he will – all over your face, draining your health with a near-constant barrage of flying kicks.
Here’s the thing about Dragon Fighter: fighting against the AI is hard. Extremely hard. Painfully, spirit-sappingly, miserably hard, so hard that it makes playing the game in single player almost entirely pointless. The sheer cheapness of this game’s AI cannot be overstated. They spam their special moves over and over again and are entirely invincible while doing so. They completely ignore any recovery times on said special moves. Unlike the player, they don’t have to struggle with muddy, inaccurate controller inputs so if you do manage to avoid one of their special moves they’ll just do another one immediately afterwards with perfect accuracy. The hitboxes on their attacks are all over the place, stretching a ridiculous distance from their bodies. You could put this down to their aura of fighting spirit extending from their attacks, if you were a fan of creating bullshit excuses for god-awful fighting games. Aside from Superwoman, every battle I fought in this hellish arena of death consisted of me save-stating every time I landed a blow and then loading it a thousand times as I made a slight error in position or timing as was consequently beaten to death in one combo. Did I try playing the game on Easy mode? Of course I did, but as far as I can tell there is absolutely no difference between the difficulty levels. In short, you’d have more fun using your forehead to hammer red-hot steel into a large spike and then inserting said spike into the bodily orifice of your choosing than you would playing Dragon Fighter on your own.

Okay, what else have we got? Well, here’s a mirror-match against Dragon Lee. Thank god he doesn’t have a projectile, and he seemed much more inclined to walk into my crouching punch than all the other characters. That meant I spent this entire fight punching myself in the crotch, which is an excellent metaphor for playing Dragon Fighter.
It’s kinda weird that they went with Fei Long, though, isn’t it? There’s only one Street Fighter character in the game and they went with Fei Long, nobody’s favourite Street Fighter character? Don’t get me wrong, I like Fei Long because sometimes it’s fun to play as Bruce Lee, but including him over Ryu or Chun Li is a baffling decision. Perhaps Flying Star were based in Hong Kong and they picked Fei Long as a local pride thing.

Now I’m fighting Kitana, again from Mortal Kombat. She appears to be preparing to throw a rock at Dragon Lee’s head and frankly I would welcome such a straightforward method of attack, but I assume it’s supposed to be a fan. At least she's not riding an invisible pedalo at me. There’s not much else to say about Kitana, really. She’s got the same “projectile and flying attack” moveset as most of the other characters. At least the stage you fight her on doesn’t look too bad. It’s certainly a lot easier on the eye than whatever the hell was going on with Liu Kang’s stage and its enormous golden demon head.

Now I must face Flash Man, so I’ll use the Metal Blade or the Crash Bombs and this fight should be a piece of cake. Okay, so it’s actually DC Comic’s speed-based superhero The Flash, which is a goddamn shame because I would much rather be fighting a Mega Man villain. If you’re going to steal character from other games, you might as well go the whole hog and have Super Mario versus the Ghost of Richard Nixon or something.
Anyway, the most notable thing about The Flash is that he isn’t any faster than the other characters. If he doesn’t have super-speed, The Flash is just a bloke in a red spandex jumpsuit, so it’s hard to get excited about kicking him in the head. Also, Flash Man has a projectile attack where he throws a lump of… something at you. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be. A chunk of the Speed Force? Relatedly, if you want to learn about The Flash, don’t try to read a wiki article about the “Speed Force” that acts as the source of his powers. Trust me, I’m trying to protect you from headaches and a general feeling of confusion.

We’re getting towards the end of the game now, and your penultimate opponent is Mortal Kombat’s thunder god and inconsistent-name-speller Rayden (or Raiden, if you like). In the original games he was played by Carlos Pesina, in the Mortal Kombat movie he was played by Christopher Lambert and in this game Rayden is portrayed by the pure, unadulterated concept of malicious spite. You know all the problems with the game’s AI that I mentioned earlier? Rayden has all of those. However, on top of that he also has a move that lets him teleport across the screen, which he can perform at will and with no set-up, making simply getting close enough to Rayden to hit him an agonisingly frustrating ordeal. Sounds pretty bad, yeah? It is, it’s very, very bad, but it gets worse because you know Rayden’s famous human torpedo move? The one where he flies across the screen with his arms outstretched, sort of like M. Bison’s Psycho Crusher? He can do that move too, and he can block while he’s doing it. Even in the murky, quarter-arsed world of bootleg NES games I have rarely come across such complete and utter bullshit.

