How to play Kangaroo online
- Walk: left and right arrow keys
- Climb, hop and jump: up arrow. The same push climbs ladders, jumps apples and picks fruit.
- Duck: down arrow, to let a high apple fly over her head
- Super Leap: up together with left or right, to clear a broken log
- Punch: Z or X (any of the red buttons) knocks out monkeys and apples
- Number of players: the = key (the keypad’s # key)
- Skill level: the – key (the keypad’s * key) switches between Novice and Advanced
- On-screen keypad: K
- Start: Enter
- Pause: P
- Player 2: I J K L to move, N or M to punch, on the second controller
- Full screen, Restart, save states: in the emulator’s toolbar (move the mouse over the screen)
Gameplay
Mother Kangaroo starts at the bottom of a tree and her baby is held at the top. She has to climb there past a gang of monkeys, who throw apples at her and drop them from above. A thrown apple can be jumped or ducked, depending on how high it flies, and any monkey or apple that gets close can be punched. If a monkey or an apple touches her, she falls out of the tree and you lose a life.
Each level has four screens, and after the fourth the game starts again at a harder level. The first is a simple climb along branches and ladders; the second, which the manual calls the hardest, has several broken logs that need a Super Leap; on the third the baby sits on top of a column of monkeys that you punch out one at a time or jump over from a branch; and the fourth is a path of ladders and logs with apple-carrying monkeys climbing down around you.
A bonus timer starts each turn at 2,000 and counts down, and if it reaches zero you lose a life. Fruit hanging in the tree is worth points when you jump up and pick it: strawberries 100, tomatoes 200, cherries 400 and pineapples 800, and ringing the bell swaps picked fruit for more valuable kinds. Punching a monkey or a dropped apple scores 200, punching a thrown apple 100, and each monkey in the screen 3 column 400. You get an extra life at 10,000 points, at 30,000 and at every further 30,000.
Skill levels
Novice has one monkey fewer and no apples dropped from the top of the tree, which the manual suggests for beginners. Advanced is meant to match the arcade machine.
Tips
- Watch the throwing arm. The manual’s own hint: the way a monkey winds up tells you whether the apple comes in low (jump) or high (duck).
- Short taps on the stick. It is easy to walk off the end of a branch, so move in small steps near ledges.
- On screen 3, punch instead of climbing. Each monkey in the column is worth 400 points, twice a normal monkey.
The story behind Kangaroo on the 5200
Kangaroo was made by Sun Electronics in Japan and distributed in North American arcades by Atari from June 1982. Atari published it for the 2600 in July 1983 and for the 5200 a month later, as model CX5229.
The 5200 version was programmed by Allen Wells at General Computer Corporation, the company that later designed the Atari 7800, and it contains all four arcade screens. Video magazine’s Arcade Alley column was unimpressed by its graphics, but the 1984 Arkie Awards named it the best arcade-to-home conversion of the year and called it a virtual duplicate of the coin-op. The Atari 8-bit computer version was made from this cartridge: Jim Leiterman of Atari Research converted it in a single day and submitted it to the Atari Program Exchange without his name on it.
