Kung Fu Heroes - Fight Chinese Stereotypes while listening to Wipeout!

A cute little game from my childhood. Kung Fu Heroes for the Nintendo Entertainment System was a game that I spent a surprising amount of time on. It's certainly not an amazing game, and few would even consider it a good one, but it's a game that I remember fondly nonetheless.

Released in 1988 by Culture Brain, it was originally known as "Super Chinese" in Japan. Imagine if that name carried over stateside, huh? The game plays out top-down style similar to Legend of Zelda, the general objective is to rescue the princess but in order to clear each stage you must defeat a certain number of enemies on each floor using your punching or jumping skills. Most enemies are pretty simple to defeat, but there are a few that have counters to certain tactics forcing you to rethink your strategy though usually it boils down to "Punching doesn't work? Try jumping on him!" or "Jumping on him doesn't work? Try punching him!"

The game features two-player co-op where player 1 takes control of "Jacky" with player 2 controlling "Lee". Nothing familiar about those names at all. Nope. The game "borrows" a few elements of the ever popular "Super Mario Bros." from the concept of Warp Zones, the fireball power-up, and even the sound effect for the 1-up! Ignoring all those elements, you would also find out that all the daytime levels feature a song that is disturbing similar to Surfari's "Wipeout". I wouldn't call it an EXACT ripoff, but it sounds very close.

So, I guess it all comes to if this game is worth your time or not. It's not. Really don't bother. The hit-detection is just bad, and you will experience a ton of cheap deaths, and whenever you get a game over it's back to beginning of the game for you! With nostalgia goggles on though, I find the game entertaining if you can find a bro to play it with. Also, a fun fact about my childhood with this game: At school the teacher wanted us to bring our favorite book and she'll read it out to the class. I brought the instruction manual to King Fu Heroes. It was read aloud. It was awesome. I'm awesome. End of Story.

Did you listen to the song?  Sound familiar?  Check this out and verify that I'm just not hearing things, please:

Yeah maybe I'm just crazy.  Oh well, later...

Yo! Noid - Be an annoying piece of s**t, DIE APPROPRIATELY!

Haha, oh wow. Seriously, I try to watch my language while writing for you guys but this game will freaking hate you for playing it. For those looking at the picture you aren't seeing things. Domino's Pizza used to have a mascot known as "The Noid", and Capcom made a game for him. And yes this game is balls hard because EVERYTHING WILL KILL YOU!

Even in sprite form, I hate the Noid.

I don't know how I got this game as a kid. Did my inner troll pick this out personally? Did I receive this as a gift?! How this game ever ended up in my library is still a mystery that I'm trying to solve. Yo Noid! is a platformer where you play as the Noid and try to survive all the way until the end of the level. Of course, it's 1-hit kills everywhere! Usually I would not have a problem with this, because the challenge doesn't come from the enemies, even they they are irritating in their own way, it actually comes from the BS level design. I never beat this game, but even Rollergames was more reasonable than this game. Just touching the water on the first stage will kill you, not falling in it, just touching it!

If you ever manage to complete the first level (that's instant street cred right there.) then you're treated to a pizza eating contest with the resident champion Noid recolor. It's a card game where you have beat your opponent by choosing a higher number card and eventually consume more pizzas than your opponent. It's a pretty amusing diversion, but it's also pretty easy to win. I played this game before I even knew how to read, and I remember winning every time.

Seriously, F*** this level.

Get to the second level, and that is where I'll just rage quit the entire game. I beat it before, but it's simply infuriating to those who never played it before. It's an ice level, so you have to jump from platform to platform while trying not to slip off and die horribly. Ice levels in video games are always a pain so why is it only the second level?! 

Truly, this game was made to make children cry. You will play it, and you will die. But is this game fun? Oh yes, absolutely. Play it, and you will love it. I'm not lying at all! Nope. Not lying. In fact, you should play the game as soon as possible, I'm not trying to share my pain to others who don't deserve it. Not at all! Here, have a video of the game in action:

Roller Games - Be a fat guy on roller skates, fall in manholes, fall off everything!

I still have my NES plugged in, so I decided to play around with it today and enjoy an infuriating game from my childhood.  I'd like to see kids today try Ultra's Rollergames, a classic example of old school difficulty featuring a rather silly premise.  Based on a TV show which only lasted for one season in the late 80s, you are some person on roller skates and you decide take to the streets navigating crazy obstacles and fighting gangs of evil roller skaters....or something like that.  This isn't exactly Final Fantasy here, there's no need for plot!  You'd be dying too often to care!  It also sounds a lot like "DJ Boy"!  Never heard of "DJ Boy"?  I might talk about it sometime down the road then...

Don't slip!

As a kid, I never beat this game, and I certainly haven't beat it now.  Of course, that's not to say the game is impossible, in fact it's actually quite beatable compared to other NES games in the same era.  You got infinite continues, so all you need is perseverance to get through the stages!  In case it wasn't obvious already, you spend the entire game on roller skates, so you can very easily roll off a cliff or fall into a manhole leaving you to restart at the nearest checkpoint.

There are 3 playable characters:  Fat guy on the "T-birds" team,  pink haired girl on the "Hot Flash" team, long haired  80's rocker dude on the "Rockers" team.  Yeah, I'm not even sure they had actual names, but you're not cool unless you picked the fat guy.  It's just hilarious having the guy try to clear gaps, jump over spikes, get stuck in manholes, and just destroy anybody stupid enough to get in his way.   Usually, after certain points in a level you're treated to a combat sequence that plays out similar to other beat-em-ups in the era like "Double Dragon".  Of course, these were the best parts of the game, but it certainly wasn't that involved compared to a game like "River City Ransom".

FFFFFFUUUUUUU--

So, would I recommend this game to you guys?  Probably not.  If you  have a positive outlook on life, I bet you can get quite a few laughs out of the game whenever you miss a jump or die in some silly way.  And even for those rage people, the game wouldn't piss you off that much when every death is knowingly your fault.  It's a pretty average game if I factor in other people's standards, but I enjoyed it as a kid and I still enjoy it now.  It has ome catchy konami tunes coupled with the rollerskating shenanigans so it definitely has charm.  I'll leave a youtube playthrough here for you to ultimately decide if the game is worth your time or not:

Later.