Bonk’s Adventure

Bring back peace to the Dinosaur Kingdom with the strongest stone head in history.

JP release: 4th December 2003
NA release: N/A
EU release: N/A
Developer: Red Entertainment
Publisher: Hudson Soft
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

The third Hudson Selection game is a remake of the classic TurboGrafx-16/PC-Engine 2D platformer Bonk’s Adventure, which was also known as PC-Genjin, PC Kid and BC Kid. Instead of just applying a new layer of graphics on top of the Red Company/Atlus original, it seems like Red Entertainment looked at the criticism of the original and has made moves to address it.

The graphics are absolutely lovely, using a handmade craft style combined with 3D characters. Bonk has some great expressions and he has great animation – which ties into one of the improvements: he handles much better than the original game, and doesn’t lose momentum at awkward moments. There are some neat effects when Bonk collects power-ups (which now stay until you get hit instead of timing out) and it feels wonderful to play.

To account for this, the levels aren’t 1-1 recreations, everything is adjusted to fit its movement to keep a similar challenge to the original. The biggest change to the levels is the length of them – the original game was criticised for having over long levels with the same parts repeating multiple times, so they’ve now been shortened to the “best parts” and overall it feels like a good length for a retro platformer.

There’s a points system, but you can no longer cheese it for extra lives, instead the only ways to earn more lives is to collect 100 little tokens, find hidden ones or to collect all the fruit hidden in each level – although these are rewarding to find on their own, tucked away in in challenging little locations, and it’s clear when you miss one and need to go back – which, with the level length, isn’t frustrating. It’s a great way to experience a classic game.

Great

If you liked Bonk, you’ll like this. It’s that simple. A simple, no-nonsense platformer with oldschool values, making this what all remakes should strive to be: in every way an improvement over the original. It’s very cheap too, all of the Hudson Collection series is priced at under three thousand Yen.
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Remake or remaster?

A Bonk compilation, including this remake, would be wonderful.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get this remake of Bonk’s Adventure.