Super Back to the Future Part II Platform: Super Famicom Released July 23, 1993 Developed by Daft Published by Toshiba EMI Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Link to English Translation Patch
19 levels of suffering to see Biff get covered in poo. Worth it. Not.
What is the only good Back to the Future game? That’s a trick question. There is no good Back to the Future game. Not the Telltale game, which is just lazily written fan fiction given a budget, and not this Japanese-exclusive platformer that gained fame through an Angry Video Game Nerd episode that declared it “a good Back to the Future game.” It’s really not good. It’s not even okay. This is a terrible game that only kind of feels passable in comparison to the Back to the Future games that came before it. It also isn’t trying to be ambitious. It’s a simple Point-A to Point-B platformer. No puzzles to solve. No time travel follies to undo. Just “get to the end of the level” gameplay, with the only twist being this is essentially a skateboarding game. Well, in theory, but the designers didn’t make a game tailored to skateboarding. Instead, they made a game that controls like if Sonic The Hedgehog handled like a shopping cart.
Sonic really is the closest cousin to this, since they were clearly aiming for a sense of speed and jumping that requires momentum. That’s why the frequent slowdown is especially face-palming. This would have been better suited for the Sega Genesis.
Super Back to the Future II is one of the worst controlling platform games I’ve reviewed. Building on the Sonic comparison, imagine if Sonic was heavier. Sonic The Plump Hedgehog. Now, imagine playing through Sonic 1 or 2 if the character built up speed slower and lost momentum faster. That’s what this game is like. Whoa, this is heavy, Doc. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the problem. Sonic worked because the levels were tailored around the sense of speed and momentum, but Super Back to the Future II’s levels aren’t. Actually, they often feel like generic, arbitrary platform stages. It’s so bad that, at one point late in the game when there was a series of platforms with architecture built around the hoverboard, I nearly fell out of my chair. “Hey look! They remembered what game they were making!” The fact that it stood out that much was one of the most damning things I’ve ever experienced in any game.
“Oh my God, skateboard ramps! In a skateboarding game!”
For the most part, the levels are designed around precision jumping, but then you get into the contradictory controls. Jumping is heavy, but basic movement is loose. So when you need to just turn around a little bit to jump, you move too far. If you’re on a small platform, you might fall off it. BUT, if you don’t, you might not have enough momentum to make the next jump anyway. SBTTF2 does this constantly. Most of the game’s challenge is based around platform placement that isn’t optimized for the physics. Any remaining challenge is based around trollish enemy placement and poor collision detection. The combat is standard hop ‘n bop gameplay. There’s no attack button, so all attacks must be done by leaping onto enemies. But, collision isn’t 1-to-1 with the sprites, and because the enemies and Marty are exaggerated to the degree they are, sometimes you take damage from a jump that should work. There’s also an overemphasis on spikes and disappearing platforms that go against the whole idea of running and jumping as fast as you can through the levels. The sprite work is great, but if it results in bad combat, it’s hard to consider it a net-positive.
The best thing I can say about SBTTF2 is it has one of the longest “blinks” in gaming history. You seriously get around five seconds of invincibility after taking damage, which often allowed me to circumvent large sections of levels. This also allowed me to accept damage against bosses in exchange for getting two or three free shots in. They weren’t fun to battle straight-up, so I was at least grateful the option to cheese ’em was so easy.
While the game tries to have set pieces that match the movie, they’re just not fun levels and there’s nothing that changes up the gameplay. There’s no event stages. You never drop the hoverboard. It’s boring. You can tell that most of the energy went into making this look great in screenshots, because the bosses look fantastic. Excellent character models, truly. But the bosses play no better than the main game. First off, a few of the fights started with the bosses going instantly into their damage animation, even blinking. I’ve never seen that before. It happens because there’s usually methods to cause environmental damage to the bosses. Sometimes there’s switches in the arena, and pressing them causes something to happen that can hit the boss. Okay, that’s different and kind of neat. Except, you can also damage the bosses by jumping on them. I wonder if this was a band-aid. The relatively large bosses are fought in cramped arenas, and their collision detection is especially unforgiving. I wonder if being able to damage them via jumps was added because their elaborate plans to use environmental factors to win battles (as befits Marty McFly) didn’t work without players dying from damage. Then again, you seem to instantly come back to life during boss battles, but ONLY during boss battles. Die during a level and you return to the start.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Super Back to the Future II is one of those cynical “made to look great on the back of a box” games that irks me. It feels like karmic justice that it never came out globally, but then it gained a reputation as being an underrated classic that American fans got shorted on. Even that rep didn’t last long after that AVGN episode aired, and there’s a reason for that. People found it, played it, and realized this is AWFUL. It’s Marty The Heavyweight Hedgehog, on the wrong platform, with terrible boss fights. I totally get the appeal in Japanese-exclusive games, especially when they’re based on American properties. I didn’t even grow up in the 8-bit/16-bit era and I get excited for them. Of course I do! I’m here to have fun and find hidden gems. This is the stuff I’m seeking out.
Behold: the one semi-clever bit in the entire game that works. Your jumping move is always spinning (again, Marty The Heavyweight Hedgehog) and works as soon as you press the button. In this section, soda cans rain down on you, and by doing the jump attack, you have to basically guide yourself up this tall shaft by hitting the cans on the way up. Great idea, but then they recycle it at other times in a way that doesn’t work because they chose to include spikes and/or enemies that fire projectiles along the pathway, which your spin attack does nothing against. Any game that turns its best idea into a negative is a truly putrid game, indeed. You hate to see it happen, but SBTTF2 does it multiple times.
This one hurts. I’ve never seen a licensed game that more people wanted to be better than it is than Super Back to the Future Part II. What a strange thing, right? A one-off, generic platform game based on the second film of a trilogy. But, it’s yet another reminder why so many of these weird Japanese licensed games exist. When you first find out about a title like Super Back to the Future Part II, it combines all the excitement of a lost treasure and a forbidden fruit. But, the genuinely good ones usually manage to find a cult following on their own and rise above the level of “historic curio.” That’s not the case with Super Back to the Future II. It has some fans, but every game has some fans. E.T. has fans. Like the Tokyo Disneyland Mickey Mouse game I did last month, this thing fell into obscurity for a reason. Or to put it another way, when Biff crashed his car, he was coated in copies of this game. Verdict: NO!
Haven’t done one of these since Christmas of 2023. We’re overdue, and since Super Mario Wonder is taking me forever and I’ve also been binge-playing our AtGames Legends Pinball with Sasha the Kid and the rest of my family, I’ve not been posting enough updates to IGC. When in doubt, LCD games to the rescue. So, for the first time since 2023, here’s some LCD games of the 1980s and beyond. From here on, LCD features will include six games per feature. All of these are done by Itizso. If you have any mint condition LCDs laying around that haven’t ever been translated like this, you should hook him up and preserve them FOR EVERYONE. Trust me, the nostalgia for these is off the charts. My LCD features are among the most read here. Even after taking a year off LCDs, I’m still “that girl who reviews LCD games.” I had someone tell me “you should do another spin-off. The LCD Chick!” Yea right. I need LCDs for THIS site. They’re the best pinch hitters I got! Make sure to check out my retro review index for a full list.
Go play some LCDs. Retrofab has tons, and even more coming!
But, when you look at all the LCDs that have ever been made, even with as many as I’ve done, I’ve not come remotely close to scratching the surface of this genre of games. I’ve taken atoms off the surface at best. There’s tons of LCDs I’d love to do. There’s an Attack From Mars LCD! Are you kidding me? It’s pretty rare too, so rare most databases for LCDs don’t list it. The Handheld Museum doesn’t. This one doesn’t either. That should be f’n alarming. As much as it makes Nintendo furious, I think it’s nothing short of miraculous that ROMs for every classic game console, complete libraries, are readily available. I see zero evidence it affects sales of classic games or even the second hand market. But, with LCDs, 99.9999% of them will never be in compilations. Digital Eclipse will never do a Gold Master Series release on them. When they’re gone, they are GONE, and only a handful have been preserved by translating them into digital form like the ones reviewed in these features. If you happen to own LCDs that you cherish? They’re rotting. There is nothing you can do about it. The plastic will last essentially forever, but the game stored inside it will last about as long as your average human being, give or take. The majority of video games are preserved forever. The majority of LCDs are in danger of being lost for all time. If that doesn’t make you sick, I don’t know why you even clicked this feature. So, donate your LCDs to wizards like Itizso, which is basically giving them to the entire world.
Anyway, on with the feature. And yea, two of these I’ve already posted in my daily updates that I abandoned. Whoever guessed those would last a month wins a smack in the face for being right.
I just reviewed the arcade classic Splatterhouse and its not so good Sega Genesis sequel as part of Kung-Fu Master: The Definitive Review (it makes sense, trust me). So, why not start my first LCD feature in fourteen months with the handheld version many (including myself) didn’t even realized existed? Well, it’s not famous for a reason. I don’t know if Itizso’s port plays right or not, but without exaggeration, this was easily the fastest game over I ever suffered on an LCD in my life. If it was even two seconds, I’d be surprised, and the next several games didn’t play out much better. Even after ten or so games, I spent more time listening to the intolerable opening chiptune than I did actually playing Splatterhouse. To help you visualize this, here’s what that was like in game review form. The object is to catch DEAD. The Object is DEAD. The DEAD GAME OVER. Want to try again? The object is to catch laddDEAD. ThDEAD are you f*cking kidding me on that one? The object is to catch the ladders in order to DEAD GAME OVER. Excuse me, I’m going to go have a cry now.
Seriously, that’s what it’s like when you first start. There’s no grace period for enemies, and the knives that come in from the bottom left of the screen basically spawn on the same space you occupy, meaning some double kills are inevitable. The object is, in fact, to jump up and catch ladders so that you can zig-zag three stories and fight a boss to rescue your girl. The combat and safe zones are NOT intuitive, and it takes a lot of practice to figure out the timing. It doesn’t feel even a little like Splatterhouse and actually would make for a better Donkey Kong game, but after an infuriating start, I admit, there’s SOMETHING here. It took me a long time to get the timing down for the enemies, and I’m still not comfortable describing how to beat the boss. Basically.. stand back and don’t attack when he does, I guess. I can’t say I had a good time because it’s a busy game with tiny enemies, quick deaths, and one of the most ridiculous jump animations I’ve seen, but it wouldn’t take much fine-tuning to make this worthwhile. Verdict: NO!
On the most basic level, this plays like Burgertime. Preschool Burgertime that completely misses the point of the genre, but Burgertime nonetheless. You shimmy up and down ladders and knock exactly two patties and four buns to the bottom of the screen, and then you do it over and over again. There’s one enemy patrolling every floor that you can pepper when they’re next to you. After one level, a little bar warps around and might temporarily block a ladder. At first, I wondered how this could feel like a maze chase since there’s no maze. The answer is “they didn’t even try to replicate that.” Instead, you basically play Red Light-Green Light with the enemies and wait for them to waddle away from the burger parts. Well, unless you kill them, and you might as well do that. Unlike the coin-op, you get all your peppers back between stages. If you can’t even wait that long, you get refills from ice cream and coffee mugs that appear on the first and second floors. So unless you screw up the timing of when to use the pepper, this is just too easy. I don’t even know why they bothered releasing this if this was the best approximation they could do of Burgertime. Um.. seriously? Two channels? TWO? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to turn the screen on its side so the playfield could be bigger? Verdict: NO!
WESTERN BAR!! Casio (1984) Gameplay Type: Shooting Gallery/Quick Draw
How many games have you play as an alcoholic sheriff who gets ashtrays thrown at them? At least one! And actually, Western Bar is one of the better shooting galleries I’ve played in this format. You can tell the designers took a long, hard look at the Game & Watch franchise, because this is very Nintendo-like, and I mean that in the best way. Levels are divided into two parts. In the first, you have to shoot targets that pass from the right of the screen to the left while dodging objects thrown by two patrons. From the second cycle onward, sticks of dynamite are thrown from the left of the screen that you do NOT want to shoot (when are you ever going to learn to read the instructions, Cathy?). From the third cycle onward, the bartender will catch the sticks and toss them onto the playfield, and you have to walk next to them to dump your whiskey out on the fuse. I spent far too much time on Google trying to find out if that would actually work or just blow you up faster. I never got a clear answer. Either way, the second part is a quick draw match against an outlaw. You hide behind a table. He hides behind the left of the counter, and when he pops out to shoot, all you have to do is press the fire button. But, he’s capable of faking his move, so make sure not to draw until he’s actually in his shooting cel. Western Bar is a busy game (you’ll want this on full screen) but it’s genuinely a lot of fun and one of the best LCDs I’ve played that isn’t from Nintendo. Verdict: YES!
WESTERN SHERIFF!! Casio (1987) Gameplay Type: Shooting Gallery
It even looks boring.
I had high hopes for this pseudo-sequel to the previous game, but Western Sheriff has none of the intense gameplay or charm of Western Bar. You gallop automatically on a horse and when bandits pop out, you shoot them. As you ride, if you hit a barrel, your horse loses 3 out of its 10 energy points, but they can be refilled with carrots. There’s tons of carrots. Far more than enemies, actually. From the second cycle onward, enemies throw dynamite from houses that have to be avoided. So, a fairly generic, mundane LCD experience, but there is one novel twist. Despite only having left and right directions, your gun can aim in multiple different channels. So, for example, if you move left, your gun will remain pointed the same way, but then moving left a second time will adjust your gun, then moving left again will move to the next space. So, that’s interesting, I suppose. But Western Sheriff is a total slog to play. If you want a good multichannel gunslinger, Konami’s Lone Ranger is so much better. and it’s on Retrofab. Verdict: NO!
Well, this is a different theme, at least. In Beauty Shop, you have to cut and shampoo hair. While there’s only three spinning plate channels, there’s seven movement “stations” in the game. Two of them are essential towards maintaining the spinning of the plates, while two of them can score optional bonus points: a tea tray on the left of the screen and a cash register on the right. These both blink in and out of existence rapidly, though you can actually get a rhythm for when they will appear. The sheer amount of movement for a three channel game is staggering, and this is further compounded by the fact that the customers won’t always get up as soon as you perform the action. They could require multiple button presses to satisfy. The game wisely created indicators to let you know which of the three is the one about to cost you a miss. The customers raise their hands, then get “steamed” if they wait too long. Beauty Shop is a shockingly intense game, but a flawed one. I feel that I only lost after 3,000 points because I kept making plays for the cash register and tea tray. Had I ignored them completely, I really think it’d be easy to just maintain the plates indefinitely. The two bonus channels don’t really score enough to justify their risk. I hate it when LCDs do that. Beauty Shop does a better job than most at the genre, but the risk/reward balance is completely wrong. Verdict: NO!
CUPHEAD!! “Homebrew” by Itizso Gameplay Type: Spinning Plate
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Cuphead is an original creation by recreation master Itizso. While it’s a typical six-channel spinning plate game disguised as a gallery shooter, there’s a big twist to this one: you’re not scoring points. Instead, you’re just trying to survive for as long as you can, with scoring measured in minutes and seconds. Unfortunately, there’s no auto-fire here. You actually do have to mash the shooting button. This isn’t a game I could put extended playtime into without annihilating my hands. I suppose the question is “does it feel like Cuphead?” And the answer is “not even a little bit.” The pea shooter’s noise, that now apparently iconic clicking sound, is here for the LCD, but otherwise, nah. I think most fans of the franchise would be disappointed that the LCD is themed more after one of the platforming segments instead of an encounter with one of the humongous, transforming bosses. But, while I don’t think this necessarily works as a Cuphead game, the addition of leaderboards makes this a one-off spinning plate experience that I enjoyed, in small doses. Verdict: YES!
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon Platform: Game Boy Advance Released March 21, 2001 (JP) June 11, 2001 (US) Designed by Koji Horie Developed by Konami Included in Castlevania Advance Collection
Bats are basically just sacks of blood, apparently.
I got Circle of the Moon on the day the Game Boy Advance launched in North America. Oh, I didn’t play it then. Did you ever watch the White Walker battle in the final season of Game of Thrones? Probably not, even if the TV was tuned into it, because you couldn’t see a damned thing. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was kind of like that when it launched. Even after my father installed one of those aftermarket, warranty-voiding light kits to my GBA, visibility wasn’t very good and I still didn’t play it. Actually, because the Game Boy Advance screen was so impossible to see, I didn’t play a lot of GBA at all until the SP and the Game Boy Player (for my younger readers, this was a device that let you play Game Boy Advance titles on the TV via a GameCube) came out in 2003, both of which came with the novelty of being able to see the games you bought. Well, the Game Boy Player did. The original SP was front lit, because Nintendo never admits to mistakes until they’ve exhausted all other possibilities. But, for me at least, the killer app of the Game Boy Player was Circle of the Moon. In fact, I binged the three Castlevania GBA games back-to-back-to-back. And it was a couple of the happiest weeks of what would be a very crappy year for me. So, I cherish the Castlevania GBA trilogy. But, did they age well?
Find the right enemies and grinding can go so quick that it’s kind of shocking. Does it still count as “grinding” if you can get a couple levels in under five minutes?
As the second “Metroidvania” game in the series and the first since the legendary Symphony of the Night, Circle of the Moon had a LOT to live up to. Circle of the Moon doesn’t attempt to be quite as RPG-like as that game. Actually, it’s more like a noncommittal hybrid of a traditional Castlevania game and a Symphony of the Night-style adventure. While the actual map is massive and sprawling, your only primary weapon is the Vampire Killer whip. Apparently this is not THE whip of the Belmont clan and instead is called the “Hunter Whip” but who gives a f*ck? It’s the Vampire Killer, period, and there’s no permanent upgrades for it and no alternatives. Luckily, the whip is one of the most satisfying of any Castlevania whips, with plenty of OOMPH and a lot of magical spells to buff it and the standard assortment of Castlevania subweapons to complement it. The action is top-notch. Controls really well, too. This is one of those games that plays so well that it completely lives and dies on the merits of the design.
This was my map when I finished the game. Dracula is directly to the right of the first yellow block from the left. With his room filled in, this is a roughly 90% complete map, and I have no idea how many HP/MP/Heart boosts I missed along the way. I didn’t use a guide for them, and actually, I only used a guide for which enemies drop which weapons.
Instead of finding weapons, there’s only armor and accessories which are dropped by enemies. In fact, each individual enemy drops only two potential things, one common, the other rare. I’m not the biggest fan of this design because I hate having this type of thing come down to tracking down lottery tickets. Like, the second best armor in the game is dropped by an enemy that exists only in one specific room. Also, the base drop rate for this armor is 0.5%, and since there’s only one of these enemies in the entire game, if you don’t get it, you have to leave the room and come back and fight it again. Something about that is really inelegant to me, and for this game, I decided not to play along. Instead, I used save states to make some of the drops go quickly. Sometimes it made a big difference, but other times? I’m not at all encouraging you to watch this whole video, but even cheesing the game with save states, it could take quite a while for the item I was seeking to drop.
By the way, the dice seem to be rolled the moment the fatal shot is THROWN, not LANDED, so if you have a boomerang about to kill an enemy on the return trip, reloading the state won’t change whether or not the enemy drops something or not. Speaking of the Boomerangs, they’re pretty rare in this. I’d recommend holding onto them when you first get one because they’re seriously overpowered for all bosses.
Additionally, some enemies drop cards that allow you to cast spells. Unlike armor, card drops happen only once, but if you want to do THAT, logically the first kill against the target enemy should result in a drop. It doesn’t. Lame. There’s two tiers of cards that have to be combined. These mostly enhance your whip. For the most part, I only used two combos, one of which gave me a fire sword and one of which made my whip twice as long. I might switch to one that increased the damage I inflicted by 25% for bosses, but otherwise, I mostly stuck to those once I had them. The problem is the same as the accessories: they’re random drops from enemies. Every treasure that can be found (besides post-boss upgrades) are either upgrades to hit points, magic points, or max hearts you can carry. I didn’t start cheesing the game with emulation trickery until over halfway through the game. If the drop system had been remotely rewarding, I would never have done it. Random drops might be great for the surprise factor, but I can assure you, it gets old. I really think it would have been more satisfying to hide the big armor and accessories as treasures in the castle.
