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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KART FIGHTER (NES)

Here it is, the grude match you've all been waiting for. All your favourite Super Mario characters, plus Toad (who is surely no-one's favourite) gather together to beat seven bells out of each other in hand-to-hand combat! What? Super Smash Brothers? Never heard of it. This is Hummer Team's bootleg Famicom game Kart Fighter!

In the last article I said I was going to write about a Mario game next, and like the twisted wish granted by an ironic punishment genie, here it is. It's called Kart Fighter because the fighters involved are drawn from Super Mario Kart, along with the look of the title screen, and not because there's any karting involved. The Fighter part of the title is spot-on though, because fighting is all there is in this game: it's plumbers trading punches, flying turtle shells and unsolicited dinosaur tongue-baths all the way. There's nothing to get in the way of the carnage, and the text on the title screen is accurate in this regard - it says OPTION, singular, and there is indeed only one option you can change. That's the difficulty level, which I will be leaving on the default setting so that I can enjoy Kart Fighter exactly as the developers intended. Well, maybe not exactly as intended because I didn't buy the cartridge from a dingy market stall, but as close as I can get.

Here they are, the Super Mario characters that you know and love so well: Kung-Fu Peach, Mario and Green Mario, Nervous Kong, the gang's all here. At first basing a bootleg Mario fighting game around Mario Kart didn't make much sense to me, but then I remembered that it was the first time that Nintendo had assembled all these characters in one place. It's easy to forget that, after decades of seeing the Mario family get together to compete in every sport under the sun, but Super Mario Kart was where it all started and so it doesn't take much of mental leap to go from "Mario characters racing" to "Mario character kicking the crap out of each other," especially at the time of Street Fighter II's phenomenal success.
Anyway, for your enjoyment I present my adventures through Kart Fighter. I will be playing as Mario himself, as seems most appropriate. If you're red-green colour blind this means that you get the bonus experience of seeing me play through Kart Fighter as Luigi.

Opponent: Nokonoko (that's Koopa Troopa to you and me).
Fighting Style: Shell Defence.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Revenge for his countless fallen brothers.
This Koopa Troopa must be the most elite warrior of his race, because Mario hit him with a fireball and he didn't immediately die. No matter how amusing it would have been for Hummer Team to include a character that is instantly defeated if it touches a projectile or is jumped on from above, Kart Fighter's Koopa Troopa has been through a rigorous training schedule that allows him to survive these minor blows, although he is still susceptible to being kicked in the face. The lack of buttons on the NES controller means that you're limited to one button for punches and one for kicks, but other than that Kart Fighter is a by-the-numbers recreation of Street Fighter II. You block by holding backwards, you can throw your opponent by getting right into their personal space and pressing punch, and you can even put them in a dizzy state with repeated blows.

Special moves are also unleashed using the familiar joypad inputs popularised by Capcom's classic: the first thing I did when I started playing Kart Fighter was unconsciously attempt a quarter-circle-punch motion, my brain immediately making the connections between Mario's ability to throw fireballs and the extremely high likelihood that Hummer Team had completely ripped off Street Fighter II. It worked, naturally, and Mario threw a fireball. He can also do a Dragon Punch, but the command for this is different than you'd expect and extremely finicky to pull off, so Mario's jumping uppercut became a move only performed by accident. Mario is Ryu, then, only without the Hurricane Kick. Mario makes up for this oversight by being sensible enough to wear shoes.

See? Koopa's getting a good look at those shoes as this kick ends the fight. The faces of the combatants are contorted in pain and rage, which is a slightly unnerving sight - even in Smash Bros the characters never look like they want to inflict real harm on their opponents, but one look at Kart Fighter Mario's grimace leaves me with the feeling that he's been waiting years to cut loose and beat a Koopa Troopa to death with his bare hands. Well, now's your chance, Mario, but can you summon that hatred and anger when you face... your own brother?!

