A playthrough of Hudson Soft's 1994 platformer for the Super NES, Super Bonk.

Super Bonk was the fourth main-line platformer produced in the Bonk series on consoles, and it was the first original console Bonk game not designed specifically for Hudson's TurboGrafx/PC Engine hardware. It follows 1993's Bonk's Big Adventure (TurboDuo/PC Engine) and it was followed by the Japanese-exclusive Chou PC Genjin 2 (Super Bonk 2) on the SNES in 1995.

By 1994 the TurboGrafx-16 was effectively dead in America and was slipping further and further behind the SNES in Japan, so it shouldn't have come as a big shock to anybody that Hudson leapt to greener pastures with Bonk 4. Still, Bonk was the Turbo's mascot, and it was strange, if not a bit sad, to see him appear on the competition's hardware. It was a bit like that unsettling feeling I had the first time I played Sonic on a non-Sega platform.

Bonk 3 wasn't quite the swansong US Turbo fans had hoped for (Bonk's Revenge was a better game), so did Hudson do right by their caveman hero when bringing him to the SNES?

I personally think so. It is a good improvement on the third game (though still not as good as the second!), and it plays well to the strengths of the SNES. Though they aren't as cheerfully bright or colorful in Super Bonk the game runs just as smooth and fast (with some fun rotation and scaling effects to boot), and the music captures the whole "stone-age meets Mario" feeling quite capably.

The most notable differences are in the stage designs and in Bonk's transformations. The game is much less linear than any Bonk game before it: each stage has multiple paths you can take to reach the boss, and it's very unlikely that you'll see every stage in the game without playing through it multiple times. The stages are just as goofy and odd as the old games, and this one really likes it "inside a dinosaur's body" themed stages.

The power-ups were my favorite addition here. Though I was never a huge fan of the tiny/giant Bonk forms from Bonk's Big Adventure, they are pretty funny this time around. Bonk can turn into... well, besides the crab, I can't really tell what his forms are specifically. One of them looks like a jailhouse crackhead, while another looks like an enormous, already-cooked chicken with Bonk's massive head perched on top. It's strange enough that it has always been able to make me laugh - creativity wasn't in short supply when it came to the humor in this one.

Super Bonk is a bit easy and its gameplay is not as polished as it was in the first two games on the Turbo were, but it was a nice breath of fresh air on the SNES, and it was a solid, incredibly personable introduction to Hudson's beloved mascot for anyone that hadn't played anything from the original trilogy. It doesn't last very long, but it sure is fun for the brief bit of time it'll take you to master it.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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