Mercury Card + Golem card ended up being, no joke, my favorite Castlevania whip ever. It reaches nearly half the screen and, although it comes at a cost of speed, it sure made backtracking a lot less painful.
So, this is awkward to say, but I found the RPG elements of Circle of the Moon to be some of the worst in a good game I’ve ever played. Too many enemies that are pushovers pay off too many experience points. Like this room here:
That “frozen shade” paid off so much that I was able to grind up about ten levels in under half-an-hour. It’s not up to players to use the honor system to protect the integrity of the game from lazy design. Designers are supposed to discourage that through challenge, right? Clearly that enemy was not something I was supposed to be fighting then and there. It had easy-to-dodge attacks and, with the fire sword spell and the star bracelets it dropped for me, I was wasting it in four or five hits, before it even fired at me. And since magic refills slowly (another bad choice, in my opinion) I didn’t have to hold back while fighting it. I have no idea how they determined some of these XP totals, but it makes Circle of the Moon one of the most exploitable RPG systems in the entire history of gaming.
One neat thing that it does do is replace weak enemies with strong ones as you make progress, though it waits a little too long to do this, and it doesn’t implement it nearly enough. If you want to put such a heavy emphasis on backtracking, you need more of this. These enemies are at the start of the game, but they don’t show up until you’re nearly finished.
There’s just absolutely no sense of balance, and no balance means no risk/reward to calculate. This is where you have to give turn-based RPGs props. In those, if you encounter an enemy that pays off so huge that you can hypothetically grind out hours worth of leveling-up in under half-an-hour, a punch-for-punch battle would see you go tits-up, lights-out in probably the first attack the enemy got on you. Action games can be that way too, but if you don’t PERFECTLY distribute the enemies or accessories, at some point the opportunity to cheese the game will present itself. Circle of the Moon does that a few times. It’s really badly done in that regard.
Don’t get me wrong: finding the hidden stuff is f’n awesome. I cracked a smile every single time a wall broke.
Now here’s the good news: the level design is mostly pretty good. There’s a ton of annoying backtracking and not nearly enough fast-travel tunnels. According to the game’s clock, it took me six-and-a-half hours to finish the Circle of the Moon, and I’d guess at least a third of that was spent making my way back to areas just to get one previously inaccessibly stat upgrade or find an enemy who dropped a card I missed. If the combat wasn’t so damn satisfying and the level design some of the best in this genre, I wouldn’t have been up for it. Yet, there’s a lot of really weird design choices that made me shake my head. Stuff that shattered my immersion that I was a badass vampire hunter exploring a castle. Like, this for example:
Are you kidding me?
One of the very last items you get from defeating a boss is the ability to shove boxes. Okay, that’s a time-honored staple of the genre. EXCEPT, one of the very first upgrades you get in Circle of the Moon is the ability to shatter stone blocks with a dash move. So, let me get this straight: Nathan Graves (hero of the game) masters the ability to shatter stone with his shoulder before he learns how to push a wooden crate out of the way? I had a spell that turned my whip into a goddamned flaming sword that, by all rights, should have set the box on fire, but I had to wait until the game was almost over to schlep a box? And by the way, they put a lot of those boxes throughout the “levels” of the game, so after getting this upgrade, if you want to boost your stats you have to spend about an hour just making your way to them so you can push them out of the way and pick up the boosts.
When the game is over, you get a series of passwords that allow you to replay the game in a different way, though the hero sprite is still Nathan. Thankfully, you don’t have to beat the game to get these, but honestly, they’re all really boring and feel like the type of challenges that pro gamers come up with to keep themselves amused. The Wizard (pictured here using a spell that turned me into a skeleton) is activated by putting FIREBALL as your name, which is also the name of Angela’s dog. Funny. The wizard is weak in everything except magic, and you start the game with every card so you basically have to magic your way through it. GRADIUS is the fighter, who can’t cast spells but his strength is insane. CROSSBOW is the “shooter” who has weak stats and has to use sub-weapons (including a new version of the dagger) that come at half the cost of hearts to use. This is one of the worst ways to ever play a Castlevania game. Finally, THIEF has weak stats but enemies drop stuff at a significantly higher rate. Sorry, no upside-down castle this time.
In terms of a pure action game, Circle of the Moon is clearly one of the most elite launch games in the history of the medium. It’s actually astonishing to think about: this was a day one Game Boy Advance game. I mean, pity about the vision thing, because the wide variety of enemies, settings, and huge boss fights make this legitimately a pretty good Castlevania adventure. While the RPG aspect is a complete airball in my opinion, the epic scale of the boss fights almost makes up for it by itself. This includes one of the best Grim Reaper fights of the 21st century, a memorable encounter with a gigantic minotaur that’s practically trapped in a pillory, and an even more gigantic two-headed dragon. Sadly, after several top-notch boss fights, the game ends with back-to-back AWFUL fights: the battle against Nathan’s rival, the insufferable Hugh Baldwin (who was originally going to be a playable character) and one of the most sloggish Dracula battles ever. Seriously, the final form of Dracula includes this dashing attack where he’s invulnerable and it’s just the worst. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon sticks the landing about as well as that pole vaulter who landed ass-first on the pole.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Okay, so Circle of the Moon wasn’t as good as I remembered it. Not even close. I can’t stress enough: this WAS the killer app for the Game Boy Player twenty-two years ago. It was the reason I wanted to own one in the first place, and I suspect I wasn’t alone in that. In 2003, at the age of thirteen/fourteen, it felt like it lived-up to my high expectations. But, it certainly didn’t hold-up perfectly two decades later. As great as the map is, it’s not an optimized map. More fast travel points would have been transformative of this game. Hell, just get rid of those and turn the save stations into fast travel points. Why not?
I’m a complete idiot, because it turned out I had the ability to do this much sooner and I just somehow skipped past that card.
Plus, the lack of balance really shows a roughness that I never noticed the first time. Like, the first time I played the game, I beat levels out-of-order because the way you clean the toxic water out of that level is so far away and disconnected from that area that I actually missed it back in 2003. I beat the toxic water level without ever cleaning the water. I just thought it was a really hard stage. That’s on the designers. Actually, knowing where to go next is not intuitive. The first time you play this, expect a LOT of aimless wandering. Thank god for the combat. Circle of the Moon is lucky that Castlevania’s core combat is so bulletproof that you can tack on a terrible RPG system and some haphazard Metroidvania progression and still have a good game. But I’ve been wrong for the last twenty years, because I thought Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was great. It’s pretty good, but nowhere near great. Verdict: YES!
Mickey to Donald: Magical Adventure 3 aka Magical Quest 3 Platform: Super Famicom Released December 8, 1995 Developed by Capcom Originally Never Released Outside of Japan – Ported to GBA in 2005 No Modern Release
How many trilogies have the first game end up being the best one? I can’t think of many.
I hated the Great Circus Mystery, which had nothing inspired about it. That’s not exactly the case with this third and final Magical Quest game. Hell, I even think they could have released this in America and saw roughly the same success as MQ2. I get why they didn’t. While Mickey Mania didn’t exactly block the release since Traveler’s Tales and Sony didn’t own exclusive Mickey Mouse rights for any window, Magical Quest 3 looks kind of fuddy-duddy when put side by side with Mickey Mania. Regardless of whether or not Magical Quest 3 is the better game, Capcom had experience with one of their sprite-based games getting smashed by a game promoted by cutting edge cel-graphics: the Aladdin fiasco with the Capcom SNES game and the Virgin Sega Genesis game. They didn’t want a repeat, and Mickey Mania was even better looking than Aladdin, on the Nintendo platform as well, and critically acclaimed, so they said “nah.” Yea, that’s almost certainly why this didn’t come out in America. Sad, huh? Especially since Magical Quest 3 is no-doubt-about-it better than the SNES version of Mickey Mania. Whether or not it’s better than the base Mickey Mania that I gave a YES! to on Sega CD wasn’t as clear, at least immediately.
Unlike Magical Quest 2, where you can choose to play as Mickey or Minnie but it doesn’t make any gameplay difference, Mickey and Donald are unique characters with unique costumes and abilities. Well, “unique” is a bit a stretch, and I’m almost certain the climbing costume has the same abilities despite having a different look. Both characters each have a knight-like combat costume. In water, Mickey sinks in his suit of armor while Donald, who looks like a complete tool in his barrel, can float. See, Mickey? You should have dressed like a tool. Of course, in the underwater stage, you can’t use Donald’s suit at all since it takes you to the top of the screen.
One HUGELY annoying aspect of the game is just the act of turning around, because you don’t just turn and face the other way. You also move a character segment forward. That makes avoiding boss attacks a huge pain in the ass.
In the knight costume, Mickey follows in the footsteps of Green Arrow and uses a lance with a boxing glove on the tip, while Donald uses a hammer. BOTH are hugely satisfying and probably the best costumes in the entire franchise. No notes. The problem instead is the magician costumes and the randomly-generated refills for them. Mickey is CLEARLY a comic fanrat since he throws playing cards like Gambit. Donald wears a fez and uses a lamp with a genie to cast spells. Mickey’s costume allows for rapid fire, while Donald’s projectile has a pronounced delay for the animation. When I fought this mini-boss as Donald:
I had to hold down the fire button to successfully score hits. The boss is immune to all attacks BUT the magical costume, since it’s shooting fast moving cannonballs at you that you have to deflect. TECHNICALLY you can use two costumes with Mickey, but with Donald, you can only use the magic costume, and it makes for a slow, agonizing fight. Early on, I thought they corrected the problem with spongy bosses, but they didn’t. There was a boss fight with a giant flower that died so quickly that I couldn’t believe it, But, by the halfway point of the game, boss fights once again dragged on so long that it sucked all the excitement and joy out of the battles. Even the mini-bosses are total slogs to fight. On the plus side, collision is better than the SNES Great Circus Mystery, but if the gameplay isn’t fun, that’s not much of a consolation prize.
The final battle against Pete did ALMOST put a smirk on my face since he changes costumes like the player. Cute idea, but the animation is so limited and sloppy that it’s like amateur hour. He just sort of waddles back and forth, and when he attacks, it doesn’t do a convincing job of creating the illusion that it’s one sprite doing all the work.
I’m genuinely fine with extended boss battles. I just drooled all over the fact that I spent nearly an hour battling a boss in Super Mario RPG, and I could totally be on-board for a platform boss being along those lines, but only if the fight is kept exciting. That requires changes of tactics, but most Magical Quest bosses have one form of attack and maybe some kind of rushing move, so two total gameplay elements that are then repeated randomly over and over and over. They also usually have some kind of interval when they’re vulnerable, so the fights feel like you’re just waiting around for something to happen. These are BAD boss fights, and they didn’t have to be. Cut the damage required in half and they would have been fine, and maybe even fun.
The first boss is actually a massive tease because he’s the type of boss I want. He has two distinct forms that feel different and take the correct amount of shots to pass. I have no idea why all the bosses aren’t like this.
Like Great Circus Mystery, I assume a lot of the decisions made were done to accommodate co-op play. This time, I *did* play a limited amount of co-op, but it’s just a slower experience that mostly comes down to one player creating a platform for another player. It’s the same problem World of Illusion had: the original game was fine, and you don’t need to build a co-op game out of that. You need to build UP, and co-op inherently prevents that. Part of me has always wondered if that’s why the New Super Mario Bros. games never “did it” for me. How many things have to be sacrificed so the co-op design can work, which has a NICHE audience as opposed to the all-encompassing one of the original game? With that said, the levels are significantly improved over the second game, but they’re still not as good as the first. There’s also some problematic elements related to the climbing gear. It’s done like a lumberjack, with a rope around the thing you’re climbing that you use to sort of scoot upwards and fling yourself. But things like these:
I really struggled greatly to “bind” myself to, even with practice. It’s certainly not intuitive or smooth-flowing. There were multiple moments in the game where I was stressing that a soft-lock was in play and ultimately only barely got past because an enemy appeared that I could use to bounce off of. There’s an overall lack of elegance, and lots of situational issues where if you run out of ammo for the magic, you probably will get stuck. The refills are random, even if they’re inside blocks. A couple times, I had to rewind the game and break blocks a couple times to assure I got refills so I could use the magic to create a platform to scale over a structure and continue the level. Well, the obvious answer is that these segments were made, you guessed it, for the co-op. If they feel that strongly about co-op, stand by your conviction and have no single player. Because all the uninspired design made for a co-op experience that between 5% and 20% of all players will probably use really seems to be the root cause for all the conservative level design.
Well, the climbing stuff isn’t great in general, single or otherwise. It’s slow and clunky, and so when they do the rising fire trope in the final level based around it, it doesn’t land at all. You can’t do that gimmick if it’s based around unreliable controls.
Or how about this one part where there’s switches and you have to use the climbing rope to drag a barrel over to them. Except, you don’t actually DRAG the barrel. Even though they’re placed quite a distance from the object, you have to throw the rope out and catch it, then drag it one single space, then repeat until it’s on the switch. Look how far away it is! How stupid! It’s actually breathtaking how consistently the Magical Quest games consistently manage to add busy work and subtract fun from so many aspects of gameplay, from bosses to platforming segments to even the act of putting a barrel on a switch. Did they sit around with a stopwatch and try to find places they could add seconds to the gameplay, so that nobody could accuse them of making a game that can be finished in an hour?
I actually thought this was going to get a YES! by virtue of being closer to the first game than the second, but when it was all said and done, I actually had to ask myself “did I really have fun with that?” At the start of the game, I did. The first couple levels were pretty good, but the fun stopped soon after. I played Magical Quest 3 twice, once with Mickey and once with Donald. The two characters weren’t so different that it felt necessary. When the credits rolled on the Donald game, I said “well, that was a colossal waste of my time.” And that’s when I knew my verdict. Unlike Great Circus Mystery, Magical Quest 3 isn’t entirely a wash. There’s a couple really good levels, but the majority of the game is a slow, clunky bore. I was bored playing it, and I was bored writing about it. There’s a reason why this franchise died the death it did. The first game was the best, and it felt like it left so much on the table. The ideal Magical Quest game would be one that takes the first couple levels from Magical Quest 3 and somehow cuts them and pastes them into the middle of the first game. Magical Quest 3 isn’t a dumpster fire, but it’s not good, either. Verdict: NO!
I’m going to do the SNES game, then the Genesis one. Can you tell I wrote the full SNES review before I touched the Genesis version?
The Great Circus Mystery Starring Mickey & Minnie aka Disney’s Magical Quest 2 Starring Mickey & Minnie Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released October, 1994 Developed Capcom Re-Released for the Game Boy Advance July 18, 2003 No Modern Release
Well, it looks good. I guess.
If I didn’t know better, I’d guess that the second game in the Magical Quest trilogy was made up entirely of ideas, levels, and costumes rejected from the first game for being too boring. Mind you, for all the whining I did with my review of the first Magical Quest, I also said in no uncertain terms I thought it was “one of the better SNES mascot platformers.” So, what happened to this piece of crap? How’s this for a bonkers conspiracy theory: I think they dropped the “Magical Quest” name from the US version of the game and changed it to the Great Circus Mystery (despite having only ONE LEVEL related to the circus) because Capcom’s US branch recognized what an absolute failure the sequel is. Folks, this is a TERRIBLE game.
What a strange name. “The Great Circus Mystery” when none of the enemies outside of the first area, none of the costumes, NOTHING is circus themed. It’s not even a well done circus themed level, either. It’s entirely superficial.
The core pick-up-and-throw gameplay returns for the sequel with basically no changes, so the new content is entirely based around the three new costumes. The first one is a vacuum cleaner, which is basically the fireman’s suit from the first game in reverse. It’s easily the most satisfying costume in the game as well, but even it’s boring. Instead of sucking up enemies which can then be shot, it eats the enemies and poops out coins, and it does it in a way where the coins go FLYING behind you so you have to scramble to get them. How stupid. A couple bosses are fought using the vacuum gun, and while I think all the bosses are, simply put, boring, the least boring ones usually involve the vacuum. There’s also some very limited (and entirely optional) platforming bits that require you to use the vacuum to pull a block closer. As in, I did it exactly twice, back-to-back. That tracks with the unimaginative level design in general. The only costume that gets extended use for platforming is the explorer costume, which is basically Mickey with a hook. It’s used for swinging off pegs, scaling walls, and occasionally sliding down vines. That doesn’t sound TOO bad, right?
Behold, the best part of the entire game. This is like a better version of Super Castlevania IV‘s rotating room. It lasts under a minute. So, the sum total of the entire game’s entertainment value is maybe 45 seconds of someone else’s idea made marginally better. Being a Mode 7 segment, this room is not in the Sega Genesis build.
Even the explorer costume is as boring as possible. First off, there’s NO offense with this thing besides enemies who can be jumped on. You can’t even pick up a downed enemy and throw them with this costume, nor can you pick up any blocks at all while wearing it. Because there’s a huge delay when you’re swapping costumes, this costume alone causes a much slower pace than the previous Magical Quest game. The level design that takes advantage of it isn’t much better. In the first stage based around the explorer costume, there’s an extended section where you have to climb up trees. As if to really stress how much contempt the designers of this game had for players, the things you’re waiting on are actual snails that move as fast as you would expect, which is so goddamed slow that I wanted to throw my controller through the screen.
Platforming done at a literal snail’s pace.
The third costume is one of the worst power-ups I’ve ever countered. It’s “Cowboy Mickey” which sees Mickey bouncing up and down on a hobby horse. All movement with this is bounce-based, and it’s SO inelegant. If you want to jump higher, which is the theoretical advantage of this costume, you have to time it based on when the up-and-down hopping is currently down. Since the hopping is so quick, it’s really not easy to actually jump or do anything with this costume. It also shoots, but not straight in front of you. The corks you shoot are a little bit high and then arc slowly. It’s literally custom designed to be hard to shoot anything with, and when games do that, that’s not really a challenge. That’s just being trollish. It also has a dash move, but that seems like a hold-over from the Genesis game, as there’s no place where it was useful in the SNES game. The poor controls with the cowboy suit make it one of the most unresponsive, unintuitive gimmicks in any platforming game. The whole idea should have been killed on the drawing board. It should NEVER have made it to the finished game.
Imagine if you could only jump randomly 1 out of every 3 times you pressed the button. That’s sort of what using the cowboy costume is like.
I wasn’t doing a comedy bit in the first paragraph. I genuinely think Great Circus Mystery is composed entirely of concepts rejected for the original game. There is just no way that everything sucks as much as it does. The first game was too well made. Hell, even the bosses fail. They’re a total slog, all taking too many hits to kill without changing up their attack patterns. “Why be four hits to kill when it can be six? Why six when it can be eight or more?” Well, because if you’re not throwing more twists into the fight, you’re really just making the bosses an endurance test, right? And it’s really not helped by the fact that the collision detection this time around is really bad. There were multiple points in the swimming stage where I used rewind just to search for the thing that damaged me. The closest enemies were so far above my sprite that I couldn’t believe that it was the cause, but it must have been unless you just randomly take damage while swimming. Look at this. The answer seems to be “the jellyfish” but you’ll note that it’s not even a little close to me.
What the f*ck, son?
What the f*ck, son?
UPDATE: Actually, you have to breathe air underwater via bubbles. They just forgot to have an air meter, which I assume was an oversight since the sequel has such a meter. Every time I took damage, it was close to an enemy, and since the collision is bad outside the water, I just assumed the damage was caused by the enemies since there was no indication on-screen that this was one of those “need to breathe” games.
