Super Kong (Supervision) Playthrough
138A playthrough of Sachen's 1992 action game for the Watara Supervision, Super Kong.
In the early 90s, Sega and Atari weren't the only companies looking to glom on to Nintendo's success with the Game Boy. Several off-brand handheld gadgets appeared on the market, and while most were dead on arrival, a small handful managed to get off the starting blocks.
Marketed as a budget-friendly alternative to the Game Boy, the Supervision was perhaps the most successful of the group in the west. $49.99 got you a machine with similar specs and a larger screen, and it was actively supported with a stream of new releases, each priced at $10-15. It was short-lived in North America, probably because it was sold primarily through those sketchy-looking Xeroxed ads that you'd find in the back of gaming magazines, but it enjoyed some popularity in Europe, England included. In NA, it was sold by Watara; in the UK, QuickShot (the joystick company); in Germany, Hartung; among several others elsewhere. Maybe Trip Hawkins was eyeing the Supervision when he dreamt up the 3DO's licensing model.
What is up with that name, though? "Supervision" was meant to draw attention to the size of its screen, sure, but did they not consider what that word already meant in English?
Super Kong was one of nineteen Supervision games Sachen (Thin Chen Enterprise) released in 1992. Instead of paraphrasing the premise, I think I'd better let this one speak for itself. Direct from the instruction sheet:
"As our science and technology became more advance, there were so many consumer products developed in order to improve human living standard, changing our life style to fix in a more comfortable, convenient and enjoyable environment. However, civilization also gave rise to many pollution that deeply influence the natural life cycle.
Somewhere in the forest of America contintent, a little monkey mistakenly ate some chemical waste. This poor monkey was then mutated into a super kong and eat up all the food. The natives was threatened by this Super Kong. A little boy came out to help the natives to fight against this Super Kong and the jungle insects."
So, we have Donkey Kong, now adorned with a ridiculously phallic tail, trying to climb a bamboo chute. The kid doesn't want him to do that, so he decides to force "Super Kong" to the ground by pelting him with black circles. You lose a life if he makes it to the top of the screen, the timer runs out, or the boy is hit, and a stage ends when SK lies dead on the floor.
It's dead simple and there's no challenge to speak of, but I was shocked at how playable Super Kong turned out to be. Entertaining, even. It plays like a stripped-down version of an arcade game from the early 80s, and the controls are decent. It has power-ups, and it looks reasonably nice. The bootlegged DK is sharp, there are multiple stage backdrops, and it has snazzy fractal screen transitions between stages. It doesn't have the depth of even the simplest Game Boy games, but I was surprised to find myself having fun with it. I expected far worse from a game that came packaged in bloodthirsty molded plastic.
If you like Sachen's NES stuff, you might want to check this one out.
*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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