Opponent: Luigi.
Fighting Style: As Mario, only greener.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Sibling rivalry.
Mario's facial expression has changed to one of trepidation as he faces off against the Green Machine. Whether he's worried about Luigi's martial prowess or that he's about to see his dumbass brother fall to an agonising death in a lava pit is up to the player to decide.

Luigi is the Ken to Mario's Ryu, differentiated only by the colour of their outfits and the fact that Mario's name is spelled wrong on his health bar. This misspelling may have been intentional, designed to bamboozle Nintendo's lawyers, as if the rest of the game didn't demonstrate quite how much contempt Hummer Team had for Nintendo's lawyers.
Oh, right. Luigi. There's not much else to say, really. He kept trying to hit me with fireballs, forgetting that jumping over fireballs is one of Mario's most finely-honed skills, along with rescuing princesses and falling down easily-avoided chasms through sheer overconfidence (admittedly that last one might be down to me rather than Mario himself). A few jump-kicks later - jump-kicks always seem to work particularly well in bootleg fighting games - and Luigi is defeated.

Opponent: Toad (Kinopio is his Japanese name).
Fighting Style: Pure, unfettered rage.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Endless "fun guy to be around" jokes.
Toad's bulked up, he's gained a foot in height and if the look of fury on his face as he approaches Mario is anything to go by, he's been hitting the steroids pretty hard. Thankfully his new-found dedication to the way of the warrior means he fights in stoic silence, so we're spared the aggravation of hearing a sound even worse than Toad's normal speaking voice: a badly-recreated copy of Toad's speaking voice.

It was at around this point that I figured out the key to victory in Kart Fighter, and that's marching relentlessly towards your opponent while tapping the punch button. Ninety percent of the time you'll either punch your foe or they'll block, giving you a chance to get even closer and allowing you to grab them. Once you've got one throw in you're golden, because you can stand over your fallen foe and grab them again as soon as they get up, allowing you to rack up big damage with no fear of repercussions. Sadly, you can't throw them around forever: eventually you'll trap them right at the edge of the screen, and throwing them a few times from that position will cause their head to clip around to the other side of the screen, whereupon any further throws will propel them back into the centre of the arena. Whether this is down to a glitch in the game's fighting engine or a deliberate effort by the developers to stop you throwing people people around until they're unconscious like a malevolent fairground teacup ride is unclear, but I know which one I believe to be true.

Opponent: Yoshi (again, Yossy is his Japanese name despite it sounding less Japanese than "Yoshi").
Fighting Style: Opens the door, gets on the floor.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Animal cruelty.
There is something about seeing a cartoon dinosaur putting up his dukes like a Victorian bare-knuckle boxer that amuses me on a deep level, so I'm just going to take a minute to enjoy it. Ahh, very nice. Okay, Yoshi. He attacks with his tongue. Don't do that, Yoshi, that's disgusting. Also, Mario is a plumber. Do you really want to be licking a man who travels through sewer pipes on the regular? Just beat him up with your muscular tail, you oddly-proportioned ferret-lizard. Yeah, Yoshi took a bit of a hit in the translation from cutesy sidekick to pugilist. He's sort of... stretched. Maybe carrying Mario for all those years has royally screwed up his back.
Speaking of graphics, if those mushrooms in the background look familiar, it's because they're ripped from Little Nemo for the NES. In for a penny, in for a pound on the whole "copyright infringement" thing, hey Hummer Team?

Opponent: Donkey Kong Jr.
Fighting Style: King of Iron Swingers Tournament Winner.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Well, Mario did once imprison his dad.
From dinosaurs to apes now, as Mario takes on Donkey Kong Jr. and by some miracle is not immediate torn apart by the ape's fantastic strength. You ought to think yourself lucky you're fighting Donkey and not Diddy Kong, Mario. When chimpanzees attack they go for the soft, vulnerable areas; the eyes, the testicles. DK Jr. fights using leaping uppercuts, by throwing banana peels along the ground and by twirling across the screen with his arms outstretched, which funnily enough presages Donkey Kong's similar move in Super Smash Bros.