Your final opponent is the mighty Fire Devil, and it’s a bloody good job I already knew that some of this game’s character are taken from Justice League Task Force because otherwise I’d have had no idea who this was. Turns out it’s Despero, one of the Martian Manhunter’s foes. Yeah, me neither. Apparently he has a magic third eye that gives him a load of mind-powers, but none of that is included in this game. He fights the same way as all the other characters: relentlessly, with constant special moves and projectiles that you have no way of countering without cheating. Oh, and Despero can taunt the player with a couple of different animations, just in case you’d reached this point without developing a complete loathing for the game.

However, the golden light of hope unexpectedly pierced the gloom, and the fight against the Fire Devil ended up being the easiest in the game. What happened was that I managed to hit the Fire Devil for a little damage while he was in the corner. Then I stood there and tapped kick for the minute or two it took for the round timer to run out. Unable to figure out a way to escape from Dragon Lee’s repeated light kicks and resolutely unwilling to take any damage, the Fire Devil crouched in the corner and blocked until I won by a time out. That’s brains over brawn, that is.

To my considerable shock, Dragon Fighter has an ending beyond the misspelled “congratulations” message I was expecting. You get a brief scene of each character performing their special moves, complete with the button commands you use to perform those moves. You might think that this is pretty useless considering you’ve already finished the game, but you’d be wrong. Because you’re shown it for completing the single-player mode, it might as well not even exist, which is a step down from useless.

The thing is, I’ve played fighting games, both legit and bootleg, that were worse than Dragon Fighter. The basic mechanics aren’t great but neither are they too awful, falling somewhere in the middle of the pirate fighting game spectrum in terms of speed and the responsiveness of the controls. Sure, the graphics are an ugly sludge of mismatched elements and sprite errors, but you could have ten minutes of fun playing it in two-player mode and the weird roster of characters is good for another ten minutes of entertainment. But then there’s that single player mode, which is so hatefully unfair and completely un-fun to play that it ruins the entire game. I’m getting angry just thinking about it. So, if you’re going to play Dragon Fighter, for the love of god make sure you do it two-player, or alternatively play a good fighting game. I hear those can be fun.

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DONKEY KONG COUNTRY 4 (NES)

Okay, so here’s how I ended up writing about this one – one of the characters in the last game I wrote about, Cocoto Kart Racer, was a big ape called Bo-Bong. Naturally, this reminded me of Donkey Kong, so I thought maybe I’d write about Donkey Kong Country… but everyone and their dog knows about Donkey Kong Country already, so I looked around the “gorillas wearing neckties” milieu until I happened across this. From our old friends Hummer Team, it’s the extremely bootleg 1997 NES adventure Donkey Kong Country 4!

It’s a bit cheeky of Hummer Team to call this Donkey Kong Country 4, in what I assume is a shallow attempt to make people think they’d be getting a brand new Donkey Kong adventure. It’s actually a trimmed-up, slimmed-down version of the original SNES Donkey Kong Country, and a better title for it would be something like Donkey Kong Country 0.6. But, Donkey and Diddy Kong are finally here, performing for you – and by “you” I mean “owners of NES or Famicom consoles who aren’t afraid to shop outside the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality.”

DKC4 even makes an effort to recreate the original game’s intro, with Cranky Kong enjoying some tunes on his gramophone until Donkey Kong drops down, kicks his elder aside and starts boogieing down with his boombox. No respect, these youthful apes. It’s an encouraging start to the game, because it’s immediately recognisable as the intro to Donkey Kong Country, and aside from some sprite flicker it’s well animated. Could DKC4 contain a faint glimmer of competence or even – whisper it softly – quality? We shall see.

Here we are at Kong Skull Island, so called because it’s shaped like Donkey Kong’s skull. Each slightly larger dot on the map is a “world” of sorts, containing a few levels and a boss fight at the end – so just like the original DKC, only more compressed. That’s going to be a common theme throughout this game.

The Konging begins, and the action on offer is most definitely of the Donkey Kong Country variety. I’m sure there are other videogames where gorillas jump on the heads of humanoid crocodiles, but Donkey Kong Country is the epitome of the form. The gameplay works exactly as you’d expect (especially if you’ve played the SNES original): there’s one button to jump and another to roll / run / pick up barrels, and using these skills you must travel from one end of the stage to the other, bouncing on the heads of your enemies to defeat them and collecting bananas, extra lives and the floating golden letters that spell out K-O-N-G.  Once he’s picked up all the golden letters, Donkey Kong can make himself an extravagant, vainglorious necklace to replace his tie. No, not really. Kong’s too modest for that. You actually get an extra life, although the give gives you twenty-five lives right at the start so I wouldn’t worry too much about collecting every single KONG icon.