Non-swimming collision is never THAT bad, but it’s never consistent. Some enemies are 1-to-1, but others aren’t. Most of the boss attacks sure aren’t. With the SNES version of Magical Quest 2, you can’t ever really use the sprites to suss out the safe distance. By this point in the SNES’ lifecycle, anything but 1-to-1 sprite collision is lazy and unacceptable. Every single boss had at least one moment where I had to jump over something and my sprite clearly, unambiguously missed the danger sprite with a full character length between us and I still took damage. NOTHING in gaming breaks immersion quite like bad collision detection, and it was the final straw that ruined Magical Quest 2 for me. Look how much clearance I had over the thing the boss is throwing at me here:
The whole game is like that, but the bosses are where it’s the most damning. Bosses are like double-or-nothing for mediocre platformers. Really good boss fights can absolutely turn a meh game into a decent one, but bad ones can confirm it as an all-time stinker. The Great Circus Mystery’s bosses do the latter. You know, there’s a third Magical Quest game that remained a Super Famicom exclusive until the Game Boy Advance re-releases in the mid 2000s. I’m starting to figure out why that never came out in America. The Great Circus Mystery killed the franchise, dead. I have no idea what the contemporary critical reception was to this, but I genuinely feel this is one of the worst sequels I’ve ever played and I can’t imagine what a let-down this must have been for kids of that era. It’s REALLY bad. The levels are dull and lacking in memorable set-pieces. The combat is dull. That cowboy costume is genuinely embarrassing, and hell, I even think the graphics are pretty lackluster. And now I know what the great mystery REALLY is: why this wasn’t cancelled before release. Verdict: NO! No, I didn’t play this co-op. Absolutely nothing I said above would be fixed by having a second player suffer with me.
The Great Circus Mystery aka Mickey to Minnie: Magical Adventure 2 Platform: Sega Genesis Released June 2, 1994 Developed by Capcom NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
For Sega Genesis fans, the collision detection in the Genny version of Great Circus Mystery is VASTLY improved. It doesn’t make it a YES! game. The costumes, level design, and spongy bosses are all still so terribly boring. But, my final big complaint was fixed in this version. If you only play one version of Magical Quest 2, fire up the Genny version. It’s MUCH improved and rises to the level of a standard boring platformer.
I wasn’t originally going to do this review, but right before publishing, curiosity got the better of me, and then I saw that the Sega Genesis game released before the Super NES game did. Hmm, I thought. I think I figured out what happened with the SNES game. Funny enough, I think it’s the same thing that happened to another Mickey Mouse game, Mickey Mania. I think the developers built a Sega Genesis game that they then had to port to the SNES. The collision detection for Mickey Mania was historically awful on the SNES. It was almost a non-issue on the Sega CD build that I played. In the case of Mickey Mania, it led to a split-decision, with the Sega CD build coasting to a YES! and the Super NES getting the NO! hammer dropped on it. Well, Great Circus Mystery is now the second Nintendo versus Sega game starring Mickey Mouse where the Sega version is better based on collision detection. Remember this?
Here’s the same boss on the Genesis, doing the same attack. Look where I am.
I’m LITERALLY TOUCHING THE SPRITE and I’m not taking damage. While it makes a monumental difference in terms of playability, it was also never Great Circus Mystery’s biggest problem. The levels are largely the same, with the only noticeable difference being the lack of the rotating room. No Mode 7 on the Genny, so they couldn’t do it. That’s where the cowboy dash move comes in. Like with the vacuum’s ability to draw blocks closer to you, they created a couple situations where it’s necessary to use it to justify its existence.
Right here. You have to hold the fire button down, which means shooting a bullet in order to perform this
The Great Circus Mystery on the Sega Genesis at least rises to the level of competently boring. I totally stand by my theory that this game is made entirely out of ideas for the original game that were shot down. The best costume in Magical Quest 2 is worse than the worst costume in Magical Quest 1. The weakest level in that original game is also better than this one’s strongest level. There is NOTHING memorable here. It’s so paint-by-numbers basic and predictable. I assume it was done that way to accommodate co-op gameplay that nobody asked for. Technically, the level design is microscopically worse on the Genesis. At least the SNES game had a forty-five second segment that outclassed one of Super Castlevania IV’s most memorable sequences. The Genesis version doesn’t even have that going for it. Meanwhile, a couple of the bosses on the Genesis game, even with better collision detection, last longer. Like this boss fight on the back of a dinosaur:
On the SNES, I could occasionally hit it twice a pass, which is nice because the bosses are so unbearably spongy that it sucks all the excitement out of the fight. On the Genesis, you’re limited to one shot per pass, which makes the fight drag on so much longer than any sense of fun lasts, then it keeps going until you actually regret turning the game on at all. None of the bosses are memorable in the least bit. The first game had a giant Pete Spider. In the sequel, the final boss is a giant, generic looking Pete Dragon. Not Pete’s Dragon. That would be lame as f*ck too, but not as lame as it turned out. I’m just in a state of shock over here because the original game was such a quality title that absolutely did not get the most out of the costumes it had. They could have done more levels with THOSE and ended up with a better game than this. While I give the nod to the Genesis version, it still really does nothing right. Ease back on the sponginess of the bosses and the levels are still bland. Make better use of the costumes and they would still be uninspired. Magical Quest 2 feels like a sequel they didn’t want to make. Nothing more than an arbitrary +1 for the release schedule. Magical Quest deserved a better sequel. Verdict: NO!
(SNES Version) This DOES NOT pull off the “use background sprites to create the illusion of the boss being bigger than it actually is” trick. That’s actually laughably pathetic. What a farce of a game.
Super Mario RPG Platform: Nintendo Switch Released November 17, 2023 Directed by Ayako Moriwaki Developed by ArtePiazza Published by Nintendo Listing at Mario Wiki $59.99 is never going to get 100 jumps in the making of this review.
SPOILERS AHEAD for a nearly three-decade-old video game. You’ve been warned.
This is going to be a largely whinny, negative review focused on the changes (and lack of changes) from the original, so I wanted to state right here and now: this is some of the most fun I’ve had in the last couple years playing a game. I loved this remake. I recommend even non-fans of RPGs who have held out on Mario RPG check it out. But, it’s a remake and I have a lot of opinions on it, and remakes in general.
If you think this looks bad for our heroes, you should see what happens when they say “I don’t know!”
I have a bonkers conspiracy theory about Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars that is 100% for sure not what really happened (based on the concept art that you can see at Cutting Room Floor), but I’m sharing it anyway. I think the game was originally going to be Mario fighting a demented mechanical Santa Claus who, instead of making fun toys for good girls and boys, made weapons that caused kids to turn violent. The whole “machines want to take over the world” thing is a little too Power Rangers Zeo for me, but is it just me or do these weapons look a little.. toy-like? They crash into Bowser’s castle for no reason, and when you finally enter the thing that crashed into the castle, it turns out to be a factory of these toy-like weapons. A workshop, if you will. Perhaps the story was about saving Christmas and Santa Claus, or maybe even saving ALL the holidays. And what does the final boss look like? EXACTLY like an evil Santa Claus.
“MECHA-SANTA WANTS A HUG! HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUG ME!”
I’m telling you, I’m on to something. Or on something. Either/or.
Regardless, this is probably the first Mario game where the story matters. I really don’t want to play an RPG with a paper-thin story, but here we are with a story so thin it’s measured in atoms. I played Mario RPG for the first time when it debuted on Virtual Console in 2008, and writing in RPGs had come a long way from the 8-bit/16-bit era. *I* grew up on the PlayStation Final Fantasy games, which were essentially the bridge to the modern well-written/well-translated era of RPGs. Going back to play games with blunt, on-the-nose writing is something I struggle greatly with when I do these retro reviews. I’ve liked a couple old school RPGs, but that’s usually based on the gameplay merits. Like, Final Fantasy VI? AKA the one the generation before me was told was Final Fantasy III? It’s fine but it didn’t “move me” because, again, a different time and era.
“Okay, I found a scenic cliff. Now, according to Simon Belmont, if I just stare at the castle with triumphant satisfaction, it’ll crumble. Okay, HMMPH, there. Okay, crumble. Any second now..”
I won’t say the plot of Mario RPG is deep, and hell, most of the actual writing is just okay. It is somewhat cleaned up in limited areas, but most of the script carried over from the original game. When I first played it in 2008, even though the dialog often had me cringing, I thought it was one of the funniest games I’d ever played. They would NEVER call it a “comedy RPG” but it clearly is. Playing this now, in 2025, most of the jokes still hold-up. That’s why I’m kind of puzzled as to why they ruined the best gag in the game: the introduction of Geno. In the SNES game, when Mario is shot by the child with the Geno doll, it’s a really violent impact with a rocket. In the remake, Mario is shot with what looks like a few Nerf balls. It completely ruins the entire bit. Why’d they do that? Ugh, you just know someone said “we can’t have a child violently shoot Mario! Someone will say we’re being insensitive towards people who are shot by children who fish their daddy’s pistol out of his sock drawer.” YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE! That’s probably why they changed it and it’s stupid. On the other hand, there’s this:
Jesus mother of God. Okay, maybe I’m wrong.
Otherwise, most of the humor still lands. It is somewhat lacking the charm, because it no longer feels like it’s squeezing the most out of the limited technology. Like how the heroes change into other characters to act out the story for new characters? That was done that way because it was a novel and entertaining way to do expository dialog using the limited space of the SNES. They did add a few brief and context-limited cutscenes that are mostly used for major character introductions (and boss introductions). They look great! I mean, like this:
Christ, can you imagine the fan fiction this led to?
Actually, bad example because that was a cutscene in the original game. Okay, the part where Peach joins the team by jumping out the window. That’s a pre-rendered cutscene now.
That looks like it’s straight out of a modern Mario game! Fine with me, but there’s just not nearly enough of it, and the timing of when to use them isn’t exactly perfect. The above whining about ruining the Geno gun gag? Wouldn’t that have been an awesome time to cut to a pre-rendered cutscene? If my hunch is right they were really worried about the visual of a child accidentally no-scoping Mario, change the gag! Have the rocket knock a statue over that falls on Mario. I also found it annoying that they have to spell out that you’re not really joining Bowser’s minions. In fact, they continue to spell out that you’re only pretending to believe Bowser’s bravado basically every time the character is given dialog. It’s kind of condescending, but I assume that’s because the script was written in 1996. I’m surprised Square didn’t have the characters look into the camera and say “DO YOU GET IT?” So, while the humor still works, the writing typically doesn’t. Too on-the-nose, too clunky, and it really doesn’t have a lot of faith in people to get what the intent is.
“Sir, I keep trying to tell you that you can’t always get what you want.”
Okay, so the plot and writing wasn’t fated to age perfectly, but do you know what did? The combat. I re-played the SNES game back in 2021 and by that point, you’d think Mario RPG’s peppy timing-based combat system would have started to show its age. Well, it didn’t at all. Twenty-five years after the game’s original release and I found myself grinding XP just for fun because menu-based combat had never felt so impactful. If there was one aspect of the game that nobody could possibly complain about being copied and pasted as it was to the remake, it’s that battle system. Well, besides the graphics themselves, ArtePiazza barely changed any aspect of the main game. The dialog, script, mini-games, enemies, bosses, etc. are mostly unchanged, with the small exception of the names of a few basic enemies and items. If they’re leaving that much alone, why rock the boat by changing the most famous, celebrated, and evergreen aspect of the game?
Hell, for the Beetlemania game, they didn’t even change the graphics.
But they did change the combat system. The balls on them for doing that, too. The riskiest change to make, easily, and if it sucked, you could insert the Stan Lee “broke, or made better?” meme from the Simpsons and call it a day. Thankfully, that’s not the case at all. The combat is even faster paced and more rewarding, with attention to the little details. I really don’t think there’s any aspect of it that isn’t better in this version. Like, it didn’t bother me but the SNES game paused a little bit when enemies cast spells. In the remake, the pause is briefer and feels like it flows directly into the attack. A small change, but one with profound gameplay results. Most of the special effects for unblockable enemy spells are faster. They turned one of the speediest combat systems in RPG history into an even peppier one. It’s a pretty remarkable achievement.
In the remake, it’s a LOT easier to time the “LUCKY” shell game and double your earnings. Once I figured out the timing and how the game occasionally does a little sleight of hand at the climax of the shuffle, I never lost once. Combined with the Exp. Booster you can buy with frog coins in the back half of the game, I was basically maxed-out going into the final two game worlds.
By far the biggest change is the addition of splash damage. If you hit the timing perfectly on basic attacks, it creates a shock wave that has a high chance of damaging all other enemies. Not as much as if they were attacked directly, but it still made the basic battles and even a few boss fights fly by. This also made backtracking a lot less annoying. If you’re searching for stuff you missed in previous stages and have leveled-up enough, instead of having to fight every enemy, a single basic attack might wipe out the entire battlefield. If the splash damage isn’t the biggest change, it’s the combo system. There’s now a meter for stringing together both offensive and defensive timing. This not only buffs your characters but builds up a new triple-team special meter. The triple teams can be devastating attacks, create unbreakable shields, etc., and each three-character combination has their own unique move. Assuming one of the three characters is KOed, the special is replaced with Toad providing a roulette wheel to buff you in the battle. That roulette single-handedly saved me from defeat in the final-final battle of the game against the 3D Culex.
This is the “!” warning that helps players get the timing down. If you want, you can opt to play “breezy” mode, which gives you a much bigger grace period on the timing-based stuff. This can be toggled on and off any time.
There’s even more changes to the battle system. KOed/transformed characters are allowed to be swapped out mid-battle for a reserve character. And yes, if the situation provides, you can swap one KOed character for another KOed one. The game also now tells you what magic attacks from enemies can’t be blocked, something the original game never stated. There’s also a visual cue of when to hit the action button for both attacks and defense. BUT, here’s the thing about that cue: once the game is satisfied you have the timing down for the thing triggering the action, the game stops doing it, like training wheels. Later on, if your timing gets out of whack, the prompt returns. It’s SO SMART. The whole combat system is!
The improved battle system is also the reason why I can’t overlook all the changes they didn’t make. Jeez, and I thought the Link’s Awakening remake was stubborn about fixing stuff. Like, the lame puzzles in the sunken ship or in Bowser’s Keep are copy and pasted wholesale from the original 1996 game, including the solutions to those puzzles. In the sunken ship, you’re trying to ascertain a six-letter secret word. The answer is the same in the 2023 version as it was in the 1996 version. Would it have really killed them to change it to something else? Some of the puzzles in the first version were just plain not very fun. Like this one:
This is a blind jumping maze. Behind those boxes, you have to randomly jump around until you find your way through it. No visual clues to help once you’re behind the stack. No real way to logic through it besides the abstract shape of the maze. It’s so inelegant, especially for such a rich and layered game. This is scraping the bottom of the barrel. So, like.. replace it! How the hell do you justify so many additions and enhancements to the BEST part of the game while leaving the gameplay elements that were kind of the f*cking pits the same? And I’m only bitching about it because they proved their bonafides with the battle system. The remake designers clearly could recognize areas where quality of life could be seamlessly applied. They’re just too talented to leave the bad parts bad. And by the way, there’s also parts that are significantly worse. Remember this mini-game:
I found it to be a lot more sensitive when turns are made. I never cared for this part to begin with, but I didn’t *hate* it. But in the remake, I really didn’t care for it at all. Or how about the Goomba Whack-a-Mole game with the pipes? I found it to be a lot less precise and I’d never want to play it again. That was actually true of most of the mini-games this time around. I remember grinding-up frog coins by doing the waterfall/river mini-game over and over. Something about it in the remake just didn’t “do it” for me. Very few areas where an improvement NEEDED to happen were actually improved, while the thing nobody would have expected to be overhauled was overhauled dramatically. It’s F*CKING WEIRD! It’d be like bringing your car into the shop because it has faulty brakes, and when you pick it up, the mechanic says “we decided not to fix your brakes, but hey, we installed heated seats and a sat-nav for you!”
They didn’t fix the Yoshi race, either. It’s still one of the most unnecessary and ultimately boring parts of the game.
Speaking of the frog coins, that’s another change to the battle system and overall game that wasn’t capitalized on. In the remake, 20% of enemies will now be “special enemies” that hit harder and have more HP, but when you defeat them, you get double the coins, double the experience points, AND a frog coin. Awesome, except one little problem: they didn’t really create more situations that require frog coins. They’re basically only good now for finishing your journal 100%. There’s a detailed list of monsters in the game that, when you use Mallow to read their mind, get a check mark on the list. Some of these are one-off beasts, and if you aren’t using Mallow, you have to pay a guy hidden in Booster’s Pass three frog coins, and you don’t even get to choose which one he checks off. I’m pretty sure it’s done randomly.
It IS a cool feature. You can watch every attack animation, spell animation, etc.
And, that’s basically it for the frog coins, other than the stuff that was already in the game. I never liked the items sold in the tadpole pond, so the frog that sells accessories like the Exp. Booster in Seaside Town is really the only legit use of frog coins, and in the new system, you’ll be able to buy out his full inventory pretty fast. That’s the extent of ways to spend this massive windfall of what had been a rare and desirable currency in the previous version. Sorry, but you just can’t do that! If you add more of a LOT more of a currency, logically you have to add a LOT more ways to spend it, and they didn’t. So, while I enjoyed the special enemy encounters quite a lot, all they ultimately do is take all the risk/reward out of how you spend frog coins.
If you’re into soundtracks, that also gets unlocked post-game. Not only that, but it comes with a fully decked-out player that also lets you listen to the original versions and even do random play.
I swear I’m done bitching. Well, mostly done, but now, here’s the good stuff. Super Mario RPG Remake is, no doubt about it, an easier game than the SNES one, so, I didn’t know what to expect from the post-game content. The framing device is that, once you restore the Star Road and wishes can be granted again, seven previous bosses had THEIR wishes granted. Now, getting this unlocked is busy work on top of busy work. Toad gives you a voucher for the honeymoon suite in Marrymore. When you use that, Geno looks longingly out the window. You have to go a couple screens into Star Road, and there you’ll discover the boss wishes. Unfortunately, instead of just clicking them and going to the new boss fights, you actually have to make your way to the original chambers where you fought them. Sigh. Okay, so that’s the bad news. Here’s the good news: most of these fights are legitimate RPG challenges, and lengthy battles to boot. The first one, a rematch with Belome, took me over twenty minutes to finish. In the second one against “Leveled-Up Punchinello”, the first thing that happened was he one-shotted Mario to death.
I guess he played Mike Tyson in Punch-Out!! before making his wish.
Actually, the Punch-Out!! comparison is pretty accurate, because the best way to describe these bonus fights is to think of the rematches from the Wii Punch-Out!! Only the final fight against 3D Culex is a normal punch-for-punch RPG battle. The other six all have some kind of twist to them, and for five of them, it’s a twist that makes them almost puzzle-like. Belome clones one of your party members, like in his previous fight. Only, this time you HAVE to fight the clone, because the clone’s first act is to cast a shield that deflects everything. Do you know how I won this fight? HE RAN OUT OF FIRE POINTS! I didn’t even realize enemies had FP, but the fight dragged out so long that he ran out of them.
You even fight Booster in the post-game quest, which never happens in the main game. He’s seen here, about to one-shot my entire party for the second and final time in this fight. Yep, I game overed against Booster, who is, for lack of a better term, a “special” individual. This is one of those “sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done” moments of my gaming life.
