NES Review: Kung Fu

This was one of the first carts I got for the NES, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1986. You know how it is. 8/9 year old kid, hears the words Kung Fu, thinks "man, bet I get to bitchslap some fools!" Well, sortakinda.

I wasn't aware of it until some time later, but Kung Fu is an arcade port, and it's one of the ones that suffers graphically in the translation. Damn the four-color-per-sprite limitations of the NES. Oh well, what can you do. You can't ask for Halo 2 in 1986, can you. Heck, back then, the best CGI we had was Tron and The Great Mouse Detective.

The objective of Kung Fu is to whoop ass and climb stairs. Simple if not for the plethora of baddies that come at you from both sides, as well as above on later floors. Basically, you have to punch, kick, jump and duck your way to each floor's boss, until you get to floor 5.

There are plenty of baddies to choose from, including the grunts in the fruity looking outfits, knife throwing Daniel-san wannabes, snakes and dragons that fall in pots (or balls, can't tell) from the ceiling, and booby traps galore. There are even midgets (or is it little people? Damn political correctness) that come at you! Yikes! You know that if there's midgets, you're in some serious trouble...

Your reward for clearing all five floors? To be sent back to the begining all over again, doomed to forever climb and fall, climb and fall. And each time you make it through, the game gets progressively harder (as do most early games like this for the NES, before the advents of passwords and save batteries). Always a joy, right? Right.

This game killed alot of my time early on, before the video store started renting out carts and before my library (or those of my friends) grew. Sadly, I remember that one of my friends hadn't quite gone 8bit yet, and was still playing an Atari 2600. I felt sorry for him. Really sorry. But those are the breaks. I did envy him for a while, though, when all I had was an Intellivision II which wouldn't play Coleco games. Sad days, they were. Kids these days are spoiled with their XBoxes and their TRL.

But I'm getting off on a rant here. Wait a second... Isn't that the reason I have a blog? Oh well. Either way, Kung Fu was good, mindless fun back in the day, and kids today might appreciate its simplicity when they want a break from fragging losers on XBox Live...

Kung Fu - NES - Arcade Port