Diddy Kong is also here. I’m sorry, I just can’t work up much enthusiasm for Diddy Kong. He’s simply not as good as Donkey Kong. Feel free to send me your hate mail, hardcore Diddy Kong fans. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but Diddy Kong must seem like kind of a weird name to non-British people, because “diddy” is a British word that means “small” and I don’t think it’s a word that gets much use overseas. I suppose the US equivalent would be Lil’ Kong.
Anyway, unlike in the original game you can only have one Kong on screen at a time, presumably due to the sprite limitations of the NES, and you can’t switch between them whenever you like. That doesn’t matter so much, because in DKC4, both Kongs are essentially identical. They both move at the same speed and Donkey Kong’s floor-slapping special move has been excised, so their sprites are the only difference. Instead of being able to freely switch Kongs, what happens is that you change to the other Kong if you get hit, assuming you’ve placed a Kong in reserve by opening a DK barrel. It’s a decent compromise, although the problem then is that the game doesn’t tell you if you have a spare Kong, which can affect your decision making when weighing up how carefully to approach certain sections of the game.

While the graphics are mostly impressive, especially the well-animated sprites of the Kongs, all of the “jungle” stages have the same black-and-brown backgrounds, giving proceedings a surprisingly sombre tone. There’s definitely something slightly unnerving about playing Donkey Kong Country against a dismal background of impenetrable shadows.

Ah, that’s better, a well-lit swimming stage is next. I was wary about the underwater levels, because they’re rarely fun in any videogame and doubly so in unlicensed pirate rip-offs, but I’m happy to report that DKC4 does a decent job of recreating the original game’s swimming controls. The Kongs feel a bit too buoyant, perhaps, but other than that it’s manageable. The swimming stages are still probably the weakest part of the game, but they’re not so hateful they’ll make you want to move to the Gobi desert so you’ll never have to see water again or anything like that.
The real problem with the water stages is that there’s no swordfish to ride. In fact, all of the ridable animal companions from the original game have been removed, presumably due to space constraints, but it’s the swordfish that I’m missing the most. I don’t think I’ve ever done the underwater levels in the original game without riding that swordfish, and I’m sorely missing the ability to ram sharks out of the way using its pointed nose.

A quick aside about the soundtrack: DKC4 does use the music from the original game… sort of. You can tell what each track is supposed to be, although the quality of their translation from SNES to NES varies quite a lot, from “reasonably good” to “pretty terrible.” The underwater sadly falls on the “terrible” end of the spectrum, which is a shame because “Aquatic Ambience” (the underwater track from the original game) is widely regarded as one of the best on the soundtrack and one of the best tracks on the SNES as a whole. In DKC4, though, it’s missing a bunch of notes and doesn’t sound right at all, as though Hummer Team got halfway through converting it to the NES and suddenly thought “you know what? That’ll do.” Tangentially related: Aquatic Ambience has always reminded me of the intro to “Wow” by Kate Bush. Check it out, although I’m fully prepared to admit I might just be hearing things. The other day I was humming one of the themes from Earth Defence Force and my friend thought I was humming “These Are a Few of My Favourite Things,” which just goes to show you what kind of an ear for a tune I have.

Most of the stages in DKC4 can be categorized into a few different themes. We’ve already seen the jungle and underwater types, and here’s another – the “walkways suspended over bottomless pits” kind. Don’t fall down the holes, watch out for the oil drums that continually spawn enemies because they’re the most dangerous things in the entire game. They don’t give you any warning, that’s the problem. At least the jumping part is simple enough, because I can happily report that DKC4’s jumping and general movement controls are rather good. There’s a slight issue in that your Kong will usually take an extra pace left or right when moving horizontally even once you’ve stopped pressing the D-pad, but it’s manageable because it is at least consistent. The jumping’s fine, though, and what’s more the physics of it actually feel a lot like they did in the original game, an impressive thing to get right given the slightly ephemeral concept of “how jumps feel.”