Now, these seven extra fights don’t scale correctly at all, at least in the order the page on the Wiki said to tackle them. The rematch against Johnny Jones, the 5th fight, is a one on one, no items allowed Mario v Johnny fight, and I won it on my first attempt when Johnny offered to let me swap my party members (who give you buffs even if they’re not part of this fight) and equipment. I put the best armor on Mario and just whittled him down. So that one kind of sucked. On the other hand, the final battle with Culex 3D took me a whopping 40+ minutes to finish. It has 9,999 health, and the crystals are beefer too AND killing them causes the crystal to buff whatever is still alive as it dies. And IT WAS AWESOME! Besides the Johnny Jones fight, all the bonus bosses were! The best part of the game for me, easily.
There’s still a hard cap on leveling-up. 30 is the max.
Two things annoy me about the bonus bosses. First is that there’s only seven of them. Seriously, they’re SO fun that I wish they had done one for EVERY boss. All-in, I spent about two hours locating them and fighting them. Two hours of additional content sounds like a lot, but this is a nearly three decade old game. Come on! The second annoyance is that this type of post-game beef is entirely limited to those seven boss fights. They didn’t enhance the overworld basic enemies post-game at all. Why not? Now granted, they added fast travel via the map, so it doesn’t take THAT long to reach them, but there’s also the emphasis on finding all the enemies you didn’t use Mallow to read the mind of. Post-game, those fights are spent having everyone else do nothing but defend while you wait for Mallow’s turn to read another mind. Had the developers added some muscle to the post-game overworld enemies, I honestly ain’t sure I’d be writing this review right now. I think I probably would have felt compelled to go out and fill out the whole monster checklist. So, I’m pretty frustrated with Mario RPG Remake. In fact, I don’t remember a game I liked that disappointed me off more. That KEPT disappointing me consistently.
Spent a solid 20 minutes trying to jump from the yellow vine to the green one, kept grazing it, but I couldn’t hold my grip on it. I was getting angrier and angrier, until my father asked “are you sure there’s not a platform there?” I said “I checked” and I truly believe I did, but yea, there was a platform there. So embarrassing.
But, even through all the disappointment, I never had to remind myself “this is one of the best video games ever made.” It never lets you forget that. It absolutely holds up to the test of time, changes or not. I guess that’s a big part of why I’m so frustrated by leaving so much of the game unchanged. Because there aren’t a lot of games out there that are honest-to-God contenders for the title of greatest of all-time. Mario RPG surely isn’t in that discussion. There’s just too many head-scratching decisions that were no doubt compromises based entirely around what could and couldn’t be done with the limitations of the Super NES. But, it feels like what’s already in the game could be tweaked slightly and transform Mario RPG into that legit GOAT contender. There’s a big difference between “one of the all-time greats” and “THE all-time greatest.” As much as I loved playing this remake, there’s something heartbreaking about a culture of development where “the greatest of all-time” is on the table and they don’t go for it, Verdict: YES!
“You’re sure he said ‘triumphant satisfaction?’ Sounds like baloney to me! If this worked, why would he go through all the trouble of fighting Dracula? Logically, wouldn’t he just need to stare at the castle whenever Dracula resurrects? Okay, I’ll go back to staring. Just had a thought is all.”
This the first Definitive Review I’ve done since Able To Play started presenting my Retro Review Index. This is an amazing idea and a great cause. They’re creating a game accessibility database, so that people like me can look up what games have epilepsy risks, or so colorblind gamers can know what games might be more difficult or impossible for them to play, and every other game accessibility necessity you can imagine. Make sure to sign up for their list and start to contribute! I’m proud to use my platform to promote them, and I wanted to start that with a game I’ve wanted to review for a long time.
Not every in-depth look at a game has to be complicated. Kung-Fu Master is a very uncomplicated game. Six total basic enemies and five unique bosses. As far as action games go, it really doesn’t get less complex. Yet, few games are as famous as it. It’s based on the Jackie Chan movie that’s only called Spartan X in Japan but Wheels on Meals everywhere else, but it’s so disconnected from the movie that it’s not even worth mentioning. Especially since it’s really based on Enter the Dragon, a totally different movie. Then, in 1988, it had a completely different movie based on it that was made in France! Bet you didn’t know that! The French Kung-Fu Master movie, based on the game where you punch and kick people to rescue your girlfriend, is the story of a middle-aged housewife and mother who falls head over heels for a 14 year old boy and, um.. wait, WHAT?! Am I reading the right synopsis? Wait, the kid plays the arcade Kung-Fu Master in the movie, so they named a movie about a woman heartsick over a child Kung-Fu Master? You’re kidding me, right? Where’d they even get the idea for that?
Oh. Yea, probably that. Sh*t, based on that description, Kung-Fu Master might be closer to the source material than the 1993 Mario movie.
Well, anyway I’ve wanted to do Kung-Fu Master for a while. I decided, while I’m at it, why not give it the Definitive Review treatment and check out ports of it? And hell, while I’m at that, wouldn’t it be neat to look at the games that rode its coattails? So, here are the 28 games included in this feature! I hope everyone enjoys!
My Hero (Sega Master System, 1986) aka Seishun Scandal
FlashGal (Arcade, 1985)
Kung-Fu Master (Commodore 64, 1985)
Lady Master of Kung Fu (Arcade, 1985) aka Nunchackun
Kung-Fu Master (ZX Spectrum, 1986)
Mr. Goemon (Arcade, 1986)
Black Belt (Sega Master System, 1986) aka Hokuto no Ken/Fist of the North Star
Kung-Fu Master (Amstrad CPC, 1987)
Kung-Fu Master (Atari 2600, 1987)
Kung Fu Kid (Sega Master System, 1987) aka Sapo Xulé O Mestre do Kung Fu
China Warrior (TurboGrafx-16, 1987) aka The Kung Fu
Kuri Kinton (Arcade, 1988)
Vigilante (Arcade, 1988)
Splatterhouse (Arcade, 1988)
Kung-Fu Master (Atari 7800, 1989)
Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu (NES, 1990)
Kung Fu Master (Game Boy, 1990) aka Spartan X
Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu (TurboGrafx-16, 1991)
Spartan X 2 (Famicom, 1991) aka Kung Fu 2
Splatterhouse 2 (Sega Genesis, 1992)
GAME REVIEWS
For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account, at least for the games themselves. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!
YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.
NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.
IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
Kung-Fu Master aka Spartan X Platform: Arcade Released November 24, 1984 Designed by Takashi Nishiyama Distributed by Irem (Japan) Data East (US) No Modern Release except Antstream
Am I the only one who thinks the less detailed NES one looks better? Oh this animates better, but in screenshots, I kind of like the simpler NES game.
It’s really easy to understand why Kung-Fu Master ended up one of the most famous and legendary games ever made. It’s one of the more simple and straightforward games of its era, but with such a nice, snappy attack that it’s impossible to not get some satisfaction out of the combat. Most of the combat is based around two types of enemies who walk onto the screen and then fall off the screen with a single attack. It’s staged in a way where it really does feel kind of like a cheap, cheesy, but ultimately entertaining martial arts movie. It barely beat Karateka to the market, but despite having somewhat similar gameplay, this is a much more energetic, arcade-like experience that is a little more nuanced than it appears at first glance.
OOMPH is the term I use to describe video game violence having the look, sound, and feel of real weight, velocity, impact, and gravity. With that said, Kung-Fu Master’s OOMPH is unlike any other game’s OOMPH. It’s very subtle, but it works so well because of the pitch-perfect death sprites of the enemies, which fall off the screen in a swooping, “out cold” type of way. Spot on, and one of the best death animations of the 80s.
Like, for example, the difference between punches and kicks. I don’t know if this is simply the placebo effect, but I find the slightly faster punches to be more effective at handling timing issues that happen when enemies come at you from both sides. I figured that’s why they were added to the game, since the kicks are more viscerally satisfying and punches have a LOT less range. BUT, there’s more to it, because punches are worth more points than kicks. That means that arcade goers with dreams of high scores in the 1980s had actual risk/reward factors to consider. That doesn’t matter so much for people with nobody to challenge today, and I never used to consider scoring at all. These days, hey, I like to see what scores I get. It matters a little.
It’s also a shockingly hard game. Not so hard that you can base an entire movie around a teenager struggling to beat the game, but to that film’s credit, he was boinking a married woman. He probably had a lot on his mind.
Kung-Fu Master is a very short game. The full five level cycle can be beaten in under ten minutes by even an average player. But the pacing of those five levels is nearly perfect. When fighting endless waves of “Grippers” and “Tom Toms” with the occasional knife thrower starts to get repetitive, BAM, jars falling from the ceiling with various contents in them. When that gets old, back to the guys in level one. When that starts to get old again, how about moths? Okay, so it’s weird most of the baddies that act as the cannon fodder opt to hug the life out of you. Maybe they smell bad. Like, really bad. I’m talking “old man wearing aftershave” bad. I don’t know why they opted not to have strikes be the primary enemy attack. Maybe it didn’t cause enough damage and made the game too easy. Maybe it caused collision issues. Who knows?
Knife guys who back away from you combined with the Grippers make for a quick loss of life.
But the hugging-to-death stuff is pretty frustrating. First off, being forced into wiggling the controller in a strike-based game makes the offense and defense feel disconnected. This isn’t helped by the fact that you can’t do things like, say, punch the knives out of the air. It’s also surprisingly hard to do a jump kick in a way where you move forward. I was mostly familiar with the NES game, where it’s significantly easier to pull off. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if that, by itself, is why many consider the NES game superior. Your health drains relatively fast, too, and sometimes there’s so many enemies it’s hard to shake them off, and like in the picture above, later stages have an uncanny knack for unleashing the knife guys at the worst times. This is why games of Kung-Fu Master can turn on a dime. I think I got pretty good at it, but in over a dozen play sessions, I never came close to finishing the second cycle, which spawns basic enemies during boss fights. Speaking of which, the bosses are easily the highlight of Kung-Fu Master.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
If I had to guess why Kung-Fu Master was uniquely memorable, I think the bosses are probably the biggest part of it. Hell, I dare say that Spartan X cemented what a boss fight should be. It’s not the first game with boss fights, but it is among the first that had unique bosses for each stage. I have this theory that boss fights are like a game’s metronome. They don’t exactly set the tempo, but they do maintain it. This might actually be the first release that my theory applies to. It’s not just in appearance, but in personality and strategy. They nailed the scaling too, and the five boss fights all feel both unique and climatic. Besides final boss Mr. X being a little too block heavy (hell, I once timed-out against him on the first cycle), they’re genuinely fun to do battle with. Kung Fu Master certainly isn’t a perfect game. The grabbing aspect is just not exciting, you know? But, the offensive game is so very, very strong. Irem and their business partners need to figure the rights issues. Maybe try to get them in perpetuity, because this should be celebrated in the 2020s. Verdict: YES!
Kung Fu Master Platform: MSX Released in 1984 Developed by Mass Tael Published by ASCII Entertainment NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Um, wait a second..
Um, wait a second..
Yea, this isn’t Spartan X. As it turns out, an entirely different game called Kung Fu Master (no hyphen) was already out on MSX. Hell, my emulator said this came out in 1983, but all other sources say this came out in 1984. Either way, it almost certainly beat Spartan X to the market. Oh, the real Spartan X is coming, but with a different name. And then there’s this piece of crap. Holy cow, this is awful. It does have a similar punch/kick mechanic to the more famous Spartan X, only you have to fight robots. Blue ones can only be punched. Red ones can only be kicked. There’s an actual goal for each of the two levels. In the first, you have to walk into the background until you reach the end point, and to assure you don’t avoid combat, you must also kill X amount of baddies. That rule applies to the second level as well. How do you finish that level? I honestly don’t know. I never got past it. The combat is simply terrible. It’s one of those games where the challenge comes from getting on the correct plane to line-up with the enemies. I never got a feel for it. It never felt consistent, frankly. Neither did the collision for when the baddies got me, and I just gave up. This doesn’t really belong in this feature, anyway. It’s hard to imagine I can possibly find a worse game in 2025. (Cathy from the future here, and I really have to learn to stop saying that, because boy, was I wrong). Verdict: NO!
Seiken Achoo aka Kung-Fu Master aka Spartan X Platform: MSX Released in 1985 Developed by ASCII Entertainment NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Here’s the real Spartan X for MSX. Real in the sense that it resembles the game you’re hoping for. Not so real in the sense that it’s a good port. Maybe it’s not their fault. They seem to have sneezed while typing in the title, so maybe they were sick at the time. The combat’s satisfaction is dramatically scaled-down. Your health drains so much faster than in the arcade, which gives you very little wiggle room to make mistakes. I went from full health and next to a boss to “dead” in the blink of an eye because enemies spawned on both sides at the same time. On the plus side, the bosses are nearly as fun to fight in the MSX version. Of course they don’t quite feel the same as the coin-op, but given how poorly done the feel of the normal baddies are (especially the jars), I was stunned that all five bosses were such close approximations. Mr. X especially, the final boss, is really close. Well done, whoever did this.
Grrrrr.
Grrrr.
Easily the hardest level is the second. It’s because the jars take half your life. So do the snakes, which somehow do as much or more damage than fire breathing dragons. The moths in level four also take half your life bar, but you see them coming, and they have very predictable patterns. I legitimately beat that part on my first try (oddly enough, I also beat the 4th and 5th bosses on my first attempt as well). The second level’s jars can drop on you in the same spot back-to-back, with not enough warning to avoid them. Since they take half a life bar, two jars, or a snake then a jar, if my math checks out is, you know, death! So the pitch-perfect scaling of the coin-op is lost in translation, and that badly hurts Kung Fu Master. A ROM hack that balances the damage would probably tilt this into the YES! column. Maybe. Hell, it took me a dozen or so non-cheating games just to reach the first boss thanks to the timing issues. I discovered a nifty trick that helped me out. I found making progress impossible until I started ignoring the knife throwers who were behind me. That ended any timing issues of being attacked by grippers from both sides and, all by itself, cut the difficulty in half. When they do attack from both sides, there’s often so many enemies that even making the screen scroll a step forward is a chore.
The moths are heavily changed from the coin-op. They don’t spawn out of chutes and are already on the screen. The ones above your head almost never do u-turns directly into you, and instead won’t change directions (and lower themselves) until you’ve passed them. That made level 4 the easiest level in the game. It wasn’t even close, actually. Again, they completely screwed up the scaling. Normally I wouldn’t hit a game as hard for that, but given the perfection of Spartan X’s scaling, it actually is kind of a big deal.
Unlike some MSX ports, Kung-Fu Master wasn’t a disaster by any stretch. In fact, it’s probably the best version of the game that I’m giving a NO! to. I put a LOT of stock in how well the bosses were made. Seriously impressive effort, given the limitations. Sigh. I really hate doing this because MSX fans are just first-rate fans who did a lot for this blog in 2024, but the lack of difficulty balance and the muffled satisfaction of the attacks really brings down this version of Kung-Fu Master. Reworking the damage would probably push this into the YES!, but I can only play the game I was given. This scales as badly as any action game I’ve ever played. It’s not an impossible game and, with practice, I could make it to the end without cheating. Fans of the coin-op in 1985 who were lucky enough to have an MSX weren’t entirely hosed, but this is a mere shadow of the coin-op. Kung-Fu Master as a coin-op holds up to the test of time, but this port doesn’t. Verdict: NO!
Knuckle Joe Platform: Arcade Released in 1985 Developed by Seibu Kaihatsu Distributed by Taito NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED (?)
It looks fun. I mean, it looks like a complete and total rip-off of Fist of the North Star, but still, it looks like it’s going to be a good time. But there’s a reason Knuckle Joe faded into obscurity, unlike his brothers G.I. and Cotton Eye.
From the studio that eventually birthed the Raiden shmup franchise comes this horrible wannabe. Instead of scrolling towards a goal, you’re placed into an arena where the object is to defeat X amount of enemies. It uses the same basic concept as Spartan X: a punch and a kick, both of which can be done while jumping or kneeling. Interestingly, holding the attack buttons causes you to hold the attack outward. Interesting in the sense that it’s different. There’s no point to it. I mean, it doesn’t really do damage and leaves you open to attack, plus you look silly doing it. Like you’ve just sh*t yourself and decided in the moment if don’t move, nobody will notice. On the other hand, Knuckle Joe (no relation to the Kirby character) could do a slam dunk from the NBA three point line from how far he can jump. And hey, this is the first game in this feature where you can block, which is done by holding both jump and kick at the same time. So, it seems like everything is here for a decent game. Well, except the combat is a wet fart. Oh, maybe I was onto something with the holding attack.
See how far the hero is (on the left in the blue pants) from the baddie on the right? That’s roughly the distance of a knock-back from being hit. Yes, some attacks knock you back that far.
Knuckle Joe is one of the worst games in this genre, ever. Enemies block and/or counter attack nearly every attack, so even basic enemies are spongy and sloggy to fight. There is absolutely zero OOMPH to the attacks, so the only way to know that something is actually making contact (as opposed to being blocked, the sprites of which look too similar) is a barely visible point marker appearing when a strike lands. Non-basic enemies take even more hits and counter-punch right to the frame. This has HORRIBLE programming, because it’s literally trading punches with frame-perfect baddies. Go ahead and block enemy attacks. Most of the time, as soon as you release the block, they’re going to hit you anyway. There is no gameplay elegance to the attack. The CPU is just too damn perfect. Consequently the gameplay isn’t exciting. It’s just demoralizing with no upside. And I haven’t even gotten to the worst part yet.
Again, look at the knock-back length. I was right next to him, close enough to attack, just a split second earlier.
I couldn’t make any progress at all. I watched Let’s Plays trying to figure out how to not go punch-for-punch with enemies and really tried, for hours, to finesse my way through this with all the settings on the easiest. Couldn’t do it. It’s just a terribly programmed game that gives too much advantage to the frame-perfect enemies. Thankfully, this is one of those games where one of the dip switch toggles is a cheat that gives you infinite health. Okay, so at least I can get media for the late game. Well, even when I can stand and throw hands with the enemies without risk of losing my health, I still suffered GAME OVERs, because I timed-out several levels in a row. Had the progress on reducing the enemy count not carried over between lives, I wouldn’t have beat the game even with cheating. In addition to perfectly counter-punching/blocking, enemies use the timer and avoid contact with you. I seriously want to ask the people who made this “did you really have fun play testing this?” I don’t think they did. Knuckle Joe is as bad as any coin-op gets. One of the worst I’ve ever played in my life. It’s one of those games that I would say is so bad that it’s practically a scam, except for the “unfair arcade game” scam to work, the game has to be fun enough for a player to reload quarters. The core gameplay is a total bore with some of the most weak violence in any punch ’em up I’ve played. Knuckle Joe deserves its place in gaming oblivion. Verdict: NO!
Shao-Lin’s Road aka Kicker Platform: Arcade Released March 23, 1985 Developed by Konami Sold Separately on Arcade Archives ($7.99)
Okay, so, this recommendation from my unofficial-official curator Dave Sanders really doesn’t belong in a Kung-Fu Master feature in terms of gameplay. I’ll buy that the theme was inspired by the success of Kung-Fu Master and the ultra-satisfying kicks from that game. BUT, Shao-Lin’s Road’s connection to Spartan X stops at the theme and attack. It actually shares much more DNA with something like the original arcade Mario Bros. It’s a wave-based platform game where the object is to eliminate all the enemies with well-timed kicks. The basic enemies take a single kick to knock out. “Bosses” for lack of a better term (the stage doesn’t end when you beat them) take four kicks. When you defeat a green enemy, it throws out limited-use items like fireballs, deadly shields, and spiked balls. Besides the items, it’s all kicks, all the time. You have to press UP to jump high enough to reach the next platform while the jump button is really only effective for jump kicks or to jump across gaps. If you walk off the ledge of a platform instead of jumping, fall onto your head, and lose one of three hits that reset every stage. And, that’s pretty much the whole game.
Happy I didn’t have to bet my life on who made this without knowing, because I would have guessed this was a Sega game. AM I WRONG? Doesn’t it look like it?
