#66: Spanky's Quest

Wait... Spanky is a... monkey? Really?

I had never heard of this Spanky fellow or his epic quest before I started playing the game today. I still know nothing about his quest and next to nothing about Spanky himself. Any story exposition for this game must have taken place in the manual. There was a very confusing intro sequence that explained nothing and then I was thrust into a quasi-platformer, quasi-puzzle game. I take the role of Spanky the monkey and my only weapon is a little purple bubble. Hit the attack button, launch the bubble. Hit the attack button again and the bubble will burst, turning into a tiny baseball which kills any enemies it hits. Some enemies have keys. Collect the keys, get to the exit. Repeat.

Look at the silly monkey!

Eventually I figured out that I could bounce the bubble off my own head. Doing so made the bubble grow in size, change colour, and caused a different sporting ball to burst out when I detonated it. Green would spit out a stream of soccer balls. Yellow would be a single volleyball, but if that volleyball killed an enemy it would burst into a bunch of volleyballs killing everything in the area. Orange would burst into a shower of basketballs that rained down destruction on everything. I could keep bouncing the orange one until I got it into a good spot, and I could even aim the bounces by positioning where I was headering it from.

That is one crabby apple.

A cute concept, but it didn't actually play very well. Spanky is a very sluggish monkey to control. Levels where I could segregate myself from the enemies and set up a good bounce were fun. Levels where the enemies could charge at me were a pain, since I couldn't charge up a good ball. So I either needed to have fantastic aim with the baseball or I needed to make precision jumps to avoid the enemies. Spanky doesn't control well enough for precision jumps, and only has two lives. I made it to the boss of the first level once on three tries, and that was enough.

The game suffers from many of the same flaws as other SNES games. It only uses two buttons. It had mediocre sound and no story. It didn't control very smoothly. It had a couple menus at the start of the game that couldn't be navigated with the control pad. Only the select button would move the cursor. I understand it's called the select button but I shouldn't need to go through every stupid option on the option menu before I can get back to the main screen!

I think I could have had fun with this as a kid, though. Get gameovered a bunch, but figure out what levels have enemies that can reach me and get to a safe spot as soon as possible. There does seem to be a game here, and that's a plus!

Rating: C