010 · KUNG FU*
Ranked #4 in our Top 5 NES Games of 1985 →
In this episode of NEStalgia, we're earning our stripes through 5 floors of really random action. Can we save Sylvia and defeat DR. X? For more NEStalgia and links discussed in the episode visit NEStlagiacast.com
Kung Fu is the first beat-em-up we've played, a 1985 launch game from Irem, the studio behind 10-Yard Fight (the running footsteps sound alike). The asterisk in the title marks it as Irem's Kung Fu, not Nintendo's and not the martial art. Mike, Sean, Sam and Joe played it, and it was the first game in a while that we mostly enjoyed.
What it gets right
- Hard on purpose. After the previous game's cheap difficulty, this one feels designed. It's short, with five floors, and you improve each run, which makes lives worth having again. A one-up at 50,000 points gives score a purpose, and a punch kill is worth 200 against 100 for a kick, so you weigh risk against reward.
- Crisp moves. Punches, crouch punches, kicks, low kicks and air attacks come out fast, and you can walk backward, which Super Mario Bros. won't let you do. The zigzag up the building, left on one floor and right on the next, feels strange in a good way.
- Style. Floor one has the "snugglers" (the manual calls them Grippers), who raise their hands like karate chops, then hug you and form a conga line. A knife thrower and a stick-fighting boss follow, and the boss plays like a real duel. Floor two goes mythical: snakes, hatching dragon eggs, bombs and little ninjas who tumble over you as if they just want to leave. Mr. X even has an evil laugh, which is voice acting in 1985.
Where it falls apart
- Hitboxes. Punch and kick range isn't where you expect, and a low kick can clip through an enemy standing right on you. That was the main reason we held back.
- The story lives in the manual. Thomas, Sylvia and Mr. X only show up as text at the start of floor three, so we assumed the giant was Mr. X. He waits on floor five, a skinny punk we'd have swapped for the giant.
- Floor four. Moths flood the room, and the Black Magician throws fireballs, teleports and regrows his head. He ended a lot of our runs. He goes down to four crouch punches, which got him called the one punch man (a name we argued over).
- A short loop. Beat Mr. X and you start floor one again with a dragon icon added. Nobody got past floor one of Game B. The rumor that 50 dragons lets you play as Sylvia is false: someone beat the game 53 times and she never showed.
Beyond the game
The arcade game was Kung Fu Master. We traded movie trivia about a French film of that name at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival, and about Wheels on Meals. Joe, calling in remotely, suspected we had muted our mics to make it up.
The bottom line
Play it. In the Essential Games List vote, Sean put it on the list for the ridiculous enemies and the fun of wasting a life on the hug train. Joe, Sam and Mike called it good but not essential. Sam lost patience with all the dying, and Mike pointed to the hitboxes and a lack of substance. The list still holds only Duck Hunt and Excitebike. It's well worth a go for how much style a launch title packs in.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Kick, jump, and punch your way to victory in Kung Fu.
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. I'm Sam. Joe here. What's up, Joe? You're changing it up. Yeah. I was expecting to say, and I'm Joe. Who would have guessed it? Joe not being here. Okay. It's Kung Fu time. I hope everybody, you know, is at least a yellow belt. There's definitely none of us are black belts just looking around this room.
And take one day when I was a kid, I was a black belt. You were a black belt? Yeah. But it was like, I feel like looking back on it, it was pretty BS that they can give a black belt to like a 10 year old or an 11 year old. It's like, yeah, it's not a real black belt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Joe, were you being serious? I was when I was like in high school, but I haven't.
That was a long time ago. All right. So we'll have to talk about if these skills translate at all into video games. To the video games. Specifically the 1985, one of the 17 launch games, Kung Fu Asterisk, as it's sometimes known. Now, I really tried to do some digging on why it's called Asterisk. Well, it's not, but like why it's there in the corner. And the only thing I could really get a concrete answer on was that the asterisk is there because it's made by Irem on the back is like what it says in the asterisk.