Whether it’s called Shao-Lin’s Road or Kicker, the game is as shallow as a puddle of spit. And yet, I’ll be damned if it isn’t a lot of fun. The kicking action is solid, and it really helps that the pace is quick. Well, at least when you’re not down to the final enemy. Sometimes the last baddie seems more concerned with switching which platform they’re on than trying to kill you. This continues even after you’ve completed a cycle of levels. Hell, if anything, it feels like it increases as the game goes deeper. Kicker is also probably one of the easier coin-ops I’ve reviewed in recent years. I made it through the full cycle of levels on only my second game. This is the rare arcader where I felt compelled to beef-up the difficulty in the dip switches, as the default medium was a little too easy and low-stakes. I’m also hugely bummed-out that there’s no co-op. You would think this would be perfect for that, and maybe even with a Joust-like “kill the second player” twist to it. Alas, it’s alternating players only. Shao Lin’s Road is one of those ultra-simple titles that just plain works because sometimes a core gameplay concept is so foolproof it can’t go wrong unless you’re REALLY bad at making games. Will it be a game you go back to? Nah. It’s good for an hour at most, but it’s a pretty dang solid hour. Verdict: YES!
Kung Fu aka Spartan X Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released June 21, 1985 Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto Developed by Nintendo NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Only two of the global top twenty-five selling NES/Famciom games have never been re-released since the retirement of the console. #16, World Class Track Meet (originally released as Stadium Events, which is THE holy grail of officially released NES games), has a perfectly good excuse: it requires the Power Pad, a precursor to dance pads. That makes Kung Fu, #13, the only one that requires no accessory that has never been celebrated with a re-release. 2025 marks the 40th Anniversary of it. Let’s do the right thing here.
Like I said above, Kung Fu is the thirteenth best-selling game on the NES, and the best seller most lost to history. This is largely based around being a Nintendo-developed title of another company’s game. A company that, until recently, really had mentally checked-out of the video game business. Now that Irem and ININ’s partnership is seeing the re-release of multiple games, they need to figure out something with Nintendo. I’m not sure if I would call this “superior” to the coin-op, but at the time it came out? Probably one of the ten best arcade ports ever made. I found the kicks a little more effective on the NES despite them allegedly having a smaller collision box. The most obvious change is to the 4th boss, the Black Magician, who is missing his spell that creates a clone of himself. On the second cycle (or B-Game), I found him to be the hardest boss because, when he teleports, you’re left frozen while the basic enemies are still free to move. There’s a BIG window before you get the controls back, and it doesn’t take long for a Gripper to kill you, especially if you’re already damaged going into the fight. You need luck against him.
Well, look at that.
UPDATE: The Magician DOES clone himself on the NES, but the circumstances that seem to generate this are ones I can’t imagine any player would do unless you’re deliberately chasing a high score. You basically have to not try to win the fight and just kick his fireballs and stall until the timer reaches a certain point. I was certain that I had timed out against him, but there’s no way I did because the clone always shows up at around 880 seconds. So, my new operating theory is that I just won every fight against him too fast. I maintain he’s the most dangerous boss in the game because of the fact that he can prevent your movement while the rest of the game, including any normal enemies, don’t pause around him. You wouldn’t want to stall for time with him. Thank you btribble3000 for sending that in! But then, after I wrote this update, I tried it again to show off to my family and..
HE NEVER F’N CLONED HIMSELF! Now my family thinks I’m cray-cray. Why does it have to be so weird? Why can’t it just be a move he does regularly like in the coin-op? ARRRRRRGH!
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Otherwise, the NES game is pretty spot on. It’s such a simple game, but Kung Fu, be it arcade or the NES, is one of the most cathartic games of its era. The bosses are still every bit as satisfying as before, even if the Magician’s attack pattern doesn’t quite match the coin-op. It never gets dull knocking the basic enemies off the stage no matter how many times you do it. The sound design plays a lot into that, not to mention the genuinely hilarious death sprites. There’s plenty of little details that help a lot, like when the little Tom Toms jump at you, you just have to stand up to kill them. Hell, why stand up when you can jump and score double the points? And, you can also set your own difficulty. The B-Game is no slouch, but don’t discount the A-Game. I never got past Mr. X on the 3rd cycle, which takes less time to reach than the length of a typical sitcom.
You know what would be really funny? If Thomas died right here. I mean, hugging is one of his weaknesses!
Now of course, what makes this version of Kung Fu a genuine historic curiosity is that it was designed and developed by the legendary creator of Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto. The volumes it speaks to how amazing the foundation of Kung-Fu Master is: a guy widely considered game development’s G.O.A.T. took such a shine to it that he wanted to personally oversee its transition to the NES. Even more profound? He did it to educate himself on how to make an amazing side scroller. This was the game that taught Big Shiggy Style how to make Super Mario Bros., and that means we owe everything that followed in its wake to Kung Fu. Wow. So, while I might give a slight, teeny tiny gameplay edge to the coin-op, there’s no doubt about it: the legend of NES Kung Fu will continue long after we’re all dust. Figure out the rights on this thing, Nintendo, and start celebrating it. Hell, carve a spot for it in Nintendo World Championships. It would be PERFECT for that, especially with the bosses! Some form of celebration is long overdue, because Kung Fu absolutely holds up to the test of time. Verdict: YES!
Dragon Wang I’m not giggling. You’re giggling. Seriously, stop giggling. Platform: Sega SG-1000 Released July, 1985 Developed by Sega NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This is the first Sega SG-1000 game to get the full IGC review treatment. Fascinating platform. Basically the closest Japan got to the Colecovision, sharing similar stats and thus having games that look similar. There’s not a lot of SG-1000 games. Seventy-five, in fact, and while this is the first I’ll review, it’s not the last.
At first glance, Dragon Wang looks like a stripped down but otherwise shameless Kung-Fu Master ripoff. The first thing you’ll encounter is identical basic enemies that take one shot to kill, knife throwers that take a couple shots, and a boss that uses a stick to attack you. But, cancel the cease and desist letter, because there’s a little more to Dragon Wang than just copying Spartan X. See, when you beat the stick guy, instead of going to the next level, it drops a key, and then you have to turn around and go searching for the next boss. There’s gaps in the ceiling and floor that you have to jump up and down. Yep, this is an exploration game with maze-like levels. The object is to find the bosses, slay them, and gather all the keys. Also, only the two basic enemies and the first boss copies Kung-Fu Master directly, so while this shares a TON of DNA, it’s also a new experience. One ruined by a single gameplay mechanic: false floors.
Dragon Wang has a strict timer of 8 minutes to finish every stage (says this FAQ), but movement is slow and exploration takes a while, so having these booby traps that can reset your progress quite a bit, with no warning and no means of evading them once activated, is just stupid. I’ve never liked the idea of no-clue/no warning false floors anyway. It’s one of those underrated gaming pet peeves that nobody would say is the absolute worst, until they happen. They always cause the same problems too, no matter the game. They add too much downtime, backtracking, and tedium. In the case of Dragon Wang, all of those issues apply to what is an otherwise genuinely decent combative game. One that, unlike Kung-Fu Master, had a tougher challenge when facing the test of time. The only attack is kicking, but it’s nowhere near as satisfying as the kicks in the game that inspired it. Not only is the collision detection fickle, but enemies poof out of existence instead of having a visually-pleasing death.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Sega seems to have grasped that Kung-Fu Master’s memorable bosses were largely responsible for that game’s success, so Dragon Wang leans very heavily into them. In the first level, you have to find and slay three bosses. Each of the next three waves has you repeat each of those fights, plus adds one additional boss. The combat against the bosses is clearly the highlight of Dragon Wang. Even though one of them is just a basic enemy’s sprite that teleports around, the fights feel different from each-other and wisely restore your health to full upon completion. While the actual battles aren’t as dynamic as Kung-Fu Master’s, they do work and provide the necessary big moments that make Dragon Wang come close to making it just over the YES! line. Of course, they’re not all awesome. The last boss is named “Jonathan” and is, I’m not kidding, a disembodied pair of legs. It’s such an unimaginable letdown that I have to wonder if there was some kind of programming error that they didn’t catch until production. Dragon Wang isn’t a complete abomination, but alright combat and an alright concept doesn’t quite make up for some shoddy game design. This was closer than I expected, but it’s still a NO! Albeit it, a NO! done with a heavy heart. This is dying for a remake. Verdict: NO!
My Hero aka Seishun Scandal Platform: Arcade, Sega Master System Arcade Released July 10, 1985 SMS Released January 31, 1986 Arcade: Designed by Kenichi Kuma SMS: Designed by Kotaro Hayashida Developed by Coreland (Arcade) Sega (Home) Published by Sega Arcade version Included in the Astro City Mini Master System version: NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
(Arcade Pictured) You know, this Definitive Review made so much more sense on paper. In reality, most of these games don’t feel that related, but eh, I played through them.
My Hero combines Kung-Fu Master’s cannon-fodder enemies with set pieces and some not-so-mild platforming elements. Tale as old as time: your main squeeze gets kidnapped and you have to rescue her. It’s one of the most hilarious kidnapping scenes in gaming history. It should be a meme to rival “shocked Pikachu face.”
“Can you believe that guy? The audacity!”
Combat features one-shot kills that consist of punches, ducking kicks, and jump kicks. Interestingly, every jump is a jump kick and your foot doesn’t even have to be extended in the sprite for it to kill the baddies. It’s highly cheesable, which is kind of surprising for a coin-op. While it does make the basic baddies little more than cannon fodder, My Hero makes up for it tons of secondary hazards, some of which are flagrantly cheap. Bombs are thrown in from the side of the screen that are pretty hard to avoid, and the collision detection for them isn’t perfect. Thankfully, those rarely show up. There’s other quick-reaction traps too, but it never feels too much like a GOTCHA.
(Arcade Pictured) The most annoying part of My Hero is the start of the second level, where these ninjas spawn and respawn to such a degree that you basically inch-forward for the entire opening section of the stage. No elegance to it. It practically rains them.
The other annoyances are a few enemies that you have to jump over rather than kill and the fact that there’s only three levels that loop to infinity. Three levels, even ones that are slightly above-average in length, isn’t a lot. Thankfully, there’s three decent bosses in the mix. When you reach them, suddenly the one-hit deaths end for both sides, and it’s instead first to score ten hits wins. They’re decent enough battles that feel more like Konami’s Yie Ar Kung-Fu than Kung-Fu Master. There’s also a nifty “power-up” where you basically rescue your pink-wearing twin brother, who follows you along until something hits him. There’s a few timing-based hazards that sure seem to mostly exist in order to prevent you from making it too far with the duplicate, but eh, it’s fine. I was told not to expect to like My Hero, but I’ve seen a LOT worse and was never bored, at least for the entire first cycle. This would make a good +1 for a collection. I wouldn’t call My Hero phenomenal, and I shouldn’t have picked this game for this feature at all, but it’s okay and that’s all I really ask for.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
And I really, REALLY shouldn’t have picked My Hero for the Sega Master System.
In a screenshot, hell, that doesn’t look bad or stripped down at all. In practice, this is historically stripped down. Now THAT would be a fascinating feature if someone is looking for content: the most stripped down arcade ports ever made. I don’t do those kinds of features. I’m strictly a full-scale reviewer who likes to do themes. Whoever wants that idea, all yours, and I’ll be the first to read it.
My Hero on the SMS is incredibly stripped-down from the coin-op, likely to accommodate the Sega Card file size limit. It only has one level theme that changes the color of the sky and slightly alters the basic layout. The main cannon fodder enemies never change after the first level, and there’s only one boss that’s fought at the end of every round. The arcade game was largely carried by the set pieces that gave a sense of freshness to go with the breezy, light-hearted action. This is really just the action, and that’s not enough. Not even close. Oddly enough, the console game uses a lot more cheap shots with the obstacles and timing-based hazards, and collision is really bad on the SMS too. Admittedly, sometimes it’s to your advantage. At one point, an RC car shot up at me and hit my sprite dead-on, but since I was in the middle of a jump kick, I survived. Even though I died the next time it happened. My Hero was a launch game for the Sega Master System in the United States that was meant to showcase quality gaming at a lower price point for consumers. Now I’m starting to understand why nobody wanted those stupid Sega Cards. Verdicts – My Hero in Arcades: YES! – My Hero on the Sega Master System: NO!
Flashgal Platform: Arcade Released November, 1985 Developed by Kyugo Published by Sega (JP) and Romstar (US) NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
I wonder if this was based on a certain woman?
Unlike My Hero, which was likely made not to ride the high tide of Kung-Fu Master but rather to be easy to adapt to the Master System, Flashgal was no doubt about it made to be Sega’s Kung-Fu Master. A faster, more action-oriented Kung-Fu Master with a female hero and lots of big action set-pieces. It’s an early example of a genre-mashup: a game with a Wonder Woman-like rip off (you think the sprite is bad? Look at the American marquee for it!) who auto-scrolls through a variety of simple set-pieces, sometimes punching and drop kicking, and other times riding vehicles or shooting guns. Hell, in one stage, you even get a sword. They really threw everything at the wall for this one, but nothing stuck. More like it oozed down the wall, probably staining it badly too.
The helicopter is the only typical side-scrolling shmup. Meanwhile, the motorcycle pictured above and the jet ski only allow you to shoot missiles at targets above you. For anything on the ground, instead of destroying it, you have to jump over it. Yes, this includes seemingly basic enemies. No shooting straight ahead. So frustrating. Also, she looks like she’s jumping over half a can of Coke. OR, maybe it’s really JOKE, the comical off brand of Coke that never fails to spray in your face.
Most jack of all trades, master of nothing games struggle to have any one aspect stand out, and Flashgal is no exception. The combat is okay, and the vehicle stuff is okay. The first thing that struck me about Flashgal was how strangely generous it is with health. If you take any damage, restoring it doesn’t take long. There’s no health refills to collect because slaying enemies does it. It wasn’t until the game showed its teeth near the end of the cycle of levels that I realized “oh, I get what’s supposed to make it hard now.” It’s the way enemies hit you. When you take damage, the knock-back is pretty violent, but you also don’t blink. Like, at all. More than once, a single hit during an especially crowded screen was enough to juggle me to my doom. It happened just enough times to verify it wasn’t some weird, unlucky fluke where the stars lined up perfectly. In later stages, the screen is so spammed with enemies that it’s clear Flashgal is going for the unadvertised one-shot KO. The vehicle sections aren’t as subtle about it. In those, one hit usually does result in a kill. I hate it when games do that. The rules are never consistent.
The gun, dropped every couple levels by an enemy, is one of the most overpowered weapons in gaming history. I don’t know if it’s possible to drop it, because once I had it, I was mowing down enemies and bosses with ease. It has unlimited ammo until the end of the stage and bullets quickly travel the full length of the screen. Hell, you can even be knocked down while carrying it and not immediately drop it. It didn’t take me long to figure out why this never got a home port. I bet arcade operators hated this one, and I bet gamers hated the instakill traps of the vehicle levels.
Most of my deaths happened when water mines or various other instakill hazards were spaced out perfectly during vehicle sections, which feature fixed-jumping. Those portions were so incredibly strict with the timing and jumping that they feel like traps designed to result in a game over by any underhanded means necessary. Granted, they don’t really start until you’ve gotten some decent time into Flashgal, but they feel like outright cheating on the designer’s part to force players off the machine. They look like this:
Or this:
And mind you, all the projectiles being dropped on you are also one-shot deaths. I’ve not seen many games that alternate between too easy and unfairly hard quite like Flashgal. And honestly, while I didn’t hate the experience by any stretch, I was often bored with it. The bosses especially are dumb. This fat gangster guy shoots you with a ray gun that freezes you like stone, so you really have to just kick him a bunch of times without letting him get a shot off. Since the bosses suffer knock back too, this usually means the fight ends with the villain dying out of frame. I *hate* that. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves with any game. It wasn’t just the ray gun guy, either. Nearly every boss I beat without seeing them die on the screen. Sigh.
Lots of violence against animals, too. Hell, when you kill these emus/peacocks, they turn into roast chicken.
I don’t think the “jeez, that’s really close to Wonder Woman” aspect is why this was vanished to gaming’s cornfield. I really think it’s just because it’s not that good. The punching/jump-kicking aspects and the helicopter section were as strong as it gets, but the combat lacks a nice snappiness to it and the helicopter section is a bare-bones space shooter painted as a helicopter game. Flashgal might be worth looking for a completely middle-of-the-road coin-op with serious tonal issues that, for whatever reason, never saw the light of day again. A weird historical curio for sure, but not one that’s worth playing deeply. Second game in this feature that is so close to a YES! it can taste it that ultimately came just short. See, this Definitive Review does make some sense. Verdict: NO!
Kung-Fu Master Platform: Commodore 64 Released November, 1985 Designed by Chris Hawley Developed by Irem (?) Published by Data East NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
“Five levels of adjustable difficulty? Sweet!” Wrong. There’s one difficulty level. All the adjustable difficulty does is change which level you start on. Want a “harder” version? You have to beat Mr. X. So, Kung-Fu Master on the Commodore 64 is the game you all know and love, only much, much slower. It does a lot of things right. The Black Magician does his duplicate spell. You can stand up to kill a jumping Tom Tom. The scoring difference between punches and kicks is present. It also has graphics that do a pretty good job of feeling like the coin-op. Kung-Fu Master on the Commodore 64 is a seriously impressive effort for its era. Also, I think I made a little poo in my panties when I saw the size of the 3rd boss. There’s a ton to admire about this version of the arcade classic, but it’s just not really fun.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
The jump kick is far too floaty and covers too much distance to be effective against most basic enemies, and having to press a button to alternate between using punches and kicks is very frustrating. The bosses are all push-overs, especially the boomerang fighter since his weapon is so slow now. Okay, one time the Giant beat me in a couple seconds, as his shots seem to be vastly overpowered. Oh, and Mr. X isn’t easy, and in fact, I couldn’t beat him until I realized the rules had apparently been changed. He requires two kicks, two punches, and two jump-kicks to beat. He’ll block every type of shot after the second. It’s not the worst idea, but it doesn’t fit with any other Mr. X fight. There’s also a whole ton of downtime. The first time I played, I rewound the first level to count the amount of basic grippers I encountered. It was seven. And I simply walked past the jars on level 2 like they meant nothing, and since they fell so slowly, they really didn’t. Only the moths and Mr. X put up a challenge. The C64 build of Kung-Fu Master is proof that a game can be incredibly impressive for its time and still not hold up to the test of time even a little bit. Verdict: NO!
Lady Master of Kung Fu aka Nunchackun Platform: Arcade Released December, 1985 Developed by Kaneko Distributed by Taito (JP) Magic Electronics (US) NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
It’s like the opposite of Kung-Fu Master: fun basic enemies, boring bosses.
Sort of like Elevator Action meets Kung-Fu Master, Lady Master/Nunchackun had me sit up in my chair for most of the first level, totally ready to crow about finding a hidden gem. The object is to go up and down elevators and walk through hallways searching for doors that contain mini-bosses. Defeating them gives you an item. Once you collect all four items and locate the final door for the level, you move onto the next stage. The normal basic combat is a quick, snappy nunchuk smack that does manage to satisfy well enough. In the overworld, you can also attack enemies above and below you. And, that’s where the fun ends, because once you beat one level, the bosses become both spongy and experts at avoiding your attacks, while the damage they deal is multiplied and the damage you deal is significantly shrank. It’s clear the developers really only wanted players to last one level and didn’t care if they were obvious about it. They already got your quarter, after all!
They jump the full length of the room too, with one shot, while spamming attacks.
“One level is long enough. We’re not running a charity over here.”
Come on, next person put a quarter in. Money to be made!”