In the interests of both fair reportage and relieving some tedium, I tried playing Kart Fighter without resorting to constant throws, and the results were not great. Kart Fighter suffers from all the familiar problems of the bootleg fighting game genre, especially those on the NES: the sprites are flickery enough to make me seriously worry about developing a tic in my eye, the presentation is extremely barebones with no win quotes or story to speak of, but worst of all is action that's a bit of a stodgy mess. Unlike a good fighting game, there's no sense of flow to the game, no feeling of smoothness or fluidity to your attacks. The characters are buffeted about the screen by unseen forces, sliding off each other in ways you wouldn't expect, presumably in a lazy effort to stop the sprites piling up on top of each other. Combos are out of the question - when you land a hit, the action actually pauses for half a second, making the game run at a somewhat ponderous pace. The entire thing feels not quite right in an almost undefinable way born from a hundred tiny gameplay flaws congealing together. As I said, that's what bootleg fighting games are like in general, but from what I can tell the Kart Fighter engine was reused for several other pirate fighting games so this game may well be the progenitor of those problems.

Opponent: Princess Peach.
Fighting Style: Gymkata
Reason for Fighting Mario: I have no idea, you'd think she's be more grateful.
With her usual pink pink dress replaced by a blue miniskirt and a serious case of conjunctivitis, Princess Peach pirouettes into battle, determined to do Mario harm by either spin-kicking him or whipping him to death with her hair. Why is Peach dressed in blue? I don't know, because her traditional pink colour scheme is in the game as her 2P costume. Maybe she just fancied a change, maybe Hummer Team were trying to invoke the essence of Chun-Li. Peach does have a Chun-Li-esque fireball, which brings me to another of Kart Fighter's problems: the characters are too similar to one another. It seems like an odd thing to say about a roster that includes a princess, a mushroom man and a gorilla, but all the characters have a projectile attack and either a horizontal "dash" move or an uppercut, which makes things a bit samey after a while.

Still, there is fun to be had with Kart Fighter. It might be awkward and clunky but it's not horrifically broken or anything. The hit detection is decent and the controls, apart from on some special move inputs, are relatively reliable. The computer's bone-dense AI means that it's a game that can only really be enjoyed in versus mode, and on the NES it's probably one of the best one-on-one fighting experiences you're going to find. Granted, that says more about the lack of good fighting games on the NES than it does about Kart Fighter's quality, but if you were desperate to challenge your friends to an NES fighting game for some reason - a time loop has trapped you in 1993, you have a serious mental disorder - then this game might be your best bet.

On a side note, the musical theme of Princess Peach's stage is an 8-bit version of the Koopa Beach theme from Super Mario Kart that sounds a bit like it's being whistled by a robot mogwai. I'm sure the rest of the music in the game is stolen from other sources, but none of it leapt out at me like this one did so presumably it's from games I've never played.

Opponent: Bowser.
Fighting Style: Adorable tinyness.
Reason for Fighting Mario: Small Man Syndrome.
Oh my word, look at this itty-bitty Bowser! He's so adorable, I just want to pick him up and give him a hug. I kept pressing the button, fervently hoping that just one time it'd allow me to give the Koopa King a cuddle, but alas it never happened and I ended up punching him in the snout over and over again.
Bowser is the closest thing Kart Fighter has to a final boss, but he's still got the same moves as everyone else - a fireball projectile and a ramming attack using his spiny shell - and he's still susceptible to repeated throws. No, I don't count throws as a hug. What, every time you hug a loved one does it end up with you slamming them to the ground? Unless you grew up in a family of professional wrestlers I very much doubt it.

Yep, that's the look I'd have on my face if I thought I was going to land on Bowser's, um, prominence.
Disturbing tail aside, Bowser is no more difficult to beat than any other character and you know what? I'm fine with that. It makes a nice change from every other fighting game, where the final boss is a cheap, overpowered test of patience. I mean, it's not like Mario's ever had any trouble beating Bowser before, so why should he now? With the Great King of Evil defeated, Mario's fist-throwing adventure is over...