So it's like Kung Fu, but made by Irem Studios, not made by Nintendo. Not to be confused with any other Kung Fu. Right, right. Don't be confused with Kung Fu. This is Kung Fu from Irem. It's not actually the martial art known as Kung Fu. Right. Now, Irem, we've heard them once before. Does anybody want to take a guess on what other game they made for the NES that launched with it? I know.
I know the answer. Oh, okay. Well, we all know the answer. Everybody knows the answer. It's 10-yard fight. And one one thing I noticed was that the the sound in 10-yard fight. That's like the only sound you hear of just them. The feet moving that one is this is in the background of this. It's so close. Yeah, it's the same. It sounds the same. Just the cadence is different. Yeah, different tone, but it's like the same rhythm. I think. All right. But before we jump into what this game is about, let's do some initial impressions.
Sean, I had a lot of fun with this game. It was it was hard, but it wasn't hard to me. in the same way that our previous game was where it just felt cheap and poorly designed. This was hard because it was designed to be hard because it's a really short game and there are only two different versions of it which I think are slightly different difficulties. And I think that it felt good for what it was and it felt a little like fighting game-y even though it wasn't really a fighting game.
Sam? Yeah. First impressions, well, as someone who read the manual... Sam, the manual, Smith. And it had all these different, not combinations, but it's like if you go, if you jump and then move forward, then you can do moves in the air and stuff. I'm like, okay, this is kind of cool.
And it just, it did feel really clunky. I could appreciate it. It was like a fun beat-em-up game and I liked that the moves come out really fast and really crisp. It was just, it was just really lacking and there was just this little bit of clunkiness and a couple things that I think just really prevented it from being really fun off the bat. Right. Joe? So yeah, my initial impression, I felt like it had a really good rhythm, I guess. It was very, kind of like Sam said, the moves came out fast, they were really crisp.
And it was pretty simple. That was my initial impression because it does get a little weird later in the game. But level one's pretty simple. You know, you're just fighting guys that are coming at you. Joe, Joe, that's floor one? Sorry, level one, that was, that was, what am I thinking? Did I even play this game?
Floor one was pretty simple. So my initial impression was pretty positive. Yeah, and I think that this game, it oozes a lot of style. When I first booted it up and said like, oh, this is a launch game, it was kind of a little advanced in other areas that the other NES launch games weren't. We didn't have a beat-em-up yet. This was the first of that kind. And also, just like,
one underappreciated thing that wasn't in my first impressions, but just something I kind of noticed along the way, was you can go forward and backwards, which is something that even, you know, soon-to-be-reviewed Super Mario Bros., you can't do. You don't get to go backwards in that game. So it's kind of cool that you have like this roam through the level. It's strange that like, you go left. Yeah, you start going left. It's a really weird feeling. But in Japan... But on the second floor, you go right. It's like... I'm just saying like, yeah, but... It's almost like you're zigzagging. Yeah, you're zigzagging for sure.
Okay, so I'm going to talk a little bit about the objective of the game because we mentioned it's a beat-em-up, but this time has like a little bit of a story to it, which is kind of fun. You don't really find out until like you get through the second floor that there's a story at all. Unless you read the manual. In such case, you find out all about Thomas and Sylvia. Yeah. This is the end of Thomas. Yeah, you have to save Sylvia from Mr. X. A very mysterious guy for sure, but he has a pretty evil laugh. That's pretty crazy. This game has voice acting. Yeah, I liked that. Yeah. Except... That reminded me of Final Fantasy VI. That famous... That famous weird laugh in there. Yeah, it did sound...
It definitely sounded like ahead of its time to have voice acting, but I think we can kind of break this down like on a floor-by-floor way. I think that's like a cool way of talking about the... Yeah. Talking about the game.
So, let's just go floor one. If I could start. Yeah. So, the most common enemy, and I think it's pretty... It saturates floor one. The pink and... Was it green? I don't know. It wasn't green. Green is the mini-guys. Yeah, so... What are we going to call those? Little people? I think they're called the... I think mini-guys is good. I call them the snugglers. Yeah, the snugglers. Because they really just walk up to you and they just kind of hug you. And then they'll form like a conga line on you. And it looks ridiculous. It does look ridiculous. Right. They don't attack.