Kaneko has a loyal cult following, but it’s also not hard to see why they never made the leap to an elite developer with crap like this. I accept that some coin-ops play a little dirty with the difficulty scaling, but this isn’t a little dirty. This is flat-out bullsh*t. Even activating the 200+ life toggle didn’t do much to help me, because the health of the bosses resets between lives. I’m capable of having a high tolerance for cruel bosses if I have a good time while dying. But that’s not the case at all here, because these are not fun or exciting battles. They’re the embodiment of mind-numbing tedium that spam range attacks and force you to ping them to death while heel-toeing your way through battle. The only way to make any progress at all is to play Lady Master of Kung Fu as slowly and cautiously as possible. Nobody wants an action game like that. And now I understand why nobody bothered to port this to home PCs or consoles. Ever. Might be best to keep it that way. Verdict: NO!
Kung-Fu Master Platform: ZX Spectrum Released in 1986 Developed by Americana Published by US Gold NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
I’m sorry, ZX fans, but Kung-Fu Master is too stripped-down on the classic European PC. The charm is gone. The violence is muffled and flyweight. It’s slow. It’s clucky. The ZX Spectrum is capable of running some outstanding games, but a snappy coin-op probably wouldn’t be my first choice. The game resembles a terrible version of the arcade game until the 4th level, which I couldn’t get past even with cheating. Remember the moths? Ever wonder what it would be like to fight them while Grippers, Knife Throwers, and Tom Toms attack you at once?
And they even spawn right on top of you too, so you’ll just see nothing but the impact sprite and your health tick down a bit. Dave, my unofficial curator of the Definitive Review game pool, declared this so badly programmed that it feels like deliberate sabotage.
I tried save states. I tried rewinding. I couldn’t get past this part. It’s hardly the only problem, either. The dragons can fire off one-hit kills, and the jars can drop in a way where you can’t possibly avoid them. I’m sure someone who had no other option could force themselves to finish this port of Kung-Fu Master, but this is the first version I didn’t finish in this feature. What drew me to the coin-op and NES game was the cathartic action. This is just interminably slow and clunky and one of the worst ports I’ve seen. Needless to say, I don’t recommend it. Verdict: NO!
Mr. Goemon Platform: Arcade Released May, 1986 Developed by Konami Sold Separately by Arcade Archives ($7.99)
This is the first game in the Ganbare Goemon franchise that’s better known in the US as “Mystical Ninja.” Thanks to Dave for cluing me in on the history of the person this is based on: the legendary Japanese bandit Ishikawa Goemon. “The real Ishikawa Goemon was a Robin Hood-style outlaw rather than a ninja; the enemy grappling makes sense as they’re trying to subdue and take him into custody. Folklore also greatly exaggerates his ‘ninja abilities’, the whole game knows this and is presented as a comedic kabuki theatre. (Boiling alive not depicted).” Yea, he was boiled alive for his crimes, along with his son. That’s awful. I mean, you can’t even make a stew out of two people. A broth, maybe. Like, a really thin broth. Oh and the whole Robin Hood thing explains him showering houses with money after every stage.
Think of Mr. Goemon as Kung-Fu Master meets Capcom’s Son Son (see my review of Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium for that). You have to hop up and down four channels of action while whacking up to four enemies at a time with your pipe. This was one of Dave’s recommendations for this feature, and it only took me about five seconds to figure out why. Like Spartan X, the enemies mostly attempt to grab you. Unlike Spartan X, you don’t have a life meter, and so when they tie you up with a hug, you only have a second or two to free yourself by wiggling the controller before a KO registers. While it’s fundamentally the same principle as Kung-Fu Master, the hugging feels more like sumo wrestling with a greater sense of urgency. Well, except for the fact that it seems a lot easier to free yourself in this game. Until the enemies gain projectiles in later stages, Mr. Goemon is a touch on the easy side, even on the normal setting. Even late in the game, I don’t remember ever dying from the jostling with enemies. I won’t say winning the shoving matches isn’t satisfying, but it’s perhaps too subdued.
There’s “bosses” that you can either throw projectiles at or just ignore until you reach the stage goal. I found these to be more like nuisances than actual boss-like enemies, and that’s all that kept Mr. Goemon’s YES! from being easy.
There’s also projectiles that are scattered throughout the stages that come in a wide variety of shapes, but they all function more or less the same: a straight shot that clears everything in front of it. There’s barrels that you can shove in front of you that also kill every enemy in their path, but because they move much slower, you can follow them down the screen for quite a ways before they leave the screen. Finally, golden mallets grant you star-like invincibility for a brief period, and any enemy you kill while flashing scores a lot more points than normal. Hard as it is to believe, this is even simpler than Kung-Fu Master. The strength of Mr. Goemon is largely that it cuts a peppy pace. This is an action game that doesn’t let up. Kill an enemy? You don’t have to wait long for one to take its place. It’s never boring, but it’s also not very exciting or deep. Frankly, I didn’t like Son Son, the game it shares the most DNA with, but this is fine. A lot of people think I’m hard to please, but really, sometimes an okay game is a-okay with me. I don’t know if I’d say it’s worth $7.99, but if it’s half off, eh, might be worth $3.99 Verdict: YES!
Black Belt aka Hokuto no Ken, aka Fist of the North Star Platform: Sega Master System Released July 20, 1986 Designed by Yuji Naka Developed by Sega Black Belt: NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Hokuto no Ken: NO MODERN RELEASE*
Of all the games in Kung-Fu Master/Spartan X: The Definitive Review that aren’t part of that series, Black Belt/Fist of the North Star is easily the closest to that game. Oh and it’s by the creator of Sonic T. Hedgehog Esq. Cannon fodder enemies that you slay by throwing punches and kicks, ducking punches and sweeping kicks, and jump kicks. No jump punches, though. The combat is pretty basic, but the game makes up for it with a wide variety of mini-bosses. It also does a neat thing where the big bosses cut to different, larger sprites. So this:
Which is how it looks while you’re in the scrolling part of a level, changes when you enter the boss chamber into this:
I, for one, think that’s neat. And hell, the bosses aren’t just wildly throwing hands with reckless abandon. They usually have one specific pattern or weakness that you have to suss out. One boss can only be hit by a counter punch. Another requires a specific sequence of hits in order to drain their health. So, while it absolutely does copy the core gameplay of Spartan X, this is no run of the mill rip-off. This is a fresh experience that absolutely holds up. In fact, had this kept the Fist of the North Star license for North America, it’s arguable this would have been the first good licensed game on the Master System that wasn’t based on an arcade property.
And hell, it’s even cinematic. After draining a boss down to their final bit of health, the game takes over for a finishing maneuver, which is usually just an over-the-top series of repetitive strikes. But I get what they were aiming for, and it’s delightful in how campy it is.
Okay, so I’m not the biggest fan of anime or manga and I don’t have a clue about the property this is based on. But, I think that’s another point in the win column for Black Belt, because you don’t need to be a fan of Fist of the North Star to enjoy this. While it lacks the personality of Kung-Fu Master in terms of the character design and sprite work, the combat is pretty equal. I love how enemies break apart upon being punched. I love that there’s items to collect, which requires a high jump (you duck, then jump to do the screen-high jumps), and I love that you get a full slate of health for the boss fights. I love that there’s a ton of mini-bosses that are all unique. Hell, this is an under-the-radar contender for the best game in this entire feature. And to think, I almost missed it! I was this close to not including it because it just slipped everyone’s mind until the eleventh hour.
I think this is the only mini-boss that repeats, as you fight these twins twice. I might be wrong though. Really, the big bosses are where this game really shines.
Now, I do have to render two separate verdicts because the Japan and US versions aren’t merely a re-spriting. These two ports are very close, but not quite the same. If you’re an American, EU, or Brazilian gamer who LOVED Black Belt, boy, are you in for a treat with Hokuto no Ken. The challenge is much greater in the Japanese game, for one thing. The level design in Black Belt is really flat, with nothing but straight corridors like in Kung-Fu Master. In Fist of the North Star, there’s the occasional platform in the layout to add a little bit more interactivity and immersion. On the SMS, the second level looks like this:
Flat and boring. I’d say it’s North Dakota but it’s not THAT boring.
And here’s the same level in the Japanese game.
I did my best to measure out roughly the same spot, but it’s tricky to do so. I can’t say 100% for certain, but I think the Japanese game has longer levels. Perhaps a little too long, as the second level was the first time playing either game that I died fighting basic enemies just from the sheer volume of them.
The basic enemies are tougher too, but they have a little more personality to go along with it. As stated in the above caption, they even managed to kill me, whereas the American version’s basic baddies never really put up a fight. The bosses play differently as well, and in fact, I struggled greatly to beat the first level’s final mini-boss, which every gosh darn strategy guide claims is the easiest. Well, that’s humiliating. I couldn’t figure out how to hit him. Maybe he’s just spongy, but he was nothing compared to the third big boss. In the Japanese version, its jumping attack is a one-hit-kill.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
The crying shame is, unless Sega adapts Fist of the North Star to the United States, players will likely be forever denied the full experience, at least by a legal means. But even the unlicensed version never got a Virtual Console release in the United States. It did come out for Wii in Japan, but that hardly helps most of the world. There’s a lot of mediocre Kung-Fu Master ports out there. This isn’t mediocre. It’s actually one of the best of its breed, and it even does it twice! The Japanese version is a little more interesting than the US version, but this should really get a full international re-release. I had a lot of fun playing this. Probably as much fun as Kung-Fu Master. Further proof that the base formula Irem created is foolproof as long as you copy the right elements. And with this, the Sega Master System losing streak at IGC is over! Verdicts: YES! and YES!
Kung-Fu Master Platform: Amstrad CPC Released in 1987 Developed by U.S. Gold Never Released Outside of Europe NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
I didn’t ever manage to defeat Mr. X in this version, either. He blocks everything!
My first ever review for the Amstrad CPC, and at first glance, I figured this was a better, faster version of the Commodore 64 port of Kung-Fu Master. I was 50% right. Faster? Sure, and smoother too. The character models are nearly identical, including the jaw-dropping size of the Giant in level #3. But, this port has whole new problems. The collision detection is, simply put, awful. Especially for kicking, where the “sweet spot” where you can score a hit is actually just in front of the sprite, which means there’s zero OOMPH. What’s the point of playing a martial arts game without the violence feeling, you know, violent? Like many PC versions, you have to hit the spacebar to change whether you’re throwing punches or kicks. The knife guys are especially hard to kill thanks to this, because they back away constantly. Of course, that prevents the Grippers/Tom Toms from spawning in that direction. All the bosses were too easy until I got to Mr. X, who I landed one total shot against even when I reloaded save states. He blocks everything and seems to always land a shot when you attempt to give yourself enough space to throw an attack in the damage zone. You know, I never landed a single jumping attack against anything but a single jar in the entire playthrough. I’ll take the C64 version over this. Verdict: NO!
Kung-Fu Master Platform: Atari 2600 Released May 12, 1987 Designed by Dan Kitchen Published by Activision NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
The Atari 2600 version of Kung-Fu Master is famous for packing a lot of the coin-op into a tiny, under-powered Atari cart. Maybe it was impressive for 1987 on the Atari 2600, but my review system doesn’t take technical achievements into consideration. All I want to know is, simply put, “is it fun?” And the answer is “nah.” The core gameplay might remain intact, but there’s only one boss who changes its attack. Arguably, only the second boss and the basic strategy of the fourth boss carries over from the coin-op. The first boss doesn’t have a stick. The third boss isn’t giant-sized. The fifth boss doesn’t block, or if it does, it didn’t block me. You can’t jump forward and there’s no jump kick. No jump kick means the moths are lame to fight. To punch you have to press the joystick and the button, which is required for the 4th boss. Standing up doesn’t kill the Tom Toms. You have to jump to do that. Enemies just blink out of existence with no death animation, muffling the exhilaration of the violence. I do think Dan Kitchen is underrated (and in the interest of full disclosure, I consider the Kitchens friends) as I enjoyed Bart vs. The World, along with Bartman Meets Radioactive Man and Swamp Thing, but this was just too tall a task for the 2600’s capabilities. It’s not hard to see how a kid stuck with an Atari 2600 in the late 80s could have enjoyed this, but it doesn’t hold up. Verdict: NO!
Kung Fu Kid aka Sapo Xulé O Mestre do Kung Fu (Brazil) Platform: Sega Master System Released May 17, 1987 Developed by Sega NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This guy was the one I struggled the most to beat.
The direct sequel to Dragon Wang from above, only it doesn’t really feel anything like that game. Oh, it’s better for sure. A fairly basic My Hero-like kick-a-lot platformer where you traverse seven worlds, kicking basic enemies, throwing cards at others, and fighting bosses. There’s not a whole lot of depth or even meat on this one. It’s really simple, but it works. Eventually you do have to jump up gaps to reach above platforms like in Dragon Wang, and sometimes they’re so high up you have to do a wall jump. You can also use wall jumps to fight the bosses, but you’ll never need to. I didn’t.
The white card in front of me cuts through enemies. If you can find cards with a hint of red in them, they’re even better and fly across the full screen. The game probably drops too many of these, but they’re not effective against most bosses.
I won’t say the OOMPH is fantastic or anything, but it’s there. You know what? Let’s uncapitalize it and call it oomph, in lowercase. What’s most notable is you jump really high, and with that comes the ability to aim your jump kicks. Okay, so it’s not THAT exciting, but it puts the emphasis on that flying kick to do most of the work. Especially since you’re usually safer mid-air than you are on the ground. Like with Kung-Fu Master, basic enemies are one-shot kills. And also like Kung-Fu Master, it’s all about the boss fights. I think Sega grasped this too, since the sixth level is just a boss rush with five new bosses. So in a game with seven levels, there’s 11 bosses, all of which are decent fights. It never feels that connected to Dragon Wang, which was unquestionably a Kung-Fu Master rip-off. With the emphasis on high jumping, this kind of feels a little more like Legend of Kage (see Taito Milestones 2: The Definitive Review for my review of that), but hey, I like that game. In a guilty pleasure kind of way, but it counts! And I kind of liked Kung Fu Kid too. Not a fantastic game by any stretch, but a decent way to use-up half an hour. Verdict: YES!
China Warrior aka The Kung Fu Platform: TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine Released November 21, 1987 Developed by Hudson Soft NO MODERN RELEASE
Seriously, they’re throwing twigs at the hero? TWIGS? Throw a Twix instead and hope he’s a diabetic. I mean, why not?
First off, yes, I know about the 1986 arcade game Gladiator, which China Warrior more directly takes inspiration from than Kung-Fu Master. I thought about doing that too, but this feature was getting bloated enough. I imagine China Warrior, aka THE Kung Fu, was pretty impressive as a launch title in 1987 in Japan for the PC Engine. In fact, it released just three weeks after the console debuted there and wouldn’t have the Mega Drive (Sega Genesis) to compete with for nearly a full year. Hey, the Famicom didn’t do sprites this big. And that’s basically all China Warrior has going for it. It’s like a crappier version of Altered Beast if every molecule of personality was surgically removed from that iconic Sega game. Well, since this came out before the coin-op Altered Beast, perhaps Altered Beast is this with a personality transplant. You auto-scroll to the right and punch or kick whatever gets in your way. Mostly one enemy sprite that’s color-swapped for variety, along with twigs, rocks, fireballs, and knives. Then there’s three bosses in each of the four levels that are just about the most stiff fights of any of these games. Plus, they recycle the bosses multiple times, INCLUDING ones that use the hero’s sprite. See?
Do you know what China Warrior is? It’s an LCD game that wished upon a star and became a video game. Big sprites are only great if they’re animated great. These aren’t. Ideally you’d want a lot of OOMPH to go with the action, and while it’s not totally non-existent, it’s well below average. The real draw of the game, the boss fights, really have no finesse to them at all and feel like they come down to button mashing. I was really half-joking about the LCD thing. China Warrior was obviously meant to be a tech demo that could show off the graphic capabilities of the PCE. It’s one of those soulless, cynical games made only to look good in screenshots. It’s also one of the most critically lambasted games ever, and yea, it sort of deserves it. I’ve played a lot worse, but there’s something sinister feeling with this one. It wasn’t a legitimate attempt at making a cutting edge game. If it was any other company, I’d let it slide. But Hudson Soft in 1987 was better than making such a horribly boring game that really doesn’t do anything right INCLUDING the graphics. Ignore the big character sprites and it’s rather plain looking, ain’t it? That’s where my anger comes from, because do you know who wouldn’t look at these screenshots and have alarms go off? Well-meaning parents looking at the back of the box at a store, shopping for a game for their martial arts loving child. This is designed to stand out TO THEM, and not a kid who knows their games. And that’s just not cool. Verdict: NO!
Kuri Kinton Platform: Arcade Released in 1988 Designed by Kei Shimizu Developed by Taito Sold Separately on Arcade Archives ($7.99)
It really does have anime-like sprites. This looks ahead of its time.
Kuri Kinton is “let’s make Spartan X look like a cartoon!” And it does look good. While the character models are generic in a way where they look like no anime and every anime, they’re loaded with personality. So, why aren’t they fun to battle? The combat tries to be more fluid and fast-paced, but the decision to have spongy mini-bosses (functionally full bosses) give chase to you through the levels until you whittle their health away was foolhardy. The mini-bosses aren’t exactly the most thrilling fights, as whatever OOMPH the basic enemies had doesn’t carry over to them. The fights are just low-impact and drag out too long, all while basic enemies continue to spawn to cheap shot you from behind.
Oh hey, a cameo by Don Flamenco as a mini-boss! I mean, they wanted King Hippo but he already had a contract with DIC to star in Captain N: The Game Master.
The more of these Kung-Fu Master coattail riders fail, the more it becomes clear to me that having a snappiness to the action and non-spongy bosses with distinct personalities is what put that original game over-the-top. It seems like it should be an easy formula to copy. For the basic enemies, Kuri Kinton does a dang good job. The enemies go flying when you smack them. The bosses don’t go flying, but I could deal with that if the battles felt unique and satisfying. All but one of the bosses feel samey, and when they die, they feel more like they’re pausing to think over all the decisions that led to this moment. Kung-Fu Master’s bosses instantly enter an ultra-satisfying death sprite and fall off the screen in the same way the basic enemies do. Combined with excellent sound design, it makes for, you know, really fun and cathartic combat. As great as the sprites are in Kuri Kinton, the sound design is bad and the victory sprites don’t give that instant sense of closure or accomplishment.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
There’s five end of stage bosses, but only one of them stood out: the third, which clones itself like the Black Magician. Only it does so many more clones. It was a genuinely decent fight, but that’s really it. I guess the fourth boss looks kind of like Dr. Doom and the Mummy had a baby, but the fight itself is dull. You know, I just played through Kuri Kinton twice and I don’t know what to say. There’s no level design moments that I can recall besides a couple points where the ceiling is too low to jump forward. That tells me the designers caught on to the fact that most players will opt to jump ahead since it’s faster than running. The level design, while offering more variety than the flat corridors of Kung-Fu Master, feels arbitrary and bland. I found myself legging it for the exit and then fighting the mini-bosses next to the elevators. Any purely combative game where my instinct tells me to forget the combat seems like a game that fails. Mind you, Kuri Kinton isn’t putrid or anything. It controls well enough, looks great, and has a relatively fast pace. It’s just very, very bland. Some games are more than the sum of their parts, but this one is far less. Verdict: NO!
Vigilante Platform: Arcade Released in 1988 Developed by Irem Distributed by Data East (US) Sold Separately on Arcade Archives ($7.99)
How much fun does it sound to need to punch a downed boss that isn’t defending itself roughly eleven trillion times to defeat them? Because it sounds f*cking boring as all hell to me!
