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| Image from... I'll be dipped, Sun Denshi. |
I've been a little off my game as of late, so we'll start off slow and review a couple of games from Sunsoft. Sunsoft is well known to kids who owned an NES... it was one of the star players among Nintendo's licensees, stumbling out of the starting gate with weak ports of Midway arcade hits but quickly finding its footing with exquisitely polished and satisfying games like Blaster Master, a video game adaptation of Tim Burton's first Batman movie, and a ballsy continuation of Spy Hunter that's actually a better sequel than Midway's own Spy Hunter II!
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| Not a perfect NES game, but a really flashy and ambitious one, with more special effects than you'd expect from an NES game. Sunsoft understood the assignment. (image from Game Fabrique) |
(I didn't review Spy Hunter II in the Midway chapter of this feature. Honestly, it didn't deserve it. The game tries to bring the action of Spy Hunter into the third dimension, but the sorry hardware makes it look like an antique next to OutRun, and the aggravating stop-start gameplay doesn't hold a candle to the non-stop excitement of Roadblasters. The artwork from Brian Colin doesn't save Spy Hunter II, and even seems out of place in an sleek action game about vehicular espionage. But I digress.)
Sun Corporation didn't have the same presence in the arcade space, however. The only Sunsoft games I've personally seen in an arcade were Kangaroo and Route 16. While Kangaroo did pretty well for itself as a Donkey Kong substitute for Atari, Route 16 didn't get much press or media attention, and was relegated to a port on the feeble Emerson Arcadia 2001 alongside other loser coin-ops like Kaneko's Red Clash, Tehkan's Pleiades, and Konami's Turtles.
(As Jeremy Parish pointed out in one of his videos, the good video game systems get Frogger! If you're the Odyssey2 or the Arcadia, you have to settle for Turtles. Stop crying, Odyssey2, I saw what you already did to Popeye.)
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| The wacky wild Waku Waku 7 cast, courtesy of Alchetron. |
Sunsoft had more luck with the Neo-Geo, publishing a solid if slight fighting game in Waku Waku 7. That game's explosion of creativity and style demonstrates just how much the company had honed its craft since its arcade debut in the early 1980s.
Kangaroo
Played: An ice cream shop in Nashville MI
Donkey Kong was one of the blockbusters of the early 1980s arcade scene. The competition bought the home rights before you could get them for your own game system, and you're feeling serious pressure. What will you offer your customers as a substitute?
For Atari, the answer was Kangaroo. Kangaroo is a lot like Donkey Kong, right down to featuring primates as the bad guys. These pink monkeys are a whole lot smaller than Donkey Kong, but there are a whole lot more of them, climbing up and down the trunks of the trees bracketing the playfield. Beware any monkeys who've climbed onto the branch where you're currently standing... they're armed with apples, and they're not afraid to use them!
In your corner is Mama, the game's leading marsupial. She's delightfully animated, capturing all the silly charm of real kangaroos with big, floppy feet that make a big, floppy noise whenever she walks. She's also armed with a pair of boxing gloves, letting her punch out nearby monkeys and their pelted produce. The fruit prizes hanging from the trees give Mama points, and a bell replenishes the supply with more valuable prizes. Don't spend too much time harvesting pineapples and strawberries, though! Your joey is held hostage at the top of the screen, and the longer you wait to rescue him, the more likely you are to be nailed by a stray apple (or get your gloves stolen by a gorilla. No, not that gorilla) on your way up.
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| It doesn't take long before the game starts showing its teeth. This is the second stage. |
There are four stages in Kangaroo, ranging from a straightforward climb up a handful of ladders to punching out a totem pole made of monkeys to some vicious platforming challenges. Mama is fragile and doesn't have Mario's solid center of gravity, making the gap-filled second stage a perilous climb. It doesn't help matters that you have to jump by pressing up, leaving the gameplay feeling even more wobbly and imprecise. Will you make that next jump? Probably. Maybe. I think so?
Still, Kangaroo isn't a bad stab at the Donkey Kong formula. It's playable enough even with the slightly sketchy controls, and it manages to distinguish itself from, and even elevate itself above, other arcade platformers of the early 1980s. Kangaroo also has mountains of personality; enough to get its own cartoon series, airing alongside Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. in Ruby-Spears' Saturday Supercade. Granted, it wasn't a good cartoon, but it's more than Burgertime or Roc 'n Rope ever got.
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| Well, at least Ruby-Spears thought these two deserved equal billing. She's "K.O. Katy" the Kangaroo in the show, by the way. Also, Paul Dini wrote this episode, because upcoming cartoonists have got to eat too. Look, it was either this or Rubik the Amazing Cube! |
Route 16
Played: In a Mount Pleasant movie theater
If you're looking for Route 16, you'll find it on the corner of Rally (X) and Venture-a Boulevard. It's effectively a fusion of those two games, with the player driving a race car to sixteen city blocks to steal bags of cash. Each block is a maze, but they're not tidy, symmetrical affairs like the one in Pac-Man, often snarling themselves into tight spirals with dead ends. When you visit a block, get all the money and get out quickly, before one of the patrolling green cars spots you. If green cars corner you in a city block and there's not a checkered flag nearby to turn the tables, you're as good as roadside scrap. Also, do mind the bombs (gulp).
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| Money bags have a nasty habit of turning into oil, which slows you down. You'll just have to wait for it to change back... and hope the other cars don't find you first! |
Route 16 frequently switches views, from a map of the city with you and the rival cars displayed as tiny dots, to the interior of the city block, with its tangled maze structure and hidden prizes in full view. You'll have to strategize on the map screen where to go next, then dive into the city block to harvest its goodies and escape before you're noticed by the other cars. It's a pretty good hook... it's just a shame that Route 16 handles like a jalopy next to the buttery smooth ride of Rally-X. The graphics are blocky, the slightly stuttery cars flicker even when there's no logical reason for it, and the soundtrack is coarse and high-pitched.
Whatever this game used for hardware should have been left in the 16th century, but at least Sunsoft gave the game a slight glow up on the Famicom with Route 16 Turbo. Its graphics are more detailed, and there's even an amusingly hopeless attempt at a camera zoom in the transition from the map view to the block view. Mode 7 it's not, but at least the designers made the effort!