Something that’s not so good is DKC4’s lack of secrets. The original game was absolutely packed with hidden bonus rooms and items tucked away in hard-to-reach corners, but there’s none of that in this game. That makes it all the more aggravating when you come across bananas arranged in an arrow, like in the screenshot above. They’d be pointing to a secret in the original game; here they just directed me to repeated deaths as I tried to figure out if there was anything under the platform (there was not).

Now it’s time for the first boss fight, against a giant beaver called Very Gnawty. Ha ha, oh Rare, you cards. Anyway, the beaver hops the screen and you have to bounce on its head a few times to defeat it. It is not the most interesting boss fight. Still, we can’t blame Hummer Team for that, they’ve given us a very accurate recreation of the boss fight from the original game. It just wasn’t very interesting then, either.

After that, it’s back to the map screen and on to another set of stages. This one has the industrial theme that doesn’t appear until much later in the original game. It’s still the same platforming-hopping action, mind you, it just takes place in what appears to be an extremely poorly-designed brewery. There are a lot of pipes and barrels, it must be a brewery.

Thus DKC4 continues, reusing the same few level backdrops as the setting for the Kongs’ platforming antics. We’re back in the jungle for this one, and the DK series’ trademark cannon-barrels make an appearance. You jump into them, and they either fire you out or you press a button to make them fire you out. Given that all these explosive barrels are located in the jungles Donkey Kong calls home, I can only assume that’s where he got the idea to throw them at Super Mario.
The barrels work well and are just as enjoyable / occasionally frustrating to use as they were in the original game, so it’s a shame that they’re the only gameplay element that differs from the generic run-n-jump action. All of the original game’s more outlandish sections – the minecart rides, being chased by enormous stone wheels, the stop-n-go traffic lights – are absent from DKC4. Whether that’s because Hummer Team couldn’t get them working within the constraints of an NES game or they simply didn’t care enough about their copyright-infringing bootleg game to recreate them, I don’t know. None of the stages are direct copies of stages in the SNES version, but are more sort of “assembled” from DKC parts, in a sort of Donkey Kong Maker situation. As a result, all the non-boss stages are either “pure” platforming or swimming, and they can tend to get a little samey.

The underground caves are another type of stage. In this case, the caves are full of bees. Or wasps, I guess. For some reason, even though you can pick up barrels and use them to defeat other enemies, the wasps are immune to getting a barrel thrown in their face. This is both a blessing and a curse, because the “bzzz!” noise they make when you kill them in the original game is a really wonderful sound effect and I miss hearing it, but it’s probably from the best that I didn’t get to hear Hummer Team’s attempt at recreating that sound effect.

The second boss is Master Necky, a large vulture that attacks by vomiting coconuts at the player and then stripping the flesh from their bones once they’re dead. I assume. I mean, he’s a vulture, it’d be weird if he didn’t feed on your still-warm entrails. Use the tyre conveniently embedded in the ground to spring up and land on Necky’s head a few times to win the day. I’m assuming that the majority of people reading this will have already done so in the original Donkey Kong Country, and if you’ve done it there you can do it here because I think it’s a bit easier thanks to the coconuts’ path being more predictable.

From here on out DKC4 doesn’t add much to the formula it’s already established. The next two bosses are Gnawty (again) and Necky (again) and the stages don’t include any exciting new gameplay features, which is a bit disappointing because having a good variety of challenges without straying too far from its platforming remit was one of the original Donkey Kong Country’s greatest strengths. There is the occasional new feature, though – in this stage, there are moving platforms. I know, I know, try not to let your raging excitement get the better of you. You know how earlier I said the Kongs will keep moving when you let go of the d-pad, making small positional adjustments far more difficult to pull off than they ought to be? Yeah, the moving platforms are not an especially fun addition. The bouncy tyres are much better, fulfilling their role as springboards for higher jumps well without being overly finicky as the springboards were in, say, Gremlins 2 for the Gameboy.

As nothing much really really changes from here on out, I’m not going to give you a run-down of all the game’s (surprisingly numerous) stages, I’ll just point out a couple of things. Things like the introduction of the Klaptrap enemies. They have not fared well during the SNES-to-NES conversion, having changed from vicious little crocodiles to boggle-eyed brown lumps of teeth with disturbingly humanoid body shapes. That could stand as a rather apt metaphor for most bootleg conversions of existing game, although in DKC4’s case it wouldn’t hold up because it’s actually quite good. Not just good for a knock-off, either, but an actual half-decent – maybe even more than half-decent – attempt at an NES platformer. I’ve certainly played a bunch of legitimate, signed-off-on-by-Nintendo NES platformers that were far worse than DKC4.