...Or is it? No, it is quite clearly not over. There's another fight after Bowser and it's against Green Mario. I'm not having another dig at Luigi constantly being in the shadow of his brother, it really is a Mario vs. Mario mirror-match, and Mario's alternate costume is, well, Luigi. The first time this happened I honestly thought the game had looped back around, and it was only because I happened to glance at the health bars and see MARI up there in all its misspelled glory. Mario's attacks are identical to Luigi's, and I've already beaten Luigi once so it'll come as no surprise that this fight did not pose much of a challenge.

Then I was made to fight Bowser again. Here, Mario has thrown his arch-enemy to the floor with such force that half of Bower's body has disappeared in a jittery mess of pixels. That's gonna hurt Bowser's chances of winning this rematch.

Okay, now Kart Fighter is over for realsies. There's no ending, which is a shame - I'm one of those odd people for whom the post-battle quips and ending sequences are an integral part of my enjoyment of a fighting game. I can enjoy them purely for the mechanics, but those extra flourishes are what brings a fighting game alive. Imagine playing an SNK fighter without people calling each other "weenie king" or "pin-headed son of an icecream maker" at the drop of a hat. A dreadful thought, isn't it? I suppose you could argue that the extra screen you get for clearing Kart Fighter on the highest difficulty is an ending, but it's an argument you'd lose because a single screen traced from the podium scene at the end of Super Mario Kart with the words "The End" over it is not an ending. The end of an ending, maybe, but not an ending it it's own right.
Also, check out these high scores. I finished the game without losing a round and I still didn't make it onto the high score table. My total was around 110,000 points. I don't think it's likely that I or anyone else could get six times that to claim top spot. What is likely is the developers randomly slapping some numbers into the top scores without even considering for one millisecond the scoring system of the game they were making.

Kart Fighter is that rare beast - a bootleg game that has something of a positive reputation. I don't think I'd go as far as to say I have positive feelings about it, personally. Not positive feelings about the gameplay, at least, but I will freely admit there's still some pleasure to be gained in watching Princess Peach beat Bowser into unconsciousness using her hair. It's a weirdly transgressive thrill that has been diminished by the passage of time and the release of multiple official Mario slugfests in the form of the Super Smash Bros. games, but it's still entertaining in its brazenness.

It doesn't have enough depth or finesse to keep you engrossed for long, and your interest will probably wane as soon as the novelty of the setting wears off, but for an NES fighting game it's not bad. For a bootleg NES fighting game it's a work of art, a Mona Lisa of almost-good gameplay and intellectual property theft. And, with no qualifiers at all, it's still a lot better than Rise of the Robots.

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TEKKEN 2 (NES)

Yes, you read the title correctly - it's Tekken 2, on the NES.

Some time in (presumably) the Nineties, a crack squad of Chinese hackers called Hummer Team cobbled together a rough approximation of Namco's famous fighting title and released it as a bootleg Famicom game, proving that while pirates may be happy to utterly disregard the concepts of copyright and intellectual property they will at least do so with a little ambition.

They even managed to squeeze the original Tekken's intro in there! Well, a little bit of it, anyway. Alright, so it's just Kazuya glowering at the player and then doing a few kicks but I'll take it. You might be thinking it's a little rough and that Kazuya's ear looks like a flattened penny you'd get from those seaside coin-squashing machines, but I should remind you that the actual Tekken intro didn't look much better. Check out Nina's running animation - I don't think it'll be too difficult for Hummer Team to recreate that level of grace and fluidity.

