Hello and welcome to my latest attempt to crash your browser with excessive .gifs, Let's Play Kung Fu Kid!
Kung Fu Kid is a 1987 Sega Master System game, the sequel to Dragon Wang on the SG1000. It's pretty strange. Let's dive in!
So far so good.
Here's the titular kid, Wang, with full health, zero talismans, and 99 seconds to his name. His mission is to confront Madanda, the unnatural evil one, to avenge the death of his Kung Fu Master, Tayron. He's gotta fight through seven stages and hordes of Madanda's demonic servants to do it.
The basic deal with demonic servants is there can be three of them on screen at a time. If there are fewer than three on screen, they'll appear from one of the edges until there are three. It makes for a pretty frantic game. After you kill a few, a talisman will appear. You don't really need them in the early stages, but it's not a bad idea to grind a little in the first stage to build up a supply.
Alternatively, you can avoid them. Enemies running into each other, like these two Disciple As heading right and the Kyong Shi heading left, will stop. This gives you respite until you scroll them offscreen and more enemies appear.
Level 1 is completely flat. Halfway along you enter a bamboo forest, at the end of which is Monster Indara, the first boss. He won't appear until the other enemies are dealt with. I was playing pretty sloppily, so I didn't have much health when I got here. Luckily I'm an ace with the save/reload state buttons and he goes down easily.
On to the next stage!
Round two is indoors.
New enemies! Disciple Bs and Lobsters. Yes, lobsters. Kick 'em and they go flying, taking out any Disciple Bs they may encounter. Note also the higher level platform at the end of the gif. That's level design!
Killing this particular lobster, near the end of the stage, nets you a talisman upgrade. If you look closely, it's got an orange stripe instead of black. It was at this point that I realised I hadn't shown off the basic talisman. Oh well, too late now!
Here's what the level 2 can do. Wang throws it across the screen and it kills whatever it hits. A bit like a lobster.
Here's the second boss, Lee the Witch. She follows a pretty simple pattern, which is fortunate since sloppy stage play has left me little margin for error.
Stage 3 adds vertical scrolling and these Puppet enemies. They move towards Wang like any other enemy, but also have a projectile attack, which seems to be their arm.
Here we have what got me interested in this game: wall jumping. There's just something about wall jumps. This probably isn't the first game to feature them, but it's pretty early days for the mechanic.
I spend a little while trying to shortcut through the gap in the roof here, without success. I think it can be done, though.
A little further on we encounter toads. Just like lobsters, they can be kicked across the screen as a projectile. Bizarre. Wang also uncovers a restorative sweet bun by kicking at the air in the right spot. That's pretty bizarre too, come to think of it.
Carrying on we meet the third boss, Geroppa the toad. It's not much of a fight.
Stage 4 is another flat walk, this time with Grand Kyong Shi as well as the regular kind, and dropping water that will hurt you if it hits you. The Grands take two hits to kill, but only one talisman, making this the point where you want to stop trying to kick things and just throw talismen all over the place. Or, if you want to save them for later, try to get three enemies behind you so no more spawn, and just move at a pace where they can keep up. Nothing else will spawn (aside from water drops), so you can run to the end of the stage. There's another talisman upgrade in this stage, but I didn't find it. I think you have to kill a certain enemy before it hits you, but I'm not sure which. It's pretty straightforward, so let's skip to the boss:
Make that bosses. These guys are Liu and Chen, acrobatic duo. Not sure which is which. One quirk of this game is that damage taken in the air only registers when you hit the ground. That goes for Wang and for bosses as well. I land the last hit just as the acrobat takes off, so he flips, throws a knife, then dies on landing.
Stage 5 is another climb. It introduces Zombies, who even when kicked over will remain on screen causing damage. Just use the talisman, Wang!
It also features this potion, which changes the colour of Wang's hair. Uh... I'm not sure what that's about. The manual says it wards off enemy fireballs.
At the end of the stage is this cool dragon picture.
And the boss, Zombie King Tao. My purple hair doesn't seem to be warding off his fireballs.
Level six is a boss rush. Up first: Giant Gorrida. Get close, kick his feet, get away. If he's in the wrong frame of his walk animation, his feet will be out of reach.
