Bonk's Adventure/BC Kid

TG-16 - A fairly respectable amount of detail, with simple backgrounds and decent texturing. Many sections look a little bit emptyl, and the main sprite is quite ugly (to me he looks more like a monkey than anything else), but this is quite an early TurboGrafx title so this is to be expected.

The most impressive aspect detail wise has to be the well drawn enemies, and the animation frames of the main character and enemy sprites, all of which are done with a lot of skill and contain loads of charm, and humour.

Amiga - For the most part the actual base detail here is pretty close to being identical to the original, though there are a few very notable exceptions, and additions added to many of the environments.

Some of the sprites here have been updated, with Bonk, and King Drool (final boss) having their sprites replaced with later revisions from Bonk's Revenge, both look much better, and manage to have even more charm than before. King Drool's 2nd revision is smaller than the original was, but I still think it comes out the better overall.

Outside of that some of the textures have been completely re-done, and are noticeably better (see the tree bark in screenshot 3), and many of the more empty sections have actually had new background details added to them, such as added textures in the stomach acid in the dinosaur stage (screenshot 2), and a new starfield on the final boss stage, there's also a bunch of silhouettes added to the swamp, tree (see screenshot 3), and final boss environments.

The only thing on the downside I've seen is that the background objects which were originally parallax scrolled are no longer there (the moon and the tower), its unfortunate but doesn't really offset all of the improvements.

TG-16 - The colour use here is generally adequate, some sections have fairly unnotable colour use, and some can stand out as a little garish, but it still looks fine for a 4th generation game of its age.

Amiga - The colour use here is definitely a vast improvement over the original, the first thing you can easily notice here are the colourful copper effect backgrounds (the colour transitions), which often look phenominal, with the colours chosen for them usually fitting the levels extremely well, and adding a lot to the overall picture.

Many elements here have been completely re-coloured with better fitting choicess, with the castle (screenshot 1), and ice stages especially standing out for their level of improvement, but all of the colouring tends to be at least slightly better, from the trees and bark, to the floor and sprites. To my mind there's only one exception to the rule, and that is the fossil and mud texture, which has an odd colouring on Amiga in my opinion.

Lastly, on the downside the enemies here have fewer pallette swaps for sprites than they did originally (see picture 1).

TG-16 - Everything is well animated, there's not a huge amount of frames for most things but it's drawn so well that the overall animation is still very good.

Amiga - For the most part the Amiga version is very close to the original, the main difference being that the main character uses the updated animations (which look a little better).

I did notice a few minor ommisions here (such as the turtle enemies no longer curling up when you hit them), but on the other hand the water, and lava animations have actually been completely re-done, and look a lot better (especially the lava animation which was originally just colour cycling, but is now moving and bubbling in a more advanced manner).

TG-16 - Very good scrolling, with some small amounts of parallax on certain levels (the moon and the tower). I would have to say that the parallax itself isn't too impressive though, as it moves in a noticeably unnatural manner.

Amiga - This version scrolls as well as the TG-16 version, but there's no parallax anymore, even so its ommision really doesn't have too much of an affect on the overall graphics, as it didn'y really look that great to begin with.

TG-16 - The music is catchy and does a good job of setting the scene, the quality is not massively high, and its sounds quite basic for the sound chip, but it still does a good job.

Amiga - The music here has been completely replaced with new songs that bear pretty much no similarity to the originals, it has more of a Xylophone sound to it and feels more jungle themed (if that makes sense).

Seeing as the songs are completely different it becomes hard to compare them, in some instances I personally prefer the originalls but in others the new songs win out, saying that though, I do feel that the new music style has a big effect on the game's atmosphere, and the actual quality of the sound is much better here too.

TG-16 - Pretty good all around sound effects.

Amiga - The sound effects seem to be better in this version, the thud when you head butt the ground, and sound effects for when you pick up items definitely sound a little more high quality.

TG-16 - Bonk's Adventure doesn't stray too far from the classic platformer formula, it has you jumping over hazards, swimming, killing enemies, and swinging from vines. Your main form of attack is a headbutt which can be used whilst on the ground, as a downward "hop and bop" style attack, or, more originally from below whilst jumping up.

One thing the game does do extremely well is add a lot of charm and comedy to the proceedings, instead of climbing walls with his hands Bonk clamps on and climbs with his teeth, collecting spicy meat sends him into an invincible crazy fervour with gases shooting out of his ears and arms flailing around, only to leave him looking like he's experiencing the hang-over from hell after it wears off, and enemies can be cruelly bounced around the stages if you get the timing right.

Amiga - The gameplay has been translated very impressively here, with an obvious attempt to recreate even the smallest of details, and enemies, power-ups and level layouts are all very accurate to the original.

One problem I feel worth mentioning though is that the main character moves slightly more sluggish than before (certainly not prominent enough to have too serious an effect on gameplay, and this runs on the sequel's slightly different engine, making the TG-16's rapid spin exploit no longer work in this version.

TG-16 - Bonk's Adventure has a very high level of presentation, apart from the aforementioned graphics style and animation there are little scenes with the bosses after they're defeated where they talk to you.

Amiga - Pretty much everything from the original has been retained.

Amiga - This version obviously has load times, they are relatively fast and not too much of a bother. You get the option of using "up" for jump or using a second button (changeable in the options).

The later Amiga version has loads of improvements both graphically and sonically making it look and sound much better than the original, the slightly more sluggish controls only have a minor effect on gameplay and in no way offset the number of improvements in other areas, leading to a strong win for Amiga.