Kangaroo is arcade game that was released in 1982. It was manufactured by Sun Electronics and distributed by Atari. The gameplay and plot of Kangaroo resemble that of Donkey Kong. The player takes the role of a mother kangaroo wearing boxing gloves, who is trying to rescue her son from fruit-throwing monkeys.
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Ah, so this is what it's like to live in Australia. Let me tell ya… there are a lot more monkeys wearing boxing gloves then I thought there would be.
Game #523
Game #523
It's similar to Donkey Kong, except for jumping over barrels you are now contending with monkeys you can punch as your work your way through each stage. Because the monkeys move around more haphazardly than in Donkey Kong, it doesn't have the same feeling of cohesion and loses some sense of pacing as a result.
Found this at a garage sale as a child. It was ok.
Nothing Kangaroo does is bad; it's just not at all memorable or interesting. Kangaroo makes for a great case study on why the original two Donkey Kongs - which this is clearly trying to emulate - are so immaculately designed. The screens are less-interesting layouts to test game mechanics. Enemies are a lot more straightforward to dispatch and require less mastery over the game itself. Power-ups are dropped fruits (like DK Jr.) instead of something that completely flips the script like the original Donkey Kong's hammer. The climactic rescue level is THIRD in each loop rather than at the END of each loop. Music is admittedly considerably more complex, but it's all lite arrangements of existing music - far from the harsh sting of Toccata and Fugue that opens DK Jr.
There's enough going on here that it's not hard to see why this looked appealing in '82 - enough to sneak its way into the Saturday Supercade's line-up for season 2. But it's also not hard to see why this game didn't have the same lasting appeal as everything else featured in the Saturday Supercade's line-up.
There's enough going on here that it's not hard to see why this looked appealing in '82 - enough to sneak its way into the Saturday Supercade's line-up for season 2. But it's also not hard to see why this game didn't have the same lasting appeal as everything else featured in the Saturday Supercade's line-up.
Mais interessante do que eu dava crédito. Esperava um clone genérico de Donkey Kong, mas Kangaroo tem uma identidade própria. O visual é ok, a mecânica de soco é uma boa adição ofensiva e defensiva ao seu arsenal de movimentos e os quatro estágios disponíveis fazem uma boa progressão de dificuldade e variedade. O que prejudica e muito esse game, entretanto, são os controles completamente imprecisos. É difícil gostar de um platformer quando você morre toda hora pelos motivos errados.
Alright, so this game isn't nearly as bad as I remember it being, but it's still a very low-rent Donkey Kong-like. My main issues is how haphazard the game mechanics and controls are. It would be a lot easier if the game didn't throw everything at you starting at the second level, and the jumping wasn't so imprecise. I swear I landed on a few platforms perfectly and the game registered that as a fall. The fact that up = jump in this game really doesn't help either. And I was playing this on Easy too, the default dip switch setting. It also looks ugly as hell, with the sprites being very choppy in motion and not very detailed. It feels like an unfinished game and that only cements that for me. The audio side of things is at least alright, though. Bah. No fucking way Atari sold 10k cabs with this shite in America. Stick to Donkey Kong Jr. or something, I dunno.