They just... Your health just drains. I like that they hold their hand up. As they get close to you, they hold their hands up like they're going to karate chop you and then they hug you.
So, right off the bat, it's got a really weird feeling to it because I'm not... Like, I get that they're trying to, like, wrestle you down. Like, that's... I think that's what they were trying to get with that. But it just looks really silly. This thought never occurred to me when I was playing the game. Like, it's so true. It's crazy to think about. You have to, if you're hearing this right now and thinking we're making it up, you have to play the game because that's exactly what happens. Three guys will be, like, pretty much, like, you know, touching each other, like, hugging them, hugging you. Can we make the icon for this episode of the conga line? I think we need to. I think so, too. Yeah, I think that will be the thumbnail.
But what's crazy about that is then immediately after that, you're like, oh, that's kind of weird. That's how enemies behave in this game. And it's like, no, because there's a guy who's about to throw knives everywhere. Like, yeah. And that's the first real threat in the game. Yeah. And they just keep throwing the huggers at you. And then you get, like, you get a boss. And I actually, I think I died many times before I even got to the boss, which is why I initially felt like. And then once you finally do get to the boss, he messes you up. Oh, yeah, he'll mess you up. This is the sword guy, right? That's the sword guy. Right. And I really like that sword guy. There was a good feeling of, like, evenly matched once you kind of, like,
there's kind of like, is he going to duck? Yeah, it definitely feels like a duel. He feels as powerful as you. Yeah, so it feels very, like, one-on-one. I did think, I don't know, because you just, your guy doesn't move very fast. And his moves don't reach very far either. Yeah, okay, so I think we should talk about that before we move on too far, is just, like, talking about, like, how you fight before we talk about how, like, the other people fight. So I think, like, you know, you do have an impressive amount of moves here. You've got your, you know, your punch, your crouch punch, your kick, your low kick. You can punch and kick in the air. So you have a lot of options here.
But I personally found the hitbox to be a little weird here. Sometimes if I hit really early, it would connect. Other times if I hit really late, you know, like, even though technically I'm seeing, I'm touching them, it would just kind of, like, clip through them and they would be able to hug me. What was everybody else's feeling? Did you find that once you were being hugged, you could only get them off you by ducking and striking? Like, whenever I tried to punch on standing. In the manual, it says. Just a button mash. Yeah, it says a button mash.
But it doesn't use that. Oh, really? Yeah, it doesn't use that word. Yeah. Yeah, no, but that's what I was doing too. I was mashing the buttons. And I found that that shakes them off pretty fast. Yeah. They kind of crumple after that. But going back to your question about how we felt about the controls, the hitboxes and reactivity of them, I found that, like,
they weren't where I would intuit them to be. Like, my punch didn't have the range that I thought it did, and my kick didn't have the range that I originally thought it did. But once I punched and kicked a few guys, then I was able to adapt. I really, I feel like I didn't, it didn't matter which one you did. I don't know if one did more damage than the other one, or whatever. I think punch has a lower range.
Punch has a lower range. Yeah, that was the only difference I noticed was the distance, but I could tell a punch did the same amount of damage as a kick. So I would just low kick for most of it, just because I felt like that. I thought low kick was just like a stylish way of doing it. Like, I really enjoyed the satisfaction of, I rarely punched. I was kicking people everywhere. I tried the jumping moves also, and I feel like there's no situation where that is any good. Well, the thing that was driving me to play in a certain way, and it's funny that we would talk about how we didn't really pay attention to scores, but in this game, the score is important because you get a very important one-up once you hit 50,000.
