Hey, this game ain’t so bad! In terms of the series, it beats the hell out of part 2, but it can’t quite live up to the standard set by the arcadey genius of the original Kid Niki (FU! FU! FUUUUUU!). Few games ever actually HAVE lived up to this standard, however, so you can’t really hold Kid Niki 3 accountable for such a failure. I guess.

Even if you’ve never played a Kid Niki game before, though, you should still check this one out; at first, it appears to be your average multiscrolling collect-the-keys-and-hit-stuff platformer, but there’s a surprising (for an NES game) amount of gameplay variety to be found here. Aside from running around, jumping, and bonking stuff with your bonking stick, you can also slide, charge up for a spin attack, and hang off of walls and ledges, among other such feats. The control’s a little floaty, and the game itself seems to suffer from…like, some weird constant jerky glitchiness (Kid Niki 3 appears to be programmed by the same people who did all those terrible early NES arcade ports like Ghosts’n Goblins and Athena, if that’s any indication), but other than that, it’s a colorful, happy little gem of a game. You play now!

Kid Nikki 3 Improvement

This hack changes the title screen and intro note plus fixes the issue with the Continue/Quit screen listed in scucci review.

‘’The continue screen isn’t translated. The changed graphics for the letters are there, but they weren’t re-done to actually spell anything… just jibberish.”

• Translation by Suicidal Translations.
• Mapper port by MottZilla.

• File: KN3_MMC3.NES
• Pre-patched with Suicidal Translations' English translation & MottZilla's mapper port hack
• Length: 393232 Bytes (3 Mbit)
• CRC32: 8D564401
• MD5: F2927E79 E7A51647 4AF05900 5F1B77DD
• SHA1: E5514A52 BC54FF1D 155C7787 5A47611D 8E454315