-a rom hack of "Donkey Kong 3" for the NES-
review by: Dr. Boogie

Donkey Kong. A giant ape that spent years fighting a woman-crazed Italian man who liked to whomp
things with a hammer. A primate with unmatched barrel-tossing skills. A single father, trying to
raise a child presumably conceived after a late night fling with the woman he kidnapped after she
was "assisted" by a bottle of Jack Daniels and a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome. The third
installment of his series of NES games was not about the mad plumber who would move on to bigger,
better games. No, this particular episode of the great ape's life was all about an angry gardener
that fought Donkey Kong by shooting him in the ass with a pesticide sprayer.

Now, at this point, you are probably asking yourself "How could anyone change such a wholesome
activity?" The short answer is "Don't ask me, stupid," but the long answer is as follows:

Right away, you can see that something is different. I'll break this down for you who haven't
already figured it out based solely on the name: as it is understood by me, Battle Beasts was a
brand of action figures from the eighties. According to my research (which I do because I love you
people and want you to be informed.), the figures had team allegiances, belonging either to fire,
water, or wood. Plus, as was the fashion back then, the figures were given corny names like Maniac
Mandrill and War Weasel. Those are actual names mind you, and believe me, those are not the corniest
ones. There was also some arrangement that said that the elements beat each other in a
rock-paper-scissors fashion, making these Battle Beasts seem like a sort of precursor to Pokémon.
Enough about that, though.

The title screen has been altered significantly so that instead of Donkey Kong beating his chest,
you see one character, which I have dubbed Loathsome Lion because frankly the original names were
too embarrassing (Pirate Lion), doing a little dance, while off to the side is another one:

I guess he's… Robo Turtle, yeah that works.

In the original game, you had to stop the insects that would fly down and try to steal the flowers
you were hoarding, for whatever reason. Now, though, you are a frog, whom we shall call the Ferocious Frog that shoots pesticide from a wand, and really, what says it's time for a battle like a frog with a wand that shoots pesticide?

The pesticide is the only thing that remains; as now, you are a frog that shoots the spray at a
spider-looking thing, Suspicious Spider.

The dangling arachnid (Who let me say once more is a piss-poor substitute for the Donkey of Kong) is
flanked by two other action figures that spew out a bunch of little owl and bat figures, let's say
Owlin' Mad and Com-Bat.

They're still after your secret hoard of flowers, but the flowers are now some non-combatant lobster
figures, Lecherous Lobster.

In the original, a more powerful version of your bug spray would drop out of the rafters so that you
could really stick it to the big DK. Your frogman, however, gets an axe to boost his power. Sure,
it may not seem like an axe would be able to shoot strong, poisonous vapors, but then again, what
are the chances that a frigging wand could either?

The author didn't stop with just redoing the characters, though. Some work was done in remaking some
of the backgrounds for the levels. Admittedly, the changes are insignificant, but I've seen quite a
few hacks where the author would simply slap a swastika here and a penis there and call it a
day, so I'm not complaining. I couldn't find any details about what the worlds looked like where
these Battle Beasts fought, so I can only assume that they looked slightly different from a regular
jungle.

All the nostalgia that this hack was supposed to bring out is lost on me because I was never a real
fanatical toy collector. Plus, corny nicknames make my stomach churn, although dishing them out is
fun. Still, if you've got a mountain of Transformers and M.U.S.C.L.E. figures in your home, maybe
this hack will be a wondrous novelty for you. Hell, maybe you even know the real names of the figures
portrayed in the hack.