Second: Rinrin and Minmin the two little Phantom Girls. I find the easiest way to do this is to get some distance and jump towards them. They'll jump at you, so kick them in the air. Beating up kids isn't cool, though. Hopefully phantom kids are ok.
Chu-Ho, magical swordsman. For a while I thought this guy was actually impossible, but if you just get behind him he's not so bad.
Boxer Miao is the best. She doesn't fight by Queensberry rules, which I assume don't allow for spinning kicks and thrown knives.
Seriously, how great is this kick animation?
Rongwang the Puzzle Wizard is the second best. I love his walk, I love his title. Pretty tough fight, though. I try to jump higher than him and land kicks from above. Makes for kind of a boring gif, but it's tense gameplay.
The last stage is another flat run, so here's me abusing the three enemy limit to run to the end without fighting anything. Again I have lost most of my health in the process.
At last, Madanda. Revenge is mine! Well, Wang's. I died on the first attempt and redid the stage for more health. Maybe my purple hair is making his fireballs miss?
The ending. The unnatural evil one, Madanda, ascends to heaven and Wang jumps up and kicks to celebrate. It's supposed to freeze on the last frame for a little while, but I can't get the gif to do it for some reason. Sorry.
THE END. Anyone know what the characters at the top mean? Anyway, thanks for reading!
2020 comment: Originally posted April 12, 2018, this was another quick and dirty project like Alien Storm. Note that the image size changes partway through (during stage five) because I'd realised I was making them at the wrong resolution. That's because the SMS's horizontal resolution is 256 pixels, but when a game has horizontal scrolling the system uses an eight pixel column to process the scrolling and drops the displayed resolution to 248. I'd left it at 256, so a lot of the images are slightly stretched. Quelle horreur! In a post subsequent to the LP I followed up a little on what I liked about the game: "It's kind of bad, but it's also pretty fun and it shows signs of someone having cared about it in development. The wall jump is aces, and I really like several of the bosses, particularly in stage six. The dragon image in stage five is another really great touch. I also like how weird it is, with the lobsters and frogs, the zombie whose body explodes dropping his head to the ground from where it continues to attack, the potion that changes your hair colour, and the enemies who run at you with their hands up."
Kung Fu Kid is a 1987 Sega Master System game, the sequel to Dragon Wang on the SG1000. It's pretty strange. Let's dive in!
So far so good.
Here's the titular kid, Wang, with full health, zero talismans, and 99 seconds to his name. His mission is to confront Madanda, the unnatural evil one, to avenge the death of his Kung Fu Master, Tayron. He's gotta fight through seven stages and hordes of Madanda's demonic servants to do it.
The basic deal with demonic servants is there can be three of them on screen at a time. If there are fewer than three on screen, they'll appear from one of the edges until there are three. It makes for a pretty frantic game. After you kill a few, a talisman will appear. You don't really need them in the early stages, but it's not a bad idea to grind a little in the first stage to build up a supply.
Alternatively, you can avoid them. Enemies running into each other, like these two Disciple As heading right and the Kyong Shi heading left, will stop. This gives you respite until you scroll them offscreen and more enemies appear.
Level 1 is completely flat. Halfway along you enter a bamboo forest, at the end of which is Monster Indara, the first boss. He won't appear until the other enemies are dealt with. I was playing pretty sloppily, so I didn't have much health when I got here. Luckily I'm an ace with the save/reload state buttons and he goes down easily.
On to the next stage!
Round two is indoors.
New enemies! Disciple Bs and Lobsters. Yes, lobsters. Kick 'em and they go flying, taking out any Disciple Bs they may encounter. Note also the higher level platform at the end of the gif. That's level design!
Killing this particular lobster, near the end of the stage, nets you a talisman upgrade. If you look closely, it's got an orange stripe instead of black. It was at this point that I realised I hadn't shown off the basic talisman. Oh well, too late now!
Here's what the level 2 can do. Wang throws it across the screen and it kills whatever it hits. A bit like a lobster.
Here's the second boss, Lee the Witch. She follows a pretty simple pattern, which is fortunate since sloppy stage play has left me little margin for error.
Stage 3 adds vertical scrolling and these Puppet enemies. They move towards Wang like any other enemy, but also have a projectile attack, which seems to be their arm.