And if you kill enemies with certain moves, you get more points. So if you punch a regular hugger, you get 200 instead of the 100 you get with the kick, which I think is an interesting way to make you balance, like, am I trying to rack up my score or am I trying to play safe with a way that I think is more conservative? Yeah, and that's a very good point there, Sean, about, like, you definitely want the one-up, and, like, that's something where it's like,
you know, we don't think about it anymore, really, lives in video games, but in this one, it's short enough to kind of justify lives, right? Like, it's not like, you know, I have to get to world 8-4, and then it's like, oh, no, if I die here, I have to start all the way back in 1-1. It's like, there's only five floors, but I need these lives to make sure that, like, by the time I get to floor four and I'm facing the Black Magician, it's like, I gotta make sure I have lives ready to take him down. Exactly, and getting past all those frickin' moths. Yes, yes. Okay, so, we're kind of, we got through floor one, you defeat the sword guy, who we all kind of agree is, like, a good starter villain,
and then you get to floor two, and things just get, like, mythical, they get ridiculous, like... Stuff's falling from the ceiling, you got eggs that are hatching in front of you, and then a dragon pops out of the egg, and it breathes fire at you. And the fire does a lot of damage. Yeah. Yeah, you gotta crouch before it gets you, or you can just try and run by him before it gets that thing out there. And the little snake guys, can you do anything? Do you have to jump over them? You have to jump over them. Yeah, because I tried low-taking them, and they just... They go through my foot.
I want to believe that it was, like, just a coding error, but the snake shouldn't, it should not do that much damage. Yeah. Yeah, it was, like, half damage. Yeah. Yeah, the snakes, really everything on the second floor kind of was, like, a shock from... Like, what is this building where the first floor has regular, like, regular, I don't know, hugging people,
knife throwers, and people with swords, and the second floor has snakes, dragons, bombs, and then, like, tiny ninjas that tumble over you. So I was very shocked by... The combination of the three, too, is also, like, a little ridiculous. Like, you have the snakes, the dragons, and these, like, bomb things, and to avoid one of them usually winds up with you getting hit by another one of the other things. Like, Sean was watching me play very poorly as I continued to try to, like,
dodge my way out of a snake only to be hit by one of the pellets of the bomb or try to jump over the dragon and then a snake egg hatches and the snake runs right through me. And then you'll get past all of that and then a pot with a snake in it will just hit your head. Yeah, and there are those things that shoot the three little projectiles and you have to kind of get between them. Like, those are very difficult to avoid. And I feel like just coming from the first floor where you kind of go into it and you're thinking, like, okay, I got all these guys, I got people that hug me, I got people that throw knives at me,
and I got this sword guy. And then you go to the next level and it's just, like, you're just not prepared for it and then you have to do the whole thing over again. Like, none of that's there anymore. Luckily, it's only half of that floor and then it gets a little bit more standard.
But then you got the boomerang guy at the end of there. Right, but we also get introduced to the little people. Can't forget the little guys. The little people are very strange. And every once in a while, one of those little guys will jump and tumble over you and then they just keep going. It's like they were just trying to get past you. They didn't want to fight you.
They just go off the screen. I never really thought about that. I guess they, do they have no ill will towards the player character? Maybe they're trying to be. Yeah, I think we were just making an assumption. We were like, oh, there's an enemy and we just kill them and it turns out they were just walking by. Maybe they're trying to escape. And I think one of the people who are there too. You kind of look like those other guys. Yeah. I do think that's funny though. I noticed that too. Like, if you're crouching, they'll jump over you.
But I just feel like they weren't programmed properly. Like, they probably wanted them to jump over you and then surprise you. But they definitely surprised me when they jumped over me. Okay, so yeah, you get to the boomerang guy and I think he's a little easier than the sword guy. I think so. He could have been the first floor boss. Yeah, I think that the sword bosses I still, I think were maybe my favorite boss. Yeah, because I think the best, again, I kind of called it a duel earlier, but it basically brings like the name of the game, Kung Fu, where you're sort of like feeling out your opponent more to the forefront.
Whereas, I think when you're skipping ahead a bit into like the third floor, you and you're fighting that big, like the giant with like the big punch. I like to call him the big man. The big man. Okay, sorry, giant is that a derogatory term.