Onto the game itself, and naturally the first thing to do is to select your character. On the top row you've got a choice between Wang, Heihachi, Michelle, Nina, King, Paul, Kazuya and Law. On the bottom row you've got... the same characters again. Identical to the characters on the top row in every way, just in a different order. Why? C'mon, this is a bootleg NES game, there's no point questioning these kind of decisions. Maybe there was extra space on the cart that needed padding out, maybe Tekken 2 was adapted from a different bootleg game that had sixteen character slots, maybe the programmers got distracted and accidentally copy-pasted all the fighters' information. All I can say for sure is that I'm disappointed that Yoshimitsu and Jack aren't included - especially Jack, because I have fond memories of playing the original Tekken with my younger brother and driving him into screaming fits of rage by spamming Jack's punch combo - but I shall struggle on and select Kazuya. It was the way he glared at me in the intro movie, I just can't get him out of my mind.
So, how can Tekken's combo-based, 3D gameplay be transferred to the NES?

Answer: it can't, and unsurprisingly Tekken 2 is a basic 2D one-one-one fighter. Kazuya and Michelle face off against each other inside a resolutely single-plane baseball stadium, and the early signs are encouraging - the stadium was an actual background from the first Tekken game and while the sprites are hardly fantastic they're certainly recognisable as the character they're supposed to represent. I know that sounds like damning with faint praise but remember, it's a bootleg game. I'm just amazed it hasn't crashed yet.

Unlike, say, Street Fighter 2 and it's six-button combat system, Tekken is a little easier to squash down for play on the NES controller, and I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that the two punch and two kick buttons of the real Tekken games have been reduced to one punch button and one kick button for Tekken 2. You can press A to punch or B to kick, and you've got a jumping and a crouching version of each. Holding away on the D-pad makes you block, and double-tapping forward or back makes you dash in that direction. A simple system, but a fairly effective one none-the-less.

Still, it took me a little while to figure out and as a result the first round against Michelle ended in a Time Over. It's okay, I've got loads more health than she does. She even crumpled to the ground when the time ran out. Round one to Kazuya!

Or not. Despite what the game tries to make you believe by having your opponent slump to the ground when the clock runs down, you can't win a round through time out. I'd have been more annoyed about losing the round if it hadn't been immediately followed by this amazing picture of Michelle, mind you. Those short-shorts are so short that one of Michelle's legs has disappeared, the mass of that missing limb seemingly migrating into her upper body where it's given her enormous, Popeye-esque arms. Simply wonderful.

Back to the fighting, and some further pad-wrangling has revealed that performing a fireball motion and pressing one of the attack buttons will produce a special move! I've played a fair amount of Tekken over the years, but unlike with other fighting game series the move names have never stuck in my mind, so you'll have to bear with me as I describe Kazuya's moves as "that big jumping uppercut that he does" (pictured above) and "jumping spinning kick-sweep". You know, those iconic techniques of Mishima-style karate.
Well, I'm impressed. A bootleg brawler with special moves that not only look like the moves they're ripping off but which are actually easy to execute when you need them! No wrestling with the D-pad in the vain hope that something, anything might happen, as is so often the case with low-quality fighting games, be they official or piratical knock-offs: special moves are smooth and predictable, so Tekken 2 gets a big thumbs up on that front.
Now that I have a few more pugilistic tools at my disposal, Michelle doesn't stand a chance and the fight goes Kazuya's way.

To paraphrase one of The Simpsons' finest moments - I hate every Mishima I see, from Kazuy-A to Kazuy-Z.
Also - and don't take this the wrong way - I think you should take a good look at Kazuyz's crotch. Go on, try to figure out how his legs are attached to his body. My current leading theory is that they aren't, it's just that his trousers are so tight (and so high-waisted, c'mon man, you look like my grandad) that his legs have nowhere else to go.

From here we follow the standard "Arcade Mode" route of two-round battles against each fighter in turn, and next up is cryogenically-frozen Irish super assassin Nina. Did I mention that she's an Irish super assassin who was once cryogenically frozen? Because I feel it bears repeating.
Nina didn't come out so well after the polygons-to-pixels conversion, her deadly combat skills somewhat dulled now that she's wearing oven gloves and has developed an intense fascination with Kazuya's groin. She's as mystified by the arrangement of his hips as I am, it seems. She also suffers from having lacklustre special moves, namely a double-fisted punch with no range and a set combo. A lot of characters have combos as one or both of their special moves, and they're almost always useless - easy to avoid and never getting the full allocation of hits in even when the first blow does connect.
Do you want to see Nina's win portrait? Of course you do.