After so many spin-offs and wannabes, I thought it would be so refreshing to play the actual direct sequel to Kung-Fu Master. Hah. It even started development under the name “Super Kung-Fu Master” and then “Beyond Kung-Fu: Return of the Master” and made it to route testing before someone said “eh, this sucks” and the game was cancelled. It was then slightly retooled and turned into this absolute slog of an experience. My god, what a bore is Vigilante, which is basically Kung Fu, only spongy. Like, so insanely spongy that it feels like it’s trolling players. The combat is a near copy of Kung-Fu Master. You punch and kick, both of which can be done while jumping and ducking. You can even pick up nunchuks. So far, so good, but my enjoyment didn’t even last a fifth of the way through the first level. Enemies quickly go from taking single shots to kill to taking three, four, or even five shots. With the damn weapon, too! What was even the point of it? I was already bored and I hadn’t even reached the first boss yet.
Later on, enemies with weapons hit you just out of sync. The blond guy has a pipe while the other two have chains. There’s no invincibility frames, either. This is basically a slow-moving instakill.
First off, the bosses regain health. Second, the bosses actively run away from you, just like the knife guys from Kung-Fu Master. How far do they run away from you? The second boss is really two bosses, and after scrolling all the way to the right to reach them, the fight went all the way back to the left before wiggling a little bit to the right before I finally won the fight. I want to say the bosses were so successful in avoiding my attacks, but they didn’t actively block them or anything. My punches and kicks mostly just went right through their sprites. THEY get undeclared invincible frames. Ain’t that peachy keen? The only way I could get damage without taking an unsurvivable amount of counter damage was to employ a boring stick-and-move strategy that further slowed the action down. Then, by the time I won the fight, I only had eight seconds to get back to the end of the stage, but I didn’t of course. You know, because the fight went the full length of the level to the left, and the spongy normal enemies started spawning again as soon as the fight was over.
Maybe the worst boss fight in the history of gaming. Boring to such a degree that it’s practically a holistic lobotomy.
Do you know what’s fun about Vigilante? NOTHING! This is both one of the worst sequels and one of the worst coin-ops I’ve ever played. Want to see how much damage a shot with the weapon does to the 4th boss? Here’s the boss, with a single hit off its life bar.
And as a reminder, bosses get their health back. Oh, don’t worry. Eventually he gets down from that perch to walk backwards towards the start of the stage while two out of three of your attacks are shrugged off. All while he gets his health back. The one positive thing I can say about Vigilante is that Irem divorced it from Kung-Fu Master. It deserves no tie to that game’s legacy. Kung-Fu Master is fun and holds up. Vigilante is basically a scam game that doesn’t play fair and it absolutely doesn’t give a f*ck if anyone has fun playing it. The blistering pace of Kung-Fu Master is completely gone, replaced by a snail’s pace that literally erases progress as a boss strategy. Who wants to play a combat game where characters shrug off the majority of your attacks? That’s not fun. I can’t believe I even have to say that. I absolutely cannot believe this piece of crap gets good reviews. One of the worst games I’ve ever played in my life. Verdict: NO!
Splatterhouse Platform: Arcade Released in November, 1988 Directed by Shigeru Yokoyama Developed by Namco Sold Separately on Arcade Archives ($7.99) Included in Namco Museum (Nintendo Switch, $29.99)
Friday the 13th if sponsored by the hard working people at BALCO.
I was confused why Dave was so insistent that Splatterhouse be included in this feature. I’d never really put significant playtime into Splatterhouse, but I remember thinking in my limited sample of it that it was shallow and cynically gimmicky. It only took me about ten seconds into my latest play session with the game to get why Dave wanted it here. It’s clearly “Kung-Fu Master, if gory and gross.” Levels are short and based around simple attacks. Even less attacks than Kung-Fu Master, actually. There’s a punch or a swing/shot of the weapon you’re holding, a jump kick, a ducking kick, and a somewhat hard to pull off standing kick. That’s it. Despite being four years older, the gameplay is even more simple than the game that inspired it.
This is where you can tell the game is a work of fantasy. A dude that muscular wouldn’t be able to fit his finger over the trigger.
Splatterhouse has an emphasis on weapons, and as long as you remember to swing a little earlier than you think, you should be able to keep the oversized meat cleaver or the stick that you pick up. One level has a pair of shotguns to pick up that each have eight shots. It’s okay, I guess. Nice change of pace. I also got a kick out of how the board that you pick up splatters the enemies against the background wall. Odd as this word is to use in a game like this, there’s charm to Splatterhouse. The sprite work is first rate, especially as a pioneer for M-rated gaming.
Oh great. Go to all this trouble of rescuing your girlfriend only for her to start her period as soon as you reach her. Pssh, typical.
It’s actually not as bloody as you would think. This is more like HP Lovecraft or House on Haunted Hill more than Friday the 13th. But, I’m fine with that. Blood for the sake of blood is really just a strange form of pandering. The lack of blood actually gives Splatterhouse a sense of authenticity to it. They really did seem to want to make a spooky game and if they had to sacrifice the gore for it, so be it. They succeeded, too. There’s some genuinely creepy sh*t in this. But, there’s one thing I didn’t like. It’ll probably get me in trouble with fans of the franchise, but think the hockey mask thing is uninspired and desperate. Surely they could have come up with something more original for a hero, especially since they actually did pull out some cleverness many times.
For a 1988 game, this is a little more ambitious than meets the eye. See those gaps in the floor? They’re actually pseudo-branching paths. As a veteran of Ninja Turtle games, I figured they were either instakills or cost a hit point. No, actually they take you to different sections of the levels, adding replay value. Very nice.
The most clever aspect are the bosses, mostly because they’re often not bosses in the “big boss” sense. It turns out, when I played the NES cute-em-up Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti (see my review in Namco Archives Vol. 1: The Definitive Review), it was following in the footsteps of the coin-op by having non-traditional bosses. The first boss is a series of worms that attack you. The second boss is a haunted room that shakes so violently that it probably should be listed at Able To Play, and you have to fight various furniture that’s thrown at you by a malevolent spirit. It’s different, but it’s a welcome change of pace because at least the battles are exciting. I’ll take a series of silly chairs and paintings being thrown at you over a monster as long as it’s more exciting every day.
The last boss I found to be uninspired in its design and a little too spongy.
That leads me to the biggest flaw with Splatterhouse, and nearly the fatal flaw: the collision detection is just awful. Not the worst I’ve seen (just wait until Spartan X 2) but it’s not even close to sprite-accurate, with your hit box a little bit wider than the already large character. Even after two full sessions, I never got a feel for the safe distance of enemies and projectiles because my brain just refused to make the adjustment. What’s especially frustrating is the enemies design seems tailored specifically to go for the fringe of the hit box. It completely deflates the game, and it’s such a kick in the ass because I want to love Splatterhouse. But the violence is significantly hurt by the lack of contact, and elite-level OOMPH can’t exist when it only works one way. If enemies aren’t actually hitting you, it still creates a sense of disconnect between the player and the action regardless of how accurate your own attacks have to be. With that said, I still liked Splatterhouse more than my previous sample of it led me to believe I would, but it’s just okay instead of as good as its legend suggests it should be. Verdict: YES!
Kung-Fu Master Platform: Atari 7800 Released in 1989 Developed by Imagineering Inc Published by Absolute Entertainment NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Starring Comic Book Guy as Boomerang Fighter
And featuring Moe Szyslak as Black Magician
The 7800 version of Kung-Fu Master is more like the 2600 with more accurate sprites and the actual bosses from the coin-op. Sadly, besides those improvements, all the same problems from the 2600 build are here. To punch, you have to lean forward into the punch. A standing punch requires you to press up diagonally towards the thing you’re punching. You can’t jump forward and, if a jump kick is possible, I never managed to even throw one. Enemies just poof out of existence, and I died more times from getting killed by the knife guys AFTER I’d beaten the boss but before I could walk off the screen to finish the level (three times) than I did the bosses themselves (zero times). The bosses are total wimps, while the knife guys usually throw their knives in pairs at a high velocity, especially if you don’t dodge the first one. So, there’s no charm, no OOMPH, and no version of the standard game’s most fun attack. Also, this came out a full five years after the NES version. Why would anyone want to play this in 1989, let alone 2025? Verdict: NO!
Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu aka Jackie Chan (Japan) Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released December, 1990 Designed by Haruo Chatani Developed by Now Production Published by Hudson Soft NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This was the final addition to this feature, and boy, am I happy I didn’t skip it!
I should make it a policy that whatever game I think should be skipped due to the redundancy is one I should probably do. I figured “well, I’m doing the TG-16 version of Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu, so I really have no reason to do the NES version.” And that was wrong, because the NES version is one of the most underrated games on the platform. Seriously, how come nobody talks about this one? It’s delightful! A smooth-controlling action platformer with fun combat, fast-paced level design and fun bosses to battle with. Oh, and it’s loaded with personality. Probably the worst part of this is the fact that it’s Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu, needlessly tying a licensing anchor around the game’s neck.
See, this is why I couldn’t give Hudson Soft a break earlier with China Warrior. They know what they’re doing, including the equal balance of combat and platforming. Especially important on the NES due to the limitations of the console.
The biggest weakness of the NES version is the lack of enemies. You usually only fight one or two at a time. While the scale is larger than most NES games, the game does have a tiny bit of an empty vibe to it, which prevents the higher stakes of something like, say, a Super Mario game. On the other hand, the combat is varied and satisfying. Smacking a frog causes it to spit-up a seemingly random special attack, usually some form of a spin-kick that does extra damage. You also get a limited supply of fireballs that you get from charging-up the attack button. The variety assures that the combat never gets boring, even if there aren’t quite enough baddies to dial-up the excitement.
The final level contains an extended stretch of one of my least favorite tropes: lights-out platforming. While there’s no instakill pits (thank God), there are some pretty hard to suss-out platform arrangements. This has never impressed me. It’s a lazy, desperate design mechanic that never has a sense of elegance. Thankfully, while the TG-16 build does this too, in that version the lights are merely dimmed, with platforms still visible.
One oddity of Action Kung Fu is that the levels are not even in size. The first level is one of the longest opening stages in any game. In fact, it’s so long that I was legitimately startled when I reached the second boss much more quickly. Action Kung Fu has a total lack of tempo. It’s as if the team didn’t quite know how long to pace out the stages. Later, there’s an extended rafting/platforming section that wears out its welcome, but that’s probably the only “down time” the game suffers. Well, besides the bonus stages that tend to drag a little bit as well. On the other hand, the bosses are all really fun to fight and are the highlights of the game, as any self-respecting boss fight should be. Well, okay so the last two bosses don’t stick the landing. Going off the TG-16 game, I think they WANTED bigger bosses and this is what they could settle for. Neither are particularly good fights, either, but the NES game is still 4 for 6 on fun bosses. That’s a win in my books.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Also, I feel like I should remind you (and myself) that last bosses can only let you down if the ride there is a fun one. Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu has got to be one of gaming’s all-time underrated platformers. Simple as it is, it’s genuinely one of the most fun platformers I’ve played on the NES. I can’t stress enough how well it controls. This thing is Mario-like in its movement accuracy, intuitive jumping, and the collision detection. Even with the inconsistent pacing, I would have been good to go another five levels. When the biggest knock on a game is that it leaves you wanting more, hell, that’s a problem I wish more games had. It also is a little on the easy side, but that’s fine, and actually, this might be a good game to introduce a young child to combative platformers. It’s always preferable for a game to be too easy than too hard, because at least with too easy, everyone of all skill levels can experience the full game. In the case of Action Kung Fu, that’s a positive, because this is a game that everyone should experience. Konami needs to figure out the rights issues on this, and if they do, I’d strongly advise they bundle both the NES and the TG-16 version, which offers slightly more bite than this. Combined, they would make a hell of a retro release. This is a game that appears on a ton of hidden gem lists. It deserves it. Verdict: YES!
Kung Fu Master aka Spartan X Platform: Game Boy Released December 11, 1990 Developed by Irem NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
“Awww. How’d you know I like to get black-out drunk when I rescue my girlfriend?”
Despite having the same name as the arcade classic, the Game Boy version of Kung-Fu Master is a full-fledged sequel that’s FINALLY what I’ve been waiting twenty games to play. A legit evolution of Spartan X with the same basic combat, only with different bosses and better level design, and I’m there for it. This is a fantastic sequel that is also fantastically glitchy. Sometimes enemies shoot projectiles that don’t get drawn, be it bullets from a sniper or ninja stars thrown by a boss. I tried a couple different emulators and it’s present on all of them, so I guess it must be a thing. Fair trade because, in this version of Kung-Fu Master, you can do a MID-JUMP FLIP KICK! And it’s awesome!
That enemy looks like he’s standing on my floating lifeless body, but he’s about to become the lifeless body because I’m in the middle of my mid-air flip kick animation. Oh and this is the Japanese version, which you can tell because the US version has one big life bar and the Japanese version has segments.
The flip kick, combined with a ton of health refills and even throwable bombs, makes the Game Boy Spartan X even breezier than the NES game was. In fact, I only died once, during the third boss. He shoots bombs at you that can hit you multiple times before they hit the ground, at which point they blow up for additional hits. You don’t blink when you take damage, so it’s this one weirdly brief section where the difficulty radically spikes, but then returns to “could probably learn to beat this blindfolded” levels of cinchy.
This is him. What’s especially startling is the original Spartan X has some of the most pitch-perfect difficulty scaling in gaming history. That’s certainly not true of the Game Boy version. I literally couldn’t believe the last boss was the last boss.
Besides a few different sprites, the biggest difference between regions is the US version has a brief final stage, whereas the international version goes straight to the push-over final boss. Besides the occasional hidden projectiles (seemingly caused by the screen having too many moving sprites already), the biggest weakness is the bosses don’t have the personalities of the original game. A few are barely distinguishable for normal baddies. But, they’re not too spongy and fun to battle, just like the original game. The basic enemies are back to being satisfying and cathartic to fight. Every wrong from the failed would-be sequel Vigilante is righted here. It feels like the true sequel to Spartan X. Technically THAT sequel is still coming for the Famicom. Spoiler alert: that game really sucks. So, for all intents and purposes, this is the only good sequence to Kung-Fu Master, and what a sequel it is. For a second year Game Boy title, this ain’t bad at all. Verdict: YES!
Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu Platform: TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine Released January 17, 1991 Designed by Haruo Chatani Developed by Now Production Published by Hudson Soft NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Same basic gameplay, but with bigger stakes.
The TG-16 build of Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu has more.. well, action! The biggest advantage the PC Engine offers over the NES is the ability to have more sprites on screen at once. That means more enemies, more challenge, and less downtime. The levels aren’t exactly the same, though the same uneven pacing and length of stages carries over from the NES. That’s fine, because all the positive aspects also carry over. A wide variety of enemies that are so satisfying to slay, along with solid level design and set pieces. Weirdly, a couple of those are dialed down from the NES. For example, the final level on Nintendo’s platform has a super-speedy auto-scrolling section near the final boss. The TG-16 build still auto-scrolls, but at a normal speed. Weird. Thankfully, for every baffling change there’s several positive ones, including plenty of segments not included in the NES game, like this:
This doesn’t appear on the NES. There’s plenty of reason to play both versions.
The enemies aren’t just increased in volume, but also in their strategies. The NES game’s limits means that enemies can mostly be dealt with one-on-one. Consequently, there’s no close calls. I never died once from combat in the NES game, and for the most part, my health was nearly always full. I don’t recall having to be careful with enemies at any point (except the Ninja Turtle-like baddies in the river). That certainly wasn’t the case with the TG-16 build. It’s much more intense, with not just enemies but set-pieces like the above dragon. It can’t be killed and has to be avoided. You can’t just plow through this game with reckless abandon like the NES game. While the platforming elements are more or less unchanged, the TG-16 game certainly has a greater emphasis on combat. But, with the near-perfect controls and enjoyable fighting mechanics returning from the NES game, it really is more of a good thing.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
The sublime boss fights also return, and they’re far more ambitious and grand than in the NES game. Even the final boss is slightly improved, and while I still think it’s lacking in the type of climatic feel you want from a last boss (it really feels tacked-on), it’s more enjoyable. I suppose it’s fitting that the difference between the two Action Kung Fu ports reminded me a lot of playing Bonk’s Adventure for the TurboGrafx-16 and NES. Hudson really knew how to play to a console’s strengths and lessen the impact of their weaknesses. Unfortunately, the Jackie Chan likeness, secured before he became a worldwide A-lister, probably makes this cost prohibitive for a re-release. So, like, file off the serial number, Konami! I’ll tell you what: give me a dollar, do a gender swap and call it Cathy Vice’s Action Kung Fu! Come on! My name even sounds like an action star! Verdict: YES!
Spartan X 2 aka Kung Fu 2 Platform: Famicom Released September 27, 1991 Developed by Tamtex Published by Irem Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I’M EMBARRASSED TO PRESENT.. THE WORST COLLISION DETECTION IN GAMING HISTORY!
Think I’m exaggerating? I’m not. This is the worst, at least in a way that benefits a player. Take a look:
Or how about this? By the way, this right here I think is legitimately a record.
And yes, even the last boss is affected by this.
Look at how far he is.
Magic!
Do I even need to continue the review? I mean, of course I do because I have too much dignity to phone it in. But holy hell, am I pissed at this Japanese-exclusive bastardization of one the Godfathers of OOMPH. Legitimately angry. HOW DARE A SEQUEL TO KUNG-FU MASTER HAVE THIS PATHETIC OF COLLISION? I’m so f*cking angry I could spit nails. It didn’t need to be this way, either. Just shrink the collision boxes! Why are they so big? It’s not like this would have been fantastic without the awful collision. Spartan X 2 is pretty generic, especially compared to the original game. Spartan X is dripping with charm. Spartan X 2 has the personality of drywall and some of the least memorable character sprites on the NES. This could be any game. It certainly doesn’t look like a sequel to Kung-Fu Master. It doesn’t look like it shares any connection at all, and even with the same basic attacks and enemies that take one hit to kill, it doesn’t feel like it either.
To the game’s credit, it seems to have gone all-in on the bosses, but the poor collision ruins them too.
Spartan X 2 does try to evolve the formula somewhat. If you duck for two seconds, the character begins to blink, Super Mario 2-style. Pressing punch once you’re blinking unleashes an uppercut, while UP plus punch at the same time throws a flying uppercut. This would be great, if not for the comically large collision boxes. With them, the uppercut makes bosses absurdly easy to beat since you don’t have to worry about actually connecting with what should be a high-risk timing-based attack. It’s really hard to get excited about a game where the OOMPH is so poor that it’s actually Dark OOMPH. It’s sort of like dark matter, only instead of annihilating normal matter that it comes in contact with, it annihilates the concept of fun without any contact required.
These guys rain continuously from the sky during this segment. No finesse or pattern to it. Just kill one, another falls.
The funny thing is, when I played Spartan X 2 a few years ago, I remember enjoying it. I have no idea what I was thinking. Perhaps it was the novelty of playing a Famicom exclusive based on a game I admired. Replaying this today, oh my God, what a piece of crap. Had the collision been better, I would have still liked the Game Boy version better, but this would have been a decently bland sequel. Instead, it feels like a game so poor that it killed the franchise for good. Like the original game, there’s only five levels that go by really quick. The whole thing takes under half-an-hour to finish. But, even though there’s set pieces and environmental traps, this feels like a rip-off of the original rather than a sequel. Sometimes the rest of the world is hosed by games staying exclusive to Japan. But with Spartan X 2, fans of the NES game dodged a bullet. Verdict: NO!
Splatterhouse 2 Platform: Sega Genesis Released July 3, 1992 Developed by Now Production Published by Namco Included in Sega Genesis Mini 2/Evercade’s Namco Collection 2
This has to be the most shallow franchise in classic gaming.
I wish I had a better game to end this feature on, but Splatterhouse 2 is just a total bore. Two straight games with absolutely no personality. What the hell? Even stranger is this from the same team that did Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti (again, see Namco Archives Vol. 1: The Definitive Review for my coverage) You know, a game that was carried entirely by personality and charm. I guess they decided this had to be all ooze and no fun, because Splatterhouse 2 has all the charm of a sack of flour. No, wait. Flour can be thrown on someone, which is both silly AND makes them look silly. That sounds fun. This isn’t fun at all. This is a spoonful of flour. Just enough flour to make you question your life’s choices, but not enough flour for comedic purposes.
