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...