You too can lose pound, pounds, pounds with the Tekken 2 Diet (warning: Tekken 2 Diet may lead to irreversible organ failure and poor fashion choices)!

Now a battle with my deadliest foe - myself! Wait, never mind, myself keeps running into my own fist. That'll hamper his chances of victory. The AI in Tekken 2 could be generously described as "variable," with some fighters showing much more intelligence than others, although a common thread is that they're all very gung-ho and not much for the art of defence.

I used this to my advantage in the fight against Michelle, and things went much more smoothly once I realised that the computer doesn't seem to have much defence against being kicked in the knees until they fall over and then subjected to a constant stream of jumping uppercuts. For all the flak I've been giving to Kazuya's pelvis, the guy has some serious lower body stamina.
"But didn't you already beat Michelle?" I hear you cry. Good, glad to see you've been paying attention. Yes, I did beat Michelle, but it turns out that the second row of duplicate characters wasn't just there for show and you have to beat each opponent twice to complete the game. No, there are no differences that I could see between Michelle and Michelle Strikes Back and yes, it is very aggravating to have to battle her again.

Ha ha, Wang. An immature reaction, yes, but need I remind you about the cryogenically-frozen Irish super assassin? I'm just treating the Tekken series with the same amount of maturity and restrain it's showing me.
Wang is an elderly Chinese man in a videogame and therefore it seems likely he'll be able to kick your ass with little effort, but unfortunately for him he's been saddled with the same problems as Nina regarding special moves, coupled with an overall shorter range. You know what's got good range? Kazuya's crouching kick and jumping uppercut.

And still polite enough to bow. What a charming fellow. Even the saucepan on his head doesn't detract from his overall air of class.

Kazuya's dad and pointy-haired series mainstay Heihachi comes next, determined to thrash out his paternal issues in the only manner he knows how - fisticuffs. Well, there's that and throwing his kids off cliffs. Those are his go-to parenting moves, but given how much of a dick Kazuya grew up to be it's fair to say he won't be winning any Father of the Year awards. That and, you know, he threw his son off a cliff.
Heihachi is rather well-represented in Tekken 2, and aside from the unfortunate decision to shade his legs using the same colour as the background so that he seems to be suffering from a horrible wasting disease, his animations and moves make him very recognisable.

Not so sharp in his win portrait, where he's squatting in a pose that's difficult to describe without using the words "straining" and "lavatory". Also, Hummer Team? I know you copied these images directly from the actual Tekken games, but you could have at least rounded Heihachi's corners off a bit. He's got the shoulders of a Final Fantasy VII character.

Hey, it's King! Everyone's favourite luchador enters the fray, and I'm very pleased that they developers went with his alternate shirt-and-tie outfit rather than taking the obvious path and dressing him as a wrestler. It's a good look for the sophisticated jaguar-headed grappler-about-town.
Now, Tekken 2 doesn't feature throws, which is unfortunate for King, what with him being a wrestler and all and throws making up a considerable part of his repertoire. He doesn't suffer too much, though, because Hummer Team thought it would be nice to give him the power of flight to compensate.

One of King's special moves is a drop-kick: a very powerful drop-kick that's fast and travels the length of the bloody screen. No projectile attacks? No problem! Just turn yourself into a living artillery shell and blast your opponents aside! The amount of challenge you get from King is directly proportional to how often he does his drop-kick, and unfortunately he only varies between "a lot" and "constantly." He's also got a lunging dive (which I could not for the life of me figure out how to perform when I played as King) that's almost as useful, and for once I had to think about what I was doing. This lead to the revelation that there's a decent game lurking somewhere deep inside Tekken 2, especially one on an 8-bit console. The collision detection is above average, movement and control are smooth and fluid and while the game does go mental every now and then - sometimes it'll drag your characters around the stage in a manner that has nothing to do with what's going on on the screen - it's generally pretty consistent. I've played worse one-on-one fighting games that were released legitimately, I can tell you that much.

