Bonk 3: Bonk's Big Adventure

The third Bonk game arrived in 1993 on the PC Engine, developed by Red Entertainment and published by Hudson Soft. Bonk served as the console's unofficial mascot: a prehistoric boy with an oversized head who uses it as a weapon, attacking with a forward headbutt or a downward skull dive.

The series developed a distinctive vocabulary. Rather than bouncing on enemies in the usual platformer manner, Bonk strikes with his skull, can embed it in a wall and hang there, and can trigger a ground shock that briefly stuns everything standing on the floor. On top of that sits a power-up system: eat the right item and the character transforms into a stronger form with different attacks.

The third game added size transformation. The right sweets make the character either much larger or much smaller, and each state changes both where you can fit and how hard you hit. That turns levels into something more than a run to the right, since many routes are passable only in one of the two states.

The game supports more than one player, which was far from standard for platformers of this period. The PC Engine's capable video hardware gives it strong colour work and smooth movement, and it looks better than most contemporaries on rival systems. You can play it directly in your browser on OldGame.cz, with nothing to install and no ROM to source.