But yeah, you're not really like sizing each other up. Obviously, there is an objective difference in size and you're really just looking like, okay, should I punch low or should I? Right. And I felt like just a few quick crouch kicks killed him pretty easily compared to the guy on the first level where you had to really, it was like, is he going to crouch when I crouch and then I'm dead? Yeah. One thing that I was kind of surprised at
with the first boss anyway was you go through and it's like a mad dash across the first level, I feel. And then you get to the boss and you kind of have to wait and be a little bit more patient with him, which I thought in the moment, I thought, oh, this is kind of cool. It's kind of like you really do have to or your enemy, you consider your opponent almost like real Kung Fu. Yeah. But not because of the asterisk.
Right. But yeah, I thought that was I thought that was interesting that it does require you to kind of be patient, which is not what I want to do at the time. But also, I feel like that's because your character is also really slow. So. So you're making your way to floor three now. And I know we kind of talked about the big man a little bit. I know his name is actually pretty similar in the manual. I don't know if you remember, Sam, but his name is kind of similar to that. That's why I was kind of like I call him the big man. And then when I look at the manual, I was like, not that far off.
I'll put in the show notes. I'll put in the show notes, whatever he really is. But they also they run faster in floor three. Did you notice that? The huggers, they kind of move a little faster towards you. I didn't notice that either. And there's definitely more of them. They're showing up more frequently now. Knife guy, always up to his surprises. If you crouch, he's throwing down his feet knives instead of his hand knives.
Can I, can I mention one thing that I noticed at the very beginning of the third level or the third floor is, so there's just suddenly like a plot. If you didn't read the manual, which I didn't, the first two floors are just like, oh, you're fighting people. And then the third floor just says, save Sylvia from Mr. X at the beginning. And I was like, wait, are there characters in this game? Who's Sylvia? Who's Mr. X? Joe, why can't we just do it? Thomas is right there. Sylvia is tied up. Mr. X is just text. Yeah, it's a very strange placement. From the beginning, from the beginning of level three, I thought Mr. X was the big man because he was in the level that they mentioned Mr. X. Joe, come on.
So I looked up the name of the big man. Okay. It is Giant. Giant is his name? I was right. His name is just Giant. Aw, man, I thought it was Giant Man or something. I think he's still Mr. X. I think that's like a hidden layer of story that they don't explicitly state. I think we have to get there, though, because we'll talk about Mr. X in a little bit. He's floor five. If we're going to just move on real fast to floor four where all of a sudden it's like somebody spilled honey all over the place.
Everybody's dead in this room because these moths, I think they're more moths than bees or wasps, have just overrun the place and they are dangerous. And this is probably the hardest part of the game for me because I only got to
our special friend, the magician. The black magician. The black magician once and I never got to the next floor after that. the floor four. I'm glad you say that. Was the end for me. Because floor four was also the end for me and it was that I didn't know he was called the black magician. I just called him the unassuming looking guy that throws fireballs and teleports. Not only throws teleports, Joe, Joe, we're missing a very clear move that no one else in the game. I think I know what it is. You kick his head off and he just regrows it.
Right. I was so bad. I was like, is this a puzzle? Am I supposed to kick his head off a certain number of times? I had no idea how to get past him and I got to him several times, never figured out what the answer was to getting past this guy. So I found out that if you want to know the answer, this might be a spoiler. This might be a spoiler for other people, but it's worth finding out because it is kind of frustrating.
He kind of goes around on the Kung Fu boards as the one punch man because you have to crouch punch him four times and he's dead. Just four shots with a crouch punch and he is gone. That's it? Yep, that is it. Why is it called the one punch man? I don't know why they call him one punch man, but I guess it's because theoretically, if you get close enough, you could just Yeah. You know, because you can register connect your Kung Fu fan base has some explaining to you. Yeah, they do have some explaining to do and they have a lot more explaining to do later on, but that gets us through floor four. So now we're going to talk about floor five,
which... Can I say one more thing about floor four? I just want to see if anyone else had this experience. I... Did anyone else get to the point where this one punch man apparently turns into two versions of himself and surrounds you and you can only hit one of them? That sounds like a glitch. Yeah. Did that happen to anyone else? Your game is haunted. Yeah, I thought it was a glitch because I couldn't hit the one that was towards the direction I was trying to progress. I had to go back and kill the other guy and he would go away eventually. And then I could hit the first guy. That's a concept in Bloodborne. Like, did they rip off Kung Fu? Kung Fu is actually a Bloodborne prequel.