King wins, and to celebrate he swaps his usual jaguar mask for the half-melted head of a really angry mole.

There's not much to say about judo master Paul Phoenix, he of the Vanilla Ice hairdo and bear rivalry, other than it's kind of hard to see him against the desert background. Good camouflage work, Paul, that'll really give you the edge.
The fight itself may have been unremarkable, but there was one thing that I noticed when I was playing this stage. Up until now Tekken 2's music had been unremarkable - I think it's reworked tracks from the actual Tekken games, but I don't know enough about Tekken's music to confirm that. Paul's theme, though... it sounded familiar. I started humming along, even. Here, check it out:

After some time spent racking my enfeebled brain, it finally came to me: it's the bloody Fear Factory music from Donkey Kong Country!

Well, that's that mystery solved. Fair play to Hummer Team, they picked a pretty great track to shoehorn into their pirated fighting game. I would have gone with Ice Cave Chant myself, but it's definitely better than the music that has come before.

Perhaps as recompense, Paul gets one of the better victory portrait. Sure, he still looks like someone grabbed his bottom half and squeezed really hard, and each club-like hand is bigger than his head, and his hair makes it look as though his balancing a log up there, but... nope, sorry, I guess Paul looks just as wonky as everyone else.

The final character we've yet to see is Law. Is it possible to talk about Law without mentioning Bruce Lee? Well, I just did so apparently not. Law has perhaps fallen the furthest of all the Tekken 2 characters, with both his special moves being easily-avoided combos and his trademark speed reduced in keeping with the game's slower pace. His kicks don't seem to connect as often as they should, either, which is a real shame for a Bruce Lee clone. See, there, I mentioned him again.

Don't worry, Law, it's nothing for you to worry your little head over. Your teeny-tiny little head.

Once you've beaten the eight fighters and their eight identical clones, you might expect to be finally granted a respite from this thumb-pummelling marathon, but Tekken 2 decides you haven't had enough yet and chucks in a couple more fights. These work like a mini endurance round, where you have to defeat two different characters with only one health bar.

I was a bit worried about having to fight King again, but as the screenshot above shows I was ready for him this time. Also, he barely did any drop-kicks. I never did find out what happens if Kazuya's uppercut collides with King's drop-kick, and that's probably for the best. I also figured out, sadly much too late, that repeatedly using Kazuya's spinning kick special against an opponent who's standing in the corner will pretty much trap them in place, allowing you to finish fights quickly and with minimum effort. Normally I'd raise this as a negative point but c'mon, sixteen normal battles and then some survival fights? Frankly, I was glad of the break.

As for the ending, you've already seen it - it's just a slideshow of all the victory portraits, so you get to enjoy King's melty head and Heihachi's cuboid arms all over again. It's more than I was expecting.

In fact, this whole game has turned out to be more than I expected. It's a competent enough 2D fighter - an unpolished, rough fighter but one that has a decent core to it, far above the quality you'd expect from a bootleg Famicom port of a 3D Playstation game. Perhaps the most impressive thing is the characters themselves, which don't look great when they're still but in motion they're immediately recognisable to anyone with even a passing knowledge of Tekken. Plus, you can't go wrong with Donkey Kong Country music.

Even the game's wonkier moments are strangely endearing, probably because they don't often impinge on the gameplay too often - sometimes the little things can raise a smile, like the font they chose for the Game Over message:

"Howdy, partners, and welcome to the King of the Old West Tournament!"

There's also the fact that if you reset the game, it starts back up with a different title screen: a title screen that says "Battle Arena Toshinden," in fact. Chinese pirates like to keep their options open.

Tekken 2 is a pleasant surprise, then. Unless you're one of Namco's lawyers. If you're looking for a one-vs-one fighting game for the NES then honestly, you could do a lot worse than this. Who would have believed it, eh?

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