Kangaroo

aka: Arcade Archives: Kangaroo, Canguru
Moby ID: 8989
Atari 8-bit Specs
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Description official descriptions

Baby Roo has been kidnapped by monkeys, and it's up to Mama Roo to come to the rescue! Your kangaroo starts out at the bottom of the screen. You need to guide the kangaroo up the various ladders and platforms to the top where Baby Roo is being held captive. The monkeys will be trying to stop you by throwing or dropping apples and knocking you off the platforms. Your kangaroo has boxing gloves, however, and can knock out the monkeys with a single punch! Along the way various types of fruit can be collected to earn bonus points.

Spellings

  • アーケードアーカイブス カンガルー - Japanese PS4 / Switch spelling

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Screenshots

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Credits (Atari 8-bit version)

Programmer

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 75% (based on 13 ratings)

Players

Average score: 2.7 out of 5 (based on 22 ratings with 1 reviews)

Take "Donkey Kong" and make it extraordinarily boring w/ terrible control

The Good
Like many 2600 games, Kangaroo has some really fun, involving cover art. When my sister got this game for her birthday, I remember looking at the box and thinking, "This game has got to be the coolest thing ever--you get to be a kangaroo who boxes monkeys. Thank you, jesus." My little sister was even further stoked because she was at the age in her gaming career where box-art still misled her on in-game graphics. So the box-art gets a big thumbs up for doing it's job: it tricks you into buying the game.

The Bad
You hop from platform to platform to rescue your baby kangaroo. This wouldn't be so bad if the controls for the game didn't completely suck, but they did. In order to jump to the next platform, you had to push up and right simultaneously, and on the 2600 stick, this didn't always work quite right. As a result, the part of the game that mattered the most, getting from platform to platform, was ruined by poor control.

You just cannot expect people to want to play a game in which the most necessary task is rendered into a happy accident by bad game control. Expecting this of them is cruel and unusual.

The Bottom Line
A "Donkey Kong with a twist" game that had much better box-art than game control. Belongs in that big hole in Nevada with all the ET carts.

Atari 2600 · by MagFram (33) · 2005

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  • MobyGames ID: 8989
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Servo.

Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 added by Rik Hideto. Atari 5200 added by RKL. Arcade added by Pseudo_Intellectual. Atari 8-bit added by LepricahnsGold.

Additional contributors: chirinea, Rik Hideto.

Game added April 20, 2003. Last modified October 9, 2023.