So, I looked up the manual. Okay. Right now. That's cheating. You're Sam the Manual Smith. You're supposed to have them in your brain. I know. Well, here's the thing. I didn't read the full manual this time because I got... It tells you how to play the game real quick and I just figured that was all I needed to know. But then it goes on to describe every single enemy and obstacle that you come across. And they all have pretty interesting names.
And... And so I read them in alphabetical order now? Like, you're just going to do that now. No, just some things I noticed. Like, the first guy, the first boss, not a sword. It's a stick. Stick man. He's fighting with a... The name is Stick Fighter. Is it like a... What's that? Kondo? Is it... What's... Oh, Kanto? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Like this... We are so bad. We're really bad. I'm sorry for anybody that actually cares. I mean, we don't even know what wedges are in golf. So, like... And I don't even know what an end zone is. If you've been following since the beginning, you know better. We're not smart people. I'm sorry.
Okay, so... Sam, yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me, give me. One more thing. The guys who seem to hug you, they're called the grippers. Oh, shoot. Oh, so that was intentional. So they do just hug you. Lots of them come to get Thomas. No specific techniques. Okay, but this is a localization note. You know what I mean? Like, this is not the original intention of this game.
All right, so let's finally get to floor five just to talk about Mr. X because there's not too much else going on there. But Mr. X, when you look at it, he's like a punk. He's like a skinny, like, little dude. Like, he's got like a mullet. He would be played as the perfect foil for the honorable puns. by Kiefer Sutherland. It's so disappointing. I wish the big man or giant, I wish he was the final boss. I think you've just confirmed it for me that the giant is the real Mr. X pulling the strings. I feel like if Kung Fu was a...
that, um, that would be like the, you know, the third act is the reveal that like, Mr. X was giant, but now this new guy is assuming the role of Mr. X and now you have to take him down. Like, you saved Sylvia, but now you have to stop him from destroying Tokyo.
All right, and so that's pretty much the game and then when you defeat Mr. X, uh, unfortunately, you just go back to floor one, but now you have like dragon, uh, one next to your thing. So it's like, that's what that dragon icon is for. It's like, every time you go through the five floors, then, uh, your dragon number goes up so you can show how many times you beat the game in one continuous play. Uh, not that worth it, really. No. Get any more challenging after you go back around? Is it like a new game plus mode on the NES? There's always the B game for that. Yeah, the B game is,
we haven't even, first off, we haven't even talked about that because I'm pretty sure nobody made it past the floor one of the B game. Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty steep difficulty curve there. Just lots of grippers coming at you. It's a lot of kicking for me and I just, I didn't have it in me. Uh, but so we were talking, we were talking about giant, uh, and how like, and then we were talking about, uh, one punch man who should actually be four punch man. So, another thing in kung fu lore is that if you beat the game to get 50 dragons, you would be able to play as Sylvia instead of Thomas. Is that confirmed?
So, I was genuinely interested, this is on a game FAQ board, like this was like in the guy's walkthrough, he had mentioned this, so I'm like, that sounds pretty legit, but this also sounds like finding Luigi in Super Mario 64. Like, something that's just not actually possible and people make up. Yeah, it reminds me of the, the Mew truck. Right, exactly, using strength and all that stuff. So I looked it up and I found this one website where this guy pretty much made it his goal to like prove that no, you don't get to play as Sylvia if you beat the game 50 times and he beat the game like 53 times and she didn't show up.