Here we have what got me interested in this game: wall jumping. There's just something about wall jumps. This probably isn't the first game to feature them, but it's pretty early days for the mechanic.
I spend a little while trying to shortcut through the gap in the roof here, without success. I think it can be done, though.
A little further on we encounter toads. Just like lobsters, they can be kicked across the screen as a projectile. Bizarre. Wang also uncovers a restorative sweet bun by kicking at the air in the right spot. That's pretty bizarre too, come to think of it.
Carrying on we meet the third boss, Geroppa the toad. It's not much of a fight.
Stage 4 is another flat walk, this time with Grand Kyong Shi as well as the regular kind, and dropping water that will hurt you if it hits you. The Grands take two hits to kill, but only one talisman, making this the point where you want to stop trying to kick things and just throw talismen all over the place. Or, if you want to save them for later, try to get three enemies behind you so no more spawn, and just move at a pace where they can keep up. Nothing else will spawn (aside from water drops), so you can run to the end of the stage. There's another talisman upgrade in this stage, but I didn't find it. I think you have to kill a certain enemy before it hits you, but I'm not sure which. It's pretty straightforward, so let's skip to the boss:
Make that bosses. These guys are Liu and Chen, acrobatic duo. Not sure which is which. One quirk of this game is that damage taken in the air only registers when you hit the ground. That goes for Wang and for bosses as well. I land the last hit just as the acrobat takes off, so he flips, throws a knife, then dies on landing.
Stage 5 is another climb. It introduces Zombies, who even when kicked over will remain on screen causing damage. Just use the talisman, Wang!
It also features this potion, which changes the colour of Wang's hair. Uh... I'm not sure what that's about. The manual says it wards off enemy fireballs.
At the end of the stage is this cool dragon picture.
And the boss, Zombie King Tao. My purple hair doesn't seem to be warding off his fireballs.
Level six is a boss rush. Up first: Giant Gorrida. Get close, kick his feet, get away. If he's in the wrong frame of his walk animation, his feet will be out of reach.
Second: Rinrin and Minmin the two little Phantom Girls. I find the easiest way to do this is to get some distance and jump towards them. They'll jump at you, so kick them in the air. Beating up kids isn't cool, though. Hopefully phantom kids are ok.
Chu-Ho, magical swordsman. For a while I thought this guy was actually impossible, but if you just get behind him he's not so bad.
Boxer Miao is the best. She doesn't fight by Queensberry rules, which I assume don't allow for spinning kicks and thrown knives.
Seriously, how great is this kick animation?
Rongwang the Puzzle Wizard is the second best. I love his walk, I love his title. Pretty tough fight, though. I try to jump higher than him and land kicks from above. Makes for kind of a boring gif, but it's tense gameplay.
The last stage is another flat run, so here's me abusing the three enemy limit to run to the end without fighting anything. Again I have lost most of my health in the process.
At last, Madanda. Revenge is mine! Well, Wang's. I died on the first attempt and redid the stage for more health. Maybe my purple hair is making his fireballs miss?
The ending. The unnatural evil one, Madanda, ascends to heaven and Wang jumps up and kicks to celebrate. It's supposed to freeze on the last frame for a little while, but I can't get the gif to do it for some reason. Sorry.
THE END. Anyone know what the characters at the top mean? Anyway, thanks for reading!
2020 comment: Originally posted April 12, 2018, this was another quick and dirty project like Alien Storm. Note that the image size changes partway through (during stage five) because I'd realised I was making them at the wrong resolution. That's because the SMS's horizontal resolution is 256 pixels, but when a game has horizontal scrolling the system uses an eight pixel column to process the scrolling and drops the displayed resolution to 248. I'd left it at 256, so a lot of the images are slightly stretched. Quelle horreur! In a post subsequent to the LP I followed up a little on what I liked about the game: "It's kind of bad, but it's also pretty fun and it shows signs of someone having cared about it in development. The wall jump is aces, and I really like several of the bosses, particularly in stage six. The dragon image in stage five is another really great touch. I also like how weird it is, with the lobsters and frogs, the zombie whose body explodes dropping his head to the ground from where it continues to attack, the potion that changes your hair colour, and the enemies who run at you with their hands up."
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