Game 359: Kung-Fu Master

I hate it when that happens.

 

"Kung-Fu Master" sounds awfully similar to Karate Champ, doesn't it? Much like that earlier game of 1984, Kung-Fu Master is credited for kicking off an entire genre of martial arts-themed action games - beat'em ups, to Karate Champ's fighting games - while also not playing very much at all like its more codified descendants.

Supposedly adapted from Jackie Chan's Wheels on Meals - apart from the obvious nod with characters named Thomas and Silvia I don't see much plot similarity - you must enter a pagoda full of bad guys and kung-fu your way up, fighting a powerful and unique enemy on each floor, until you reach the fifth where you'll showdown with Mr. X and rescue Silvia. The setup seems much more like Bruce Lee's unfinished Game of Death, which Wikipedia claims is "also inspired by."

Here, unlike in so many beat'em ups that would follow in the years to come, most of the enemies are knocked out in one hit, making the game flow more akin to a shoot'em up, only that the short range of your attacks and relative lack of vertical control means timing is emphasized over aiming and movement. The timing windows for your attacks are strict, and a mistimed strike will more often than not lead you to take some damage. Punches have less range than kicks without being significantly faster and therefore have stricter timing, but award more points. You can also punch and kick while crouching, which has its uses, and punch and kick while jumping, which is a bit limited in its usefulness.

Kung-Fu Master is a pretty tough and not always fair experience, though fairer still than most arcade games of the day. If you can figure out the timing to hit each enemy, and the technique to beat each boss, you can beat Kung-Fu Master as long as the random enemy creation routine doesn't spawn more impossible enemy combinations than you have spare lives. And with enough tries, this is bound to happen eventually. I'd say it took me about two and a half hours before I "won" by completing a single loop, and with this victory I was satisfied. Below is my video.

 

The first floor is your introduction stage and has waves of 'grippers' come at you from left and right to give you hugs if they get close enough. You can usually shake them off before they do too much damage, but the real danger is the knife throwers who can kill you in two or three hits if you're immobilized or otherwise just can't dodge their knives quick enough.

Make it to the end and you fight a man with a big stick, who may seem impossible at first. He outranges you, after all, but he's slow, and gets knocked back a smidge when you hit him, giving you time to back out of his range (or duck) before he retaliates. Aggression - and beginning with a decent amount of health - pays off.

Beat him and you reach the next level. My most hated level.

Aaargh! Level 2 is short, but the opening is chaos. Complete chaos. Deadly pottery comes crashing down from the ceiling nonstop, each piece unleashing some dangerous ordinance in your direction - snakes, firebreathing dragons, and deadliest of all, disco balls that explode into confetti. Dawdle here and you are sure to get overwhelmed and die. Make any error here and you'll probably die.

Make it to the end and the rest of the level is easy. Grippers are joined by Tom Toms, little kids who can only be beaten with crouching attacks but are otherwise normal enemies. Even the end boss is easy.

How are you talking?

Level 3 is more of the same - grippers, Tom Toms, knife throwers, just a lot more of them. You need to learn that when enemies approach from behind, to keep moving and turn around to fight at the last minute; if you waste too much time standing your ground as they come to you, you'll run out of time.

The boss here is a giant who doesn't attack low very often.

 

Level 4 opens with a swarm of killer moths. Like with level 2, I found it best to keep moving as much as you can. The longer you spend fighting them, the more of them spawn and trouble you.

The usual grippers and Tom Toms attack after that, but now the Tom Tom's have a new trick - a somersault attack that jumps over your crouching kicks. It doesn't hurt quite as much as a knife-throw, thankfully, but it's better to avoid it by standing up.

The boss is a nasty hunchbacked magician. At a distance, he'll summon moths and dragons. Up close, which is where you need to be anyway to hit him, he'll throw fireballs high and low and not really give you a fair chance to react and dodge appropriately. You do not want to strike him with anything but crouching attacks, because a single hit to the face will make him teleport and shoot a spell off at you. He'll do that anyway after enough low blows, but the fewer spells you allow him to cast, the better.

 

The fifth and final floor would be my most hated, if it weren't for a little trick I discovered.

Level 5 is a grueling endurance test of endless waves of bad guys. Not only is running out of time a credible threat, but I swear that this game actually drops inputs when there's too much going on, which is, of course, potentially fatal.

The trick? When a knife guy approaches from behind you, don't fight him! Just keep moving, and nobody else will spawn from that direction. It's easier to dodge the knives he throws at your back while dealing with enemies in front of you than it is to deal with hordes of grippers and Tom Toms from both directions at the same time. You reach Mr. X a lot faster this way too.

Granted, there is the risk that you'll run into two knife-throwers who toss their knives at the same time in an impossible-to-dodge pattern, but you run that risk regardless, and the longer you spend on this level, the more likely it is to happen.

Mr. X awaits at the end of this marathon. At first, he seems to be able to block all of your hits and then counterattack with undodgable blows. But with persistence, technique, and a bit of luck, he's not too bad. The trick is to attack right before he does. Do it a bit too soon and he'll block, but that's okay; it interrupts his attack and usually delays the next one. Crouching punches seem pretty safe - he can defeat them with a jump-kick, but he doesn't do that too often.

You rescued Silvia! Marital bliss is yours forever, right?

Very funny, guys.

GAB rating: Above average. Kung-Fu Master is mechanically pretty solid, and I can't discount its influence on what would come, but for how steep its learning curve is, the game is pretty shallow and simplistic. You'll probably die in a few seconds the first time you play - I certainly did. I got much better with practice, but repetitive, barebones gameplay made it unsatisfying to master.

The Famicom/NES port simply called "Kung Fu", likely the most widely played version, is noteworthy as its director was none other than Shigeru Miyamoto, with sound design by Kōji Kondō. One of the few early-era Famicom games to feature smooth horizontal scrolling, it, along with Excitebike, anticipates Super Mario Bros. It's actually one of the first video games I ever played, albeit only once and very briefly, while visiting a kindly, slightly eccentric spinster, who was one of two people in the neighborhood who had a Nintendo at the time. It seems to be a pretty direct port in terms of gameplay, with the expected visual and audio downgrades, and the addition of a 'Game A' mode which considerably reduces the damage you take. Completing a loop in it takes you to 'Game B' mode which is close to arcade difficulty.