So, unfortunately, you're stuck as Thomas. Um, black haired Thomas, not blonde slash brown haired Thomas from the arcade game. I don't know why they changed his hair for the NES version.
Uh, this was a popular arcade game though. It was called Kung Fu Master instead of Kung Fu. Um, and so popular in fact that it found its way into the Berlin International Film Festival. Wait, what? What? Is anybody ready for this? Kung Fu Master is a film, a French made film that was entered into the Berlin International Film Festival in 1988. So, three years after the game. It's an adaptation of the game. So, it's not an adaptation of the game. Is it a documentary of someone playing the game? It is a woman who is in her like 40s who has a daughter.
She is a teacher at the school and she falls in love with this 14 year old boy at the school who goes to the arcade and plays Kung Fu. Oh my god. Okay? What? And, and it's this whole thing where it's like this relationship between them and they actually like kiss in the movie and spend time together and her daughter is ashamed of her and the mom realizes that she can't be like this and that she used to date a much older man so she realizes what this boy is now going through and at the end of the game, not the end of the game, at the end of the film,
Julian, the little, the boy, I'm going to call him a little boy, he's 14 and he's dating this 40 year old woman, he doesn't know that she's not going to see him anymore, I think her name is Mary Jane and she's decided that she's just not going to see him anymore and he goes to the arcade, finally beats Kung Fu Master, the game that we're talking about here, tells somebody at the arcade, I think he says to the arcade employee, call Mary Jane, tell her I beat Kung Fu and she doesn't answer and that's like the end of the movie.
You're blowing my mind right now. Okay, so I need to let you guys peek behind the curtain a bit. Before the recording of this episode, Mike said that there was going to be a surprise relating to movies. This was the surprise? This is the movie. Okay, then you, we had different surprises because I learned while doing a little bit of research about this game that the game itself is based off of a Kung Fu movie
called Oh my God. Wheels on Meals. Wheels on Meals? Not Meals on Wheels. Wheels on Meals? It's called Wheels on Meals. He works in a food truck. This guy Thomas, and he's got a, it like takes place in Barcelona. like, and he's trying to, like, Thomas is trying to save Sylvia in that game. the names. This is the deepest, yeah. Please go, Joe. Please tell us. Can I interject real fast?
So, so, I think we mentioned at the beginning of this episode that I'm remote right now, so I'm not in the room with them, and I'm at this point pretty convinced that at some point they muted their microphones and said, let's see if we can get Joe to believe these ridiculous stories about what movies are connected to this random 1985 arcade game. I honestly think that we have to do an episode that's just a double feature where we watch Wheels on Meals and Kung Fu Master back to back and like, maybe it's a live stream thing.
Yeah. Maybe we'll just watch them with their own audio commentary tracks over them. I made this stupid joke that I'm, I'm gonna just mention that I made it, but I left it out of the story. There, there's a Easter scene in the Kung Fu Master film where Mary Jane is hiding eggs and then she's surprised by Julian and I think that was like one of the first video game Easter eggs. oh wow. No, you should have kept it out.
This is the most ridiculous story. We are so off topic right now. We're on the post show. Yeah, this is post show. I really feel like there's so much though, like, like this is the deepest, this is a deep cut of video game. Yeah. Oh, definitely. But that can only mean that we are now entering the essential games list.
All right. It's the essential games list and you're playing games like For Honor and you're like, why? I can't, I can't blame you. Why are you still playing For Honor? There's seven million, seven million concurrent users. I can play the video game adaptation of Wheels on Meals. Yeah, exactly. Instead of For Honor, I could be playing Wheels on Meals, Kung Fu Master video game adaptation.
And to be honest, that's probably enough, right? Like you're probably now going to pick this game up, but maybe you want to hear what we have to say if it makes the essential games list or not. The essential games list is like we vote on it. We're talking about truly special games here, folks. Games so far, only things on it is Duck Hunt, which was unanimous and Excitebike, which I'm pretty sure some people's stomachs are turning about the decision still.
