Background
- Developer: Sun Electronics
- Publisher: Sun Electronics, Atari (distributor)
- Debut: May 1982
- Platform: Arcade
- Home Ports: Atari 8-bit, Atari 2600, Atari 5200
Jackals
During my time interviewing Blizzard Entertainment and Blizzard North developers for Stay Awhile and Listen, my books chronicling the history of the two Blizzards with an emphasis on the Diablo franchise, Blizz North co-founder Max Schaefer said, “If anyone says their game is a 'something killer,' that's good if you're that 'something.' I think Diablo II endures in part because an insane amount of work was put into it, and we made a lot of correct decisions and approached it from a consistent sensibility that the so-called Diablo killers—which to some extent are trying to be Diablo, yet something different—tried to replicate. I don't think that's ever a particularly good way to go about dethroning a game, copying it.”
The concept of “killers” in the videogame industry dates all the way back to Pong. After Atari found success with its table tennis game, other coin-op manufacturers looked at its simple design and thought, We can make a table tennis game. Clones flooded the market. This incensed Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, who referred to the makers of these copycats as “jackals.” Despite Pong’s commercial success, Atari was still walking a knife’s edge. Bushnell’s approach was to churn out an endless wave of games featuring new concepts. By the time competitors latched on to one idea and copied it, he reasoned, Atari would already have another game, better and fresher than the last, in arcades.
In the words of one of the greatest philosophers of all time: “Begun, the Clone Wars have.”
Admittedly, rip-offs of ping-pong can only go so far: two-on-two matchups; change the background to blue and wahla—air hockey instead of table tennis. The Clone Wars ramped up after the mega-success of Space Invaders in 1975. Spaceships shooting aliens in space could be spun off in countless directions: multiple types of enemies with their own attacks and movement patterns, power-ups for the player’s ship, backgrounds other than a black screen dotted with white pixels.
Things haven’t changed in the past 45 years: Every time a new type of game emerges, manufacturers race to copy it. Donkey Kong, released in the summer of ’81, was no exception. Nintendo’s masterpiece offered an appealing set of tools and concepts to riff on: single-screen stages featuring unique layouts; jumping as the central mechanic, bolstered by secondary and tertiary abilities such as climbing and power-ups; subtle but appealing narrative elements that made players feel like they were involved in something bigger than competing for spots on high-score tables.
Kangaroo was among the first of several games to borrow heavily from Nintendo’s masterpiece, but its developers left room to stretch their legs and expand on many of DK’s ideas.
Hip-Hop
Sun Electronics Corporations was founded in April 1971 as—surprise, surprise—a maker and seller of electronics. In 1978, the company expanded into coin-op games. Its first two titles, Block Challenger and Block Perfect, were clones of Atari’s Breakout game. Kangaroo, released in May of ’82, was one of its first breakout (you know I’m punny by now, right?) hits. When Nintendo’s Famicom caught on, Sun Corp. continued to develop and publish games under the name Sunsoft, which would become one of the most beloved labels of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Kangaroo unapologetically borrows Donkey Kong as its foundation. Instead of a carpenter who scales construction sites to rescue his lady love, you play a mother kangaroo who’s been separated from her kid. To reunite them, you’ll climb ladders and jump over obstacles. Pretty familiar, right?
Ripping off, or cloning a game may be considered underhanded and lazy by those who created the first game of its type. It’s also attractive for developers looking to make a name for themselves in a crowded market. When you set out to make an original game, you need to think of everything: the game design, the code, the art, the sound. Starting with a tried and true premise eliminates a lot of overhead. Once you’ve earned a tidy profit cloning games, you’ll have the budget to experiment with your own ideas.
However, it’s not enough to clone a game and hope it catches on; countless other developers will be taking that approach as well. Your best bet is to sprinkle other ideas into a tested formula. That will make your game familiar to consumers, as well as attractive in how it differs ever so slightly from its predecessor(s).
Before we dig into how Kangaroo separates itself from Donkey Kong, we have got to talk about its cinematic intro, which may be the funniest thing I’ve seen in the history of cinematic intros. We open on a shot of multiple platforms, each with a kid kangaroo standing on the far right. Their mothers start on the far left, and hop toward them. “Mom!” the kids exclaim when their mothers reach them. One mother, our protagonist, doesn’t notice the gaping hole in the middle of the platform, and falls right through it, kicking and flailing as she plummets head-first to the ground. It looks like something out of a cartoon. It’s hilarious.
My disturbing lack of empathy aside, Kangaroo’s opening is a clear nod to Nintendo’s understated yet powerful usage of narrative to ground players in its world. A mother setting out to rescue her kid—who can’t get behind that?
Like DK, Kangaroo takes place on four stages. Each features a series platforms set on a single screen, so players can see every bit of terrain they need to traverse. Instead of barrels and fireballs, your enemies are monkeys that climb down the sides of the screen and run toward you hurling apples, and at least one monkey that marches back and forth along the top platform, dropping apples like bombs.
Here’s where Kangaroo does its own thing, and quite well. Monkeys can throw apples at your head, your legs, or your chest. Those apples come at you fast, so you have to think quickly to deal with them. Apples aimed at your legs must be jumped over. Apples on a trajectory toward your head can ducked under. Apples at chest level can’t be avoided by jumping or crouching; instead, you press the game’s single button to punch them.
Being able to crouch and punch as well as jump makes Kangaroo’s titular protagonist our most flexible hero (technically heroine) yet. Consider Space Panic, the first platforming game. You couldn’t jump, but you could dig holes to trap the aliens chasing you, but you had to fill those holes in to finish them off, or if you needed to get to the other side of a hole, since there was no jump action. While you were digging and filling, you had to quickly absorb the layout of the platforms and ladders granting access to those platforms, as well as monitor enemy movement. All these elements crashed headlong into one another, making gameplay dense and frustrating.
