early version of Jungle King with only 3 screens?

coinopper

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The old video game magazine, Electronic Games, has a review of this game in its February 1983 issue, on page 62. It describes the game as being a "three-scenario contest". I read further, and realize there's no description of the boulder scene. There's 2 screenshots of the game showing the river and cannibal screens, so someone there must have played it all the way through. I just don't know how they could forget an entire scene unless the game they played didn't have it. Has anyone ever heard of this version before?
 
Maybe Jungle Boy only had 3 screens?

Every version I've played of Jungle Hunt/King had all four screens.
 
My guess would be that they were reviewing a home version of the game (possibly on the Colecovision?) where there wasn't enough cartridge memory available to put all 4 levels into the game. This was pretty common back then. I think that both the Colecovision AND 8 bit NES versions of Donkey Kong both didn't have the pie factory level included, for example...
 
In this case, the review was for the arcade version. It's even in the section for coin-op reviews. The issue is dated February 1983 but dates on EG mags were usually several months ahead of when they actually hit the newsstands. The Colecovision version has all 4 screens, but I don't think any home versions came out until at least the summer of 1983.
 
The Atari 2600 version had all the screens too and it was a really good playing version.

I'd chalk up that article to a mistake on the writer's part, unless they were given access to playing a proto version that wasn't finished (probably unlikely back then).
 
Electronic Games was based in New York City, so it's possible a location near them had a test copy of the game. But even with the 3 or 4 month lag time with the issue's cover date, it still came out a few months after the game was released (which according to MAME, was August 1982), so I doubt there was still a test copy out by then. And the review was definitely about the arcade game, as the title is "Meet the King of Coin-Op Swing" :)
 
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