So there's only... Maybe a little regret. There's only two games in there so far. I still like it. I'm standing back. Sam still likes it. I still like it. I still like it, but I don't know if... I think I might have some rethinking of where to put it. Joe, I think I'm going to make a super cut of every time you've said, well, Excitebike. Well, you know,
I'll send you more audio files of me saying that if you want to add more. That'd be amazing. Joe, do you want to go first for the essential games list? Sure. Kung Fu, I think it was fun. I wouldn't shy away from playing it if you have it around or if you think you can find it. You definitely
won't regret it, but not essential. You might want to add one of the movies to your essential movie list, but as a video game, I wouldn't. Yeah. All right, Sam. Here's the thing about Kung Fu. I feel like if you're in 1985 and you don't have, or now, and you don't have access to anything else, but you do have this game that maybe your parents bought for you and this is kind of all you have for a little bit, I think it will get more fun if you put a lot of time into it, you know? But it's just, it's frustrating and it was just not, it's not on the list for sure. I was, I don't know, you just, you die over and over and over and over.
Oh, you are going to ES games. No, I know, but it's just like, that's just, that's it. That's enough of a, I gotcha. Yeah, I mean, now, like attention spans and everything, I don't have the attention span for this game, I'll say that, you know? I don't care enough to get to level five. Sylvia's not worth it for me. Sylvia's not worth it. Hashtag, hashtag sorry Sylvia.
Sam. Sean. Yeah, yes, okay. So, I think I like this game more than the rest of you. I think that its difficulty curve was appropriate and I know that there was some jankiness to it, but it was definitely a hell of a lot more responsive than some of our previous games. games. I could feel myself improving on each successive run. I really like the like the ridiculous plotting and characters and enemies and I just, I always need to waste at least one life on the hug train.
And I don't know, I really like this game. I'm gonna throw this for the essential games. Hey, wow. All right. A little unexpected. Yeah. But, okay, this is what I'll say about Kung Fu. You know about the films. And when you know about the hugging tree. and when you know about the guy's head falling off and coming back on and when you know about the 10 yard fight steps. Like when you get deep in this game, when you really fall in love with it, it's a good game. This is a game worth playing.
But, is it essential? No, it's not. And, and there's a couple reasons, you know, I talked about very early on in this, the hitbox, and I don't want to like let that just fly by. I seriously think that the hitbox has a huge problem in this game. And there are times where I am like so close to the enemy and I do a low kick and it just doesn't do any damage. And I'm like,
oh my god, like he's right. Like I couldn't even move an inch closer. I'd be on top of the guy. I'd probably be connecting for damage that way. So I didn't really like the hitboxes, wasn't a fan of it. But this game oozes style, like even more so than some of the other games we've talked about that had style but not enough to get into the essential games list. I think this is actually like a very complete NES game, especially as a launch title. But for me, there's just not enough, there's not enough substance into the actual gameplay,
despite being able to do all the different punches and kicks. There's not enough there that makes it worth it to keep, to keep the grind of trying to get through just one round of five floors, let alone beating the five floors and saying like, all right, let's do it again on Dragon 2. Like, you know,
that's just the personal opinion. But for me, not essential. Yeah, I tried fighting for you guys, Kung Fu master fans. And they're definitely out there. The Kung Fu fan base stays alive. I still have problems with you calling it one punch man, but I fought for you. Definitely a four punch dude. Maybe it's because it's like, it's one succession of punches. It's like one round of punches. That's what I was saying. That's what I was saying. One group of four punches. We cannot talk any longer about this.
So with that, I'm just going to say that's all the time we have for this episode of Nostalgia. Join us next time for Pinball. For more Nostalgia, please subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen and be sure to check out NostalgiaCast.com. That's N-E-S-T-A-L-G-I-A Cast.com. There you'll find links to the show and show notes as well as our other platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Thank you so much for your support of Nostalgia. We thank you for spending time with us. I'm Michael Esposito. You can find me on at Esposito Film on Twitter and I'll talk to you soon. escrito escrito escrito ! Thank you.
