On the other hand, Super Air Zonk's very similar prequel, Air Zonk, is already available on the Virtual Console, and is 200 points cheaper. Air Zonk is also the better of the two titles, if only by a slight margin.
Now, if you listen to your old issues of Die Hard Game Fan (and, really, you shouldn't), Super Air Zonk is inferior to Air Zonk simply because of its lack of parallax scrolling, which as anyone worth his or her retro stripes knows is the single most important graphical effect to ever be invented. In the early '90s, games lived and died by their number of layers of background scrolling, as evidenced by parallax-filled games like Bubsy being hailed with praise like "Move over, Mario!" Super Air Zonk's lack of parallax, then, presents reason enough not to buy it.
Regardless of its unforgivable lack of scrolls, though, Super Air Zonk still manages to make an interesting case for itself. Zonk is a 23rd-and-a-half century descendant of Hudson's freakish cavebaby mascot Bonk, and while his games share a similar look with Bonk's, Super Air Zonk plays out as a horizontally scrolling shooter.
"Oh god," you say. "Not another shooter on the Virtual Console." Well, yeah, it's a shooter, but it at least has the courtesy to be decently weird enough to stand out. Zonk can rescue helper characters throughout the game's stages, and can combine with them for more powerful and unusual attack forms. One character may change Zonk into a scatter-shooting sushi chef, while another turns him into a tyrannosaurus tank with a powerful backwards shot. Some of these new forms are kind of useless and even harmful to your chances of survival, but each can be unequipped at any time and reassigned as secondary attacks that are usually of at least some help.
If this sounds similar to Air Zonk...well, it really is. Super Air Zonk feels more like an expansion pack for Air Zonk than a full-fledged sequel, and the games play very similarly. The stages and powerups are different, sure, but there's very little advancement in terms of gameplay. Even the CD-quality rockabilly soundtrack is strangely subdued, and with almost no cutscenes or voiceovers to speak of, the game does little else to differentiate itself as a CD-ROM title.
In the end, Super Air Zonk is a more expensive and slightly inferior version of Air Zonk. Unless you played Air Zonk and were left craving more, I can't see this game being of much worth to you. But hey, at least you don't have to pay $250 for the disappointment, right?
Interested parties should check out Super Air Zonk in the following video montage, if just to gaze down upon its shameful lack of parallax scrolling. Beware the music, though -- some joker thought it would be a good idea to replace the original soundtrack with something entirely unrelated.
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