It has its flaws, to be sure. The stages can get repetitive, horizontal movement is sometimes slippery and the hit detection on larger obstacles like the bees or the spinning spiked wheels is far less generous than the size and shape of their sprites would suggest. However, underneath those issues is an otherwise solid game that never feels broken or glitchy, with stages that might not rise to the heights of level design found in the genre’s true classics but which offer some fast-paced, uncomplicated jumping fun with a good sense of flow.

The graphics are rather good too, especially the animations on the sprites, although the backgrounds are a little monotonous in their darkness and sometimes Hummer Team got a bit over-ambitious with the amount of sprites on screen at once, leading to areas like this gauntlet of spinning tyres that have a bit of slowdown and a lot of sprite flicker – enough flicker to make the game more difficult, in fact. On the whole, though, I’d definitely say DKC4 is an above-average-looking game.

Oh look, it’s a new boss! New in the sense that he hasn’t appeared in this game already, he was definitely in the original game. Its name is Dumb Drum, and it’s out to get revenge for the years of abuse suffered by his oil drum brothers and sisters at the hands of all those beat-em-up protagonists. The boss tries to slam down on the Kongs’ head, and after a while it’ll retreat to the sky and drop a couple of regular enemies into the battle. Defeat the small enemies and Dumb Drum will revert to trying to smash the Kongs into paste, until the repeated impacts with the floor cause it to explode. Thus, Donkey Kong wins by default, having done nothing more than get out of the way and jump on the occasional lizardman. There’s a lesson in there about not being consumed by your own anger, Dumb Drum.

Straight after that fight, you’re thrown into the game’s final battle: it’s the Kongs versus the banana-plundering pirate King K. Rool. You won’t be surprised to learn that the fight plays out exactly as it does in the SNES version of the game: K. Rool throws his crown (which somehow incorporates boomerang technology) at you, you jump on his exposed head and then dodge either K. Rool's charges or the cannonballs that fall from the sky until he throws his crown again. It’s a battle of patience between crocodile and ape! A titanic tussle for the ages! It’s… actually a bit boring! Maybe I’d be more inclined to enjoy it if I hadn’t already done it several times as a kid while playing the original DKC, but then again I remember not enjoying much back then, either. At least he doesn’t pretend to be dead and run some fake credits halfway through the fight, like he does in the original game.

Once King K. Rool has been sufficiently stomped, the game is over and you can claim your reward: a brief and extremely dull set of credits before the game locks up and you have to reset your NES. Now that’s the kind of lazy, zero-effort crap I expect from a bootleg NES game! If you wanted an ending, you should have bought the proper version of the game, you cheapskate.

But wait, there’s more! Some versions of DKC4 came on a multicart, bundled with another game called The Jungle Book 2. I’m sure that’ll be a clone version of the one of the legitimate Jungle Book games, right?

Well, you know what they say about assuming. It turns out that The Jungle Book 2 is just Donkey Kong Country 4 except Donkey Kong has been replaced by Mowgli. And Diddy Kong has been replaced by, uh, Mowgli. And the levels run in a different order. What a bizarre thing to expend even the slightest amount of time and effort on creating. Did Hummer Team think there was a voracious Jungle Book fanbase out there, desperate for any new product with Mowgli in it, and they just had to get a piece of the action? Whatever the case, if it is your greatest desire to see Mowgli throw a barrel at a crocodile, The Jungle Book 2 has you covered.

So that’s Donkey Kong Country 4, a surprisingly good attempt to cram one of the most beloved SNES action games into an NES cartridge. In a way it’s nice to have played something that, although flawed, was far better than I expected, but I must confess to being slightly disappointed. Whenever I play a bootleg videogame, I’m always hoping that there’ll be something utterly baffling or completely ridiculous contained within, and apart from sometimes coming attached with Donkey Kong Country Starring Mowgli, there isn’t much of that going on in DKC4. It is an interesting curio, at least, and although I couldn’t recommend you play it over the SNES original those of you who love NES platformers will probably get a kick out of it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to listen to "Barbie Girl" a hundred times, because I’ve had the DK Rap stuck in my head ever since I started playing this game and I will do anything, anything, to dislodge it.

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