Kangaroo is the exact opposite. After punching, ducking under, or hopping over an apple, the threat has passed. There’s an ape on each stage that tries to steal your boxing glove, leaving you unable to punch, but you deal with him by punching him in his mouth and sending him flying off one side of the screen and onto the other. It’s very satisfying.
Best of all, the movement or button press required to neutralize or avoid obstacles is intuitive. Pull up on the joystick to jump, pull down to crouch, or press the game’s one and only button to throw a punch. That’s where Space Panic failed. On paper, defeating aliens by digging holes seems simple. In practice, it’s anything but. I do wish Kangaroo had a jump button instead of pushing up on the joystick, which I maintain is awkward. But that is a subjective complaint. (Playing Kangaroo on an emulator nullifies this issue: Simply map “jump” to the button of your choice. I used the default controls so that I could play the game as close to how it was intended as possible. Now that this review is finished, I plan to remap the button.)
Kangaroo’s mechanical accessibility does not always apply to other aspects of its design. Your objective on all four stages is to scale platforms and deal with or avoid obstacles to reach your kid, who, like DK’s Pauline, usually waits near the top (although not always, something we’ll explore in a moment). In some of these stages, platforms are arranged like a staircase, and in many instances your kangaroo jumps higher than the height of the second “step” in the arrangement. You would think, then, that you could skip hopping atop the lowest platform first. Not so.
Kangaroo’s collision detection is fussy. It will not register your avatar as standing on the platform, even if it’s below the maximum height of your jump, unless you first jump onto the first platform in the arrangement. To further our staircase analogy, you can’t skip steps. You have to jump on the first, then the second, and so on. This may not seem like a big deal, but stages can get hectic with monkeys climbing up and down, flinging apples in all directions. Seeing your kangaroo jump well over the top of a platform that the game will not allow you to land because you’re not tackling its terrain in the order it expects feels like an arbitrary decision.
The hectic nature of stages can work against you in an unexpected way. Without getting too technical, every piece of hardware has certain rules about how many objects can be displayed on a screen at once. Hardware can draw a certain number of objects per scanline. Programmers can pump out more pixels than the maximum, but doing so causes images to flicker, and can even cause slowdown. Sun Corp.’s engineers apparently ignored the rules about accommodating no more than X pixels per scan line on a display. Kangaroo doesn’t slow down, but stages two through four teem with sprites, leading to rampant flickering that can be distracting when there’s already so much on-screen action to track.
Aside from technical quirks, Kangaroo’s stages exhibit a fun variety of layouts and challenges that attempt to break away from Donkey Kong’s “reach the top to win a stage” goal. Your objective on every stage is to reach your kiddo, but the third stage breaks convention by placing the kid in a cage near the center. The cage is held aloft by a column of monkeys, each standing on the other’s shoulders. To reach it, you first must punch the lower monkeys out of position. Knocking away a monkey lowers the cage. Once it’s aligned with the closest platform, you must quickly find your way to the cage.
The rub is that you have to act fast. Dawdle, and other monkeys will rush to the column and raise the cage out of reach. Act too fast, and you might knock out too many monkeys, lowering the cage to the bottom of the screen. Another option is to knock away enough monkeys to bring the cage equal to the platform you have to jump from to reach it, but this is riskier. Like Donkey Kong, Kangaroo severely punishes falling. Dropping down to a platform, even one half an inch below your position, results in a death. Platforms must be even or higher than your position to safely scale them. Should you get carried away punching and let the cage fall too low, you’ll have to wait for monkeys to raise it back up. That’s dangerous, because more time spent on the level means greater odds to get clocked by apples or pugilist apes.
Hanging around stages longer than is necessary can be rewarding. You earn points for punching monkeys and apples, and for collecting fruit hanging over platforms. Each stage has a bell that you can ring to repopulate it with new fruits worth even more points. In that way, the game gives you a choice. You can either hang around collecting fruit and dispatching enemies or earn bonus points for completing a stage as fast as possible.
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Kangaroo is its soundtrack. Instead of unique tunes that lend themselves to furthering the game’s identity, the soundtrack consists of generic folk music. It’s fine, but feels rote, as if someone at Sun Corp. said, “Well, we need music, I guess,” and figured out how to code Westminster Quarters (most often heard in the real world when a clock chimes on each quarter-hour) and “Oh! Susanna,” which plays when you complete a stage.
Although Kangaroo isn’t as polished as DK, it’s more robust in some ways. Its strengths offset my frustrations with it, especially in the context of how Nintendo influenced platformers before Super Mario Bros. came along and became the golden template forevermore.
Score
Graphics: 3/5. Colorful and varied, but flickering and other glitches mar the experience.
Gameplay: 4/5. From towers of monkeys and diverse arrangements of platforms to the quick thinking needed to react to obstacles, Kangaroo will keep you hopping. “Up” to jump, though? Miss me with that, Sun Corp.
Sound: 3/5. The soundtrack is a generic mix of folk songs, which is good for variety’s sake, but doesn’t do much to give Kangaroo an identity of its own.
Overall: 3/5. Kangaroo is a solid platformer—too solid at times. Its rigidity in navigating terrain conflicts with the flexibility it gives you in other areas. It’s fun, but some players may prefer DK due to its all-around polished execution.
Ranking
This list is subjective based on my experiences. I also can't promise I'll expand this ranking to include every platformer ever made. It may be simpler, and fairer, to rank platformers within the same "generation" of releases. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Without further ado, here are my rankings as of this entry. Click a game's title to read its review.
2. Kangaroo
No comments:
Post a Comment