Talk:Donkey Kong 3

Enemy confusion

This talk page or section has a conflict or a question that needs to be answered. Please try to help and resolve the issue by leaving a comment.

Some of the Donkey Kong 3 enemy names somehow got confused. To get the easy ones out of the way, Vine Eater, Moth, and Beetle are almost certainly conjectural (one description of the game on page 152 of the Animal Crossing Player's Guide of all things almost mentions the latter: "You are a gardener with bigger problems than beetles or weeds—Donkey Kong has invaded your Eden!"); "Buttifly" turned out to be Attacker according to the NES instruction booklet and Donkey Kong 3-e cards, and "Beebomb" turned out to be Super Bee according to an arcade instruction card. That leaves Buzzbee, Queen Buzzbee, and Beespy. According to arcade materials such as the flyers and instructions, at the time of writing, what we've had as the basic one-shot, dart-wielding "Beespy" should really be Buzzbee. The other two are a little more complicated. The aforementioned arcade materials indicate that Beespy is the bigger one that takes two hits and then explodes upon defeat. However, Queen Buzzbee is used once in the NES manual on page 5 to refer to the same two-shot enemy, despite later using Beespy with its arcade art on pages 6 and 7 with no mention of the former. What happened? With only access to a Virtual Console manual and not the original Famicom version, my theory is that it was mistranslated from Beespy's full Japanese name as seen in the Japanese flyer, 「親バチ・ベスピー」 (note that Buzzbee's is 「兵隊バチ・バズビー」 which is easily confused). So then, what we currently have as "Queen Buzzbee" should definitely be Beespy, right? I think so, but that leaves the question of what to do with the enemy we currently have as "Buzzbee". To make it more confusing, some later English sources attribute the name Queen Buzzbee randomly. Page 156 of The Official Nintendo Player's Guide: "Buzzbees, queen buzzbees, bee spies, and crafty snakes will attack you and go for the flowers." Cards 3 and 4 of the Donkey Kong 3 e-reader set list Queen Buzzbee and Beespy as separate enemies, with the former stating that Queen Buzzbee is worth 700 points (what the NES manual refers to as one "Guard") and with the latter suggesting that it is one of the starting enemies ("As the rounds advance, other pesky bugs will also appear." implied to be the likes of Moth and Beetle); Card 5 then describes the two-shot, stinger-exploding enemy as Queen Buzzbee instead of Beespy. I think we can safely treat Queen Buzzbee as a mistake, however. If we do that, that leaves the question of how to cover the enemy we currently name "Buzzbee". Unofficial Japanese sites like Wikipedia seem to treat it and Beetle as simple graphic swaps of actual Buzzbee and Attacker, respectively, so merging with those articles would be one way to handle it, though official sources imply they may be among the "other pesky bugs" that appear later. LinkTheLefty (talk) 11:42, October 27, 2021 (EDT)

I think until if and when we find other official names, merging the graphic swaps covers the most bases. Doc von Schmeltwick (talk) 11:51, October 27, 2021 (EDT)

Here's the Arcade Archive's manual if you need it.--Platform (talk) 12:22, October 27, 2021 (EDT)

The other issue with outright merging, I just realized, is that the points/characters screens of the arcade version and Dai Gyakushū both seem to treat them as distinct entities (and on that note, if someone can point me in the direction of manual scans of the latter, it might have more names). Knowing about Arcade Archives is helpful since it reconfirms that I'm looking at it correctly - it looks like Donkey Kong 3-e uses "Queen Buzzbee" to refer to a guarded/escorted Beespy, so that may be how the names were sometimes used together. LinkTheLefty (talk) 15:28, October 27, 2021 (EDT)

While waiting to see if there's more input on the harder variant of "Buzzbee" (and, very potentially, Beetle and Moth), I've temporarily moved said article to the conjectural name "Beebuzz" for the time being in order to enact the rest of the known official names. On a related note, I also can't find the names "Blue Greenhouse", "Gray Greenhouse", and "Yellow Greenhouse" anywhere - would anyone be opposed to covering it as one "greenhouse" article, just noting the levels as sort-of color variants (this would also require moving the current "Greenhouse" article to "Green House", which is technically its proper name as the former seems to have only been a weird change made to the English version of Game & Watch Gallery 3)? LinkTheLefty (talk) 12:38, October 28, 2021 (EDT)