Let us discuss Sega's answer to Donkey Kong; Congo Bongo

[gbpxl]

I have seen screenshots of the game over the years but didn't realize what the game was until recently. I always thought the isometric view was really cool. Well after reading the Wikipedia entry, I found out there aren't any semi-newer consoles that the game was ported to. It looks like it might have been released on a Japanese only compilation for PS2 but that doesn't help me because I only have an NTSC system.

It sounds like the Coleco version was the best port of the arcade version. But I don't really want to buy that just to play one game.

Are there any ways to play this besides a MAME emulator?

[jb143]

It's an unlockable game on the Sega Genesis Collection for PSP. I think some other compilation games as well.

You're probably against Mame but if you want to try the game out and don't want to mess with setting up emulators then you can play it online here..
https://archive.org/details/arcade_congo

They have other versions as well, though I'm not seeing the ColecoVision version.

I thought for sure I had the ColecoVision version, but after checking it was the C-64 instead. It's ok for a few play throughs every now and then, but in my opinion you're not missing much.


Edit...
Looks like Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection for Xbox 360 and PS3 also has it as an unlockable game.

[Steve W]

What always shocked me about Congo Bongo was the horribleness of the ports to some systems. Like Zaxxon, they shouldn't have even bothered porting to some consoles (or got decent programmers and really put the effort in to make it as good as possible). The Atari 2600 version is appallingly bad. Hell, the Sega SG-1000 looks terrible! And it shouldn't look bad at all, considering that the Colecovision version looks fantastic and both machines have similar hardware inside. At least systems like the Atari 5200 got good looking ports, even though they lost that full isometric viewpoint like the arcade had. Congo Bongo is a graphically complex looking game for its time, there's next to no possibility that a VIC-20 port will look like anything except a turd.