There’s significantly less weapons this go around. My favorites were probably these beakers, which are functionally bombs. And I probably only liked them because they perma-kill these mud creatures. Normally they come back to life, but not with the beakers. You also get a chainsaw for one boss, which is the closest this game ever comes to feeling like a sequel.
Splatterhouse 2 shouldn’t have a number attached to it. This feels like a glorified remake. In the 2020s, this would be DLC. Like, bad DLC. It offers nothing new and removes all the originality. Not that Splatterhouse had a ton of that to begin with. I mean, come on. But this has even less. It also has no OOMPH at all, but that’s not a collision thing this time. Actually, it’s a sound design issue. My longtime readers will note that I notoriously play most games muted. MOST, but not all. Music screws with my concentration because I’m tone deaf, but sound effects are a different beast. Those usually help with OOMPH, and in a combative game like Splatterhouse, I’ll put up with an irritating chip tune if the sound design will enhance the feeling of violence. This is missing a lot of sound effects. I even checked YouTube videos to make sure it wasn’t my emulator, and it wasn’t. The music isn’t really good anyway, so they should have focused on developing crunchy/smooshy sound effects to complement the violence and grossness. Instead, what’s here sounds like someone just picked whatever was available out of a sound library. It’s embarrassing. One of the worst sounding games of this type ever made.
This fight was so tedious. I was close to quitting after a few hits. I just wanted it to end.
When it comes to these older games, I usually wait until after I finish my play session before I see what contemporary critics had to say. My jaw literally hung loose when I saw some of the scores thrown at this thing. 5 out of 5 from Game Pro. 9 out of 10 from Game Informer. Are you f*cking kidding me? This is the exact same game from the first one, with nothing really new and every single good part gone. When it tries to straight-up copy the original, it feels muffled. The clever boss fights against several smaller enemies? It tries that (the above mentioned chainsaw bit) but it just doesn’t work this time. It’s not scary or spooky. Oddly, it doesn’t come across like it’s trying too hard, either. Instead, it feels like someone trying to copy a game they’re not passionate about. Maybe that’s what happened. Splatterhouse always has a touch of cynicism to it, but this one feels wholly cynical.
Props where it’s due: that’s creepy. Rest of the game blows, though.
The basic enemies are a bore. The bosses are a REAL bore. There’s not a single memorable design in any of them except the second boss, which is pictured above. Even that kind of sucks, because it’s fought in a black void, like the Genesis version of Altered Beast. I get why it’s like that. A boss that big has to remove the background or the Genesis can’t do it, but it also makes it hard for me to get emotionally invested in the setting. Also, unlike Altered Beast, Splatterhouse relies heavily on the setting for the chills. You can’t just take that away. The setting is the whole crux of the game! Of course, for the most part, this feels like the setting is the same as well. The two locations that feel new-ish, the library and the portal, both fail. The portal has you falling down a shaft, but your character’s walking animation stays the same. It looks incredibly silly.
Seriously, you’re supposed to be falling. Would it have REALLY killed them to do a different sprite in order to sell the falling aspect?
And the library does the “things in the foreground block you from seeing the baddies” shtick that I’ve never cared for.
I think I might have injured myself from rolling my eyes so much.
The sum total of entertainment for this sequel to Splatterhouse is one single decent boss fight. One. I have to assume that all the critics that were falling over backwards to heap praise on this thing were coming off of recent dental surgery or something. I’ve played worse games in this feature, but the sheer length of boredom that Splatterhouse 2 subjected me to makes it one of the worst in this feature. Hell, it only gives you one shotgun in the entire game and they didn’t even make a satisfying BANG noise for it. When a dude is jacked the way Rick is (that’s not-Jason’s name), punching something should feel impactful. Here, it feels like he’s punching a series of oversized novelty pillows. Splatterhouse 2 is a game that feels like it intends to coast on the first game’s reputation and notoriety, but like with Kung-Fu Master, it’s now clear the franchise died for a reason: because they didn’t have a clue what they had in the original. Okay Dave, now I get why you insisted I include these. Verdict: NO!
Is he peeing?
“Thanks for leaving me in hell for three months you bastard!”
Castlevania Chronicles
aka Akumajō Dracula Platform: PlayStation Released May 24, 2001 Directed by Masayuki Umasaki Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE*
*Castlevania Chronicles appears to be fully delisted from all global PlayStation platforms, but I was unable to confirm this.
Hey, if the Simpsons can get away with Halloween in November, why can’t I?
I nearly did Castlevania Chronicles for Halloween, but I lost interest thinking it was little more than a remake of the first game. Hey, I have much love in my heart for the first Castlevania, but I’ve already reviewed it, so I chose to do Dracula X instead. Besides, I didn’t even have a PlayStation emulator up and running, so all I had was my Vita, wherever the hell it is. I bought Chronicles (or got it with PS+, I don’t remember which) but I don’t remember ever booting it up. Well, Chronicles has a lot in common with Dracula X. They’re both remakes of the original Castlevania. I know that Dracula X is supposed to technically be an alternative take on Rondo of Blood, but I mean.. come on. It’s a back-to-basics Castlevania, only with new level design and “fancy” graphics that are actually pretty damn bland. That sentence is about Dracula X, but it PERFECTLY describes Chronicles, except the bland part. This isn’t just a graphical overhaul along the lines of what Super Mario All-Stars did for the NES Mario games. This has new set pieces, new bosses, removes other bosses (or demotes them to one-off mini-bosses), and features seven entirely (or almost entirely) new levels. And that’s a real pain in my ass because I thought this would be a fun little quickie review to buy me time while I work on the bonus reviews for Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review and it turns out this is a whole new game that I’ve never played before. Well f*ck.
There’s something about fighting a normal Merlin-like wizard that feels completely out of place in a Castlevania game. This is like the type of boss you’d expect in one of the Game Boy Castlevanias, and in fact, this is apparently the same boss from Belmont’s Revenge. Hell, the thing in the center of the screen, which is just an attack by the wizard, should have been the boss.
Actually, it’s worse than that, because this game was first released in July of 1993 for the Sharp X68000 exclusively in Japan as Akumajō Dracula. Castlevania Chronicles is a remake/reimagining of a remake/reimagining of a game that’s then re-remade/re-reimagined a third time. You can play the “original” game from 1993, which I was certain was going to be a beat-for-beat remake of Castlevania 1. It’s not. Then you can play “Arrangement” which I figured would change up the level design. It doesn’t. Both games are, more or less, the same game, though Arrangement’s difficulty is rebalanced. The only other difference is your character’s appearance and the final boss’s appearance. They didn’t even change the backgrounds. Here’s nearly the same screenshot above, only it’s taken in the “normal” mode.
I played this version first, by the way.
Only a few special effects have been added. The giant bat you fight at the end of the first level plays identically, but now it has a spooky motion blur when it moves. I mean, sometimes, but not all the time. Oooooh. The arrange mode is a lot easier, too, though I’d be hard-pressed to explain why. The original game ate me for lunch so badly that I opted to play with save states instead of lives, but I ran through Arrange mode only losing one life the entire time. Maybe I was taking less damage, but if that’s the case, the effect is so subtle I didn’t instinctively notice. Apparently this mode has adjustable difficulty, but I have more Tetris to play and I really thought I was playing a remake of Castlevania 1 that I could knock out in a few hours, so I never experimented with the difficulty settings. Whatever was the default is what I played on. I know that I unlocked concept art when I finished, and there’s also an interview with producer Koji Igarashi, making this one of the first games with DVD-like extras (Digital Eclipse was doing this too with their Arcade’s Greatest Hits line).
If you think this is grainy, try imagining it on the Sega CD.
Only the first level and the final battle with Dracula resembles the original Castlevania, but besides those, only tiny chunks of stages show up. The “Infamous Hallway” leading to the Grim Reaper fight is here, only it takes place in front of a crumbling mural and other spooky paintings. Fun fact: the mural can be any of the four seasons, depending on the X68000’s internal clock. The original PlayStation doesn’t have a clock, but a code can change the date, which changes the mural. The section of the final level where you have to jump over pits while fighting and/or avoiding multiple giant bats that you fought as the first boss? That’s here. And.. actually, that’s about it. In fact, all the other levels feel completely different from the original game, and so do the bosses except Dracula. Medusa is no longer just a giant head. The mummies are gone completely. Frankenstein is a one-off set-piece mini-boss (I wanted to see how many hyphens I could get in a row). The Grim Reaper is a total push-over, and Dracula isn’t far behind him. Hell, the holy water isn’t the be-all, end-all to beat the game anymore. The boomerang is much more effective than it ever has been, as it does more damage than the whip, easily.
Calling “The Creature” a mini-boss is a little unfair. He might not have a life bar or the boss music, but he IS a boss that takes about the same hits (or maybe just a little less) than a normal boss. The timing of when the electrodes wake him up is totally off, though. You don’t see it come to life, but otherwise, this is functionally a mid-level boss battle that’s more exciting and intense than a couple of the real bosses, even including the Grim Reaper. There’s other mini-boss set-pieces. A stained-glass window shatters and comes to life, Young Sherlock-style (it’s so close that it’s a safe bet the producers of Chronicles were big fans of the film), and you fight a giant skeletal spider at one point.
The biggest problem with Chronicles is it has a massive tone problem. Yes, Castlevania is inherently silly, but what I think makes the original games work is they never say “oh, we know it’s ridiculous.” All those early games, including Super Castlevania IV, are totally sincere, so what should be an absurd farce actually does become genuinely scary at times. Castlevania never gets enough credit for that, but all that crap is out the window in Castlevania Chronicles. At one point you enter.. um.. what the hell is this?
Dracula’s day care center? I guess? A gigantic play room that sees you fighting dolls and toy soldiers. Dolls can be creepy, and the dolls in Chronicles are actually some of the tougher normal baddies to deal with in the entire game. But, stylistically, it didn’t work the way they dressed it up. It feels like a satire of Castlevania, but this isn’t the only part like that. In the second-to-last level, my jaw literally dropped when skeleton jump ropes appeared. Not just skeleton jump ropes, but DOUBLE DUTCH-STYLE skeleton jump ropes. Maybe these would have been fun and frisky set pieces for the early parts of the game, but they come in the last third of Chronicles, and they’re just too absurd to hold the mood Castlevania aims for. What was the pitch meeting the monsters made to Dracula for the jump rope? “Okay, we know that the Belmonts have defeated us for, like, century after century, but hear us out! We have a plan that will surely prevent this Simon character from ever making it to you. You know how nobody likes exercise, right? Well, what if..”
This was apparently not a fever dream I had. I double-checked and everything! This is real! That or I just uploaded a picture of a blank screen and my readers are checking with friends to make sure I’m okay.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think this game came out in the 2020s. It’s Castlevania based around subversion of expectations. Like you know the first piece of meat you find in the first Castlevania game? I gave that a whole paragraph in the Castlevania review because it was the perfect example of how to educate a player. They put a bat in front of it in order to assure players whipped the wall, revealing the meat and showing that Castlevania is a game with breakable walls. Well, that wall is back in Chronicles, only when you whip the wall, this happens now:
Since it’s hard to see them, yes, those are the jumping men. An endless stream of them, and that’s not an exaggeration. Tons of them keep spilling out until you leave the room.
That’s just a dick move extraordinaire right there. What’s frustrating about stuff like that is Castlevania Chronicles is, more often than not, pretty dang clever with its level design. This isn’t a half-hearted assortment of platforms and staircases, like Dracula X. Chronicles is solid from start to finish. I just beat it twice, and I could have kept going and challenged the time attack modes (unlocked after beating Arrangement) without being bored. It’s certainly not perfect. The difficulty curve is all over the place and some needless last pixel jumps somewhat spoil the fun. The new bosses are a little on the generic side, with the exception of the best werewolf fight in Castlevania. It takes place in front of a clock, and it actually throws the numbers off the face of the clock at you, then grabs the minute hand and uses it as a melee weapon when it’s down to its final ticks of health.
The remake of the original final battle with Dracula includes no real surprises, which was a bit disappointing. Hell, the final form doesn’t even have a different sprite in Arrangement, like the first does. However, I love how big the boss is, so I’ll let it slide.
I won’t say that Chronicles has a bad reputation, as contemporary reviews I think were more middling thanks to the timing of release. People wanted new in 2001, not old. The PlayStation 2 was already out by the time Chronicles was released, and the GameCube and Xbox were literally just about to come out, but Castlevania wasn’t so old that it qualified as “retro.” Had this come out today, in 2024, I honestly think it’d get 9s and 10s from critics. Instead of a “bad reputation” I’d argue that Chronicles has the WRONG reputation. It’s just not a remake, period, end of story. Try to imagine it as the REAL Castlevania II that happened just before Dracula’s Curse. On those terms, Chronicles is actually kind of the perfect sequel.
It also makes a lot of bone-headed decisions, like having the skeleton spider, a one-off set piece, be obscured by the status bar. We might reach the remake singularity, but screw it: someone really ought to remake this again, because this is easily the most underrated of the linear Castlevanias.
If this had an entirely different first level, they could have done exactly that, retconning Simon’s Quest out of existence and substituting Chronicles as “Castlevania II: Simon’s Chronicles” or something like that. There’s more levels (eight instead of six), better combat (you can whip downward and down-diagonal when you jump) and bigger set-pieces, but there’s still a direct line between the first game and this one. A subtly of evolution that makes it succeed in a way the Dracula X could never have hoped for. I wanted a little review to buy me time while I work on Tetris, and instead, I found one of my favorite Castlevania games. Chronicles isn’t just underrated, but CRIMINALLY underrated, and worth a look, even if it’s too silly for its own good. Verdict: YES!
Hey everyone. I want to once again say THANK YOU for following me at Indie Gamer Chick. You’ve made this week awesome. Thanks for everyone sharing links to my latest reviews on social media. Closing any social media is tough because you’ve all been so good to me for over thirteen years now. It means THE WORLD to me that you stuck around anyway. And it’s worked out great for me because I’ve been a lot more productive here. I have some FUN projects I’m working on. Contra Force’s review will probably hit Monday, and then Contra III: The Alien Wars. I know that’s the one everyone wants. Sega fans, you’re not left out. I’m doing Hard Corps too. I will have some scary games for Halloween too. Well, Castlevania. I dunno how scary that is to you. I’m doing the family thing this weekend. It’s one of those pinball-centric weekends in the Vice Household. So, what AM I playing?
That’s the AtGames Legends Pinball Micro. This last Christmas, myself, Angela, and Sasha each got one from Santa Claus. Or a fat man who dressed like Santa but looked suspiciously like my father. Weird. It’s long overdue we look at some of the exclusive tables that can only be found if you own one of the now army of Legends Pinball models. I suspect in the near future we’ll finally take the plunge on one of the 4K models. When they first launched, flipper lag was brutal, and frankly, you never know if that will get fixed or not. Well, a lot of people insist it’s been fixed. People I trust. AtGames has multiple models and I think it’s likely we’ll be picking one in the near future. You can only play Zen Studios’ output on 4K, so for god’s sake, please don’t buy the standard “HD” tables thinking Zen’s work will eventually find its way to them. It won’t. Ever. BUT, here’s some good news: Zaccaria Pinball is on there. Magic Pixel’s engine for Zaccaria Pinball is Oscar and Dave’s favorite pinball physics engine. Yes, it’s basically the same as the versions of Zaccaria for Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and Steam, only with a lot fewer options but a REAL pinball feel, with a table that you lean over. The lack of bells & whistles is slightly disheartening. As far as we can tell, you can’t do five ball games or change the rules. No special challenges either. It’s just one single build of each table. That’s FINE, by the way, because they’re optimized for the digital pins. Aerobatics shoots just like a real table, with the exception of a teeny tiny stutter at the start of the first ball of each game. I have no clue why it does that.
We keep our pinball ratings sheets live for everyone to view, even when it’s a work on progress. I’ve added a tab for this Legends Pinball Micro project, if you want to keep up with us, or if you want to see our ratings for other platforms like Zaccaria. We know that many of my readers are casual pinball fans who still would like some form of pinball in their family rooms/man caves. Sasha and myself are working to get short-form reviews of all 50 tables that are built in to every Micro PLUS the AtGames exclusive tables with themes like Dr. Seuss, Natural History, and Taito.
Because Zaccaria’s pins, along with 21 tables created by Farsight Studios’ for their Pinball Arcade (which are the built-in tables for the full-sized Legends HD Pinball) are nearly identical to the tables from the Console/PC versions, we’re using the existing ratings for Pinball Chick team members Jordi and Dave (aka Dave Sanders, creator of Alien and Full Throttle for Heighway) for this project, BUT, they don’t own an AtGames device. They’re in Europe, so I’m not even sure if it’s an option where they live. The Vice Familiy ratings will ONLY be from AtGames devices, and we’ve started the review process. We hope to have it done very soon, for those who actually considering it for the holiday season. The Legends Pinball Micro retails for about $500 shipped, and it goes on sale all the time. It’s only $400 right now on Amazon. Here’s a sneak peak of the review, the first alphabetically. The picture is from Zaccaria Pinball but it’s literally the same table.
Aerobatics Type: EM Set: Zaccaria Pinball Pack 1
FREE WITH EVERY LEGENDS PINBALL MICRO Based on “Aerobatics” by Zaccaria (1977)
Vice Versus Winner: Sasha (9,065,700 – “KID”)
We LOVE Aerobatics in the Vice Household. Don’t think of this as a typical EM. It’s more like a high-concept early Solid State. This has some very unusual game flow, with two spinners that feed a saucer, which in turn lights targets on the playfield or advances the bonus. The inlanes are semi-open and a ball is capable of rolling up them and out of play. To make up for this, both outlanes are easily lit, and if the ball falls down a lit outlane, you get an extra ball. Not only that, but every outlane has a puncher’s chance of bouncing back into play, something you can affect directly with a well-timed nudge. Aerobatics can get repetitive, no doubt. Our duels usually devolve into who can get the most extra balls, but it’s every bit as exciting as it is strange. This is the only Zaccaria I’ve given MASTERPIECEstatus to for a reason. In my opinion, this was their finest hour and one of the most underrated pins ever. Cathy: MASTERPIECE (5 out of 5) Angela: GREAT (4 out of 5) Oscar: GREAT Sasha: GREAT Jordi: GOOD* (3 out of 5) Dave: MASTERPIECE*
Scoring Average: 4.16 – CERTIFIED EXCELLENT
*Played on Zaccaria Pinball for Consoles/PC
I’m not out of the 8-bit Contra woods yet. In fact, I have two Game Boy games (one of which is Super Game Boy enabled) and the Contra that isn’t a Contra in Contra Force left. I can’t believe the Sega Master System didn’t get its own Contra, or even a port of the NES/arcade ones. So, that puts me three games away from Contra III on the Super NES. Actually, two games away. Yes, I’ll do it before the Game Boy port. No, I’m not doing the Game Boy Advance version. In fact, it’s unlikely I’ll ever review many Game Boy Advance versions of SNES games here at IGC. It just doesn’t interest me as much, with one obvious exception: the Super Mario Advance series. If I ever review the NES Mario games, I’m far more likely to do the GBA versions. Besides, I have a lot of other older games to play. Like Konami’s Metamorphic Force, which just released to Arcade Archives. I think it’s the first ever release of this game. I might do that.
That’s Haunted Halloween from my friends at Retrotainment games. They offered me a demo of this, but I have a strict “no demo” policy and so I’ll wait for the finished game. For your consideration, here’s their (already funded) Kickstarter campaign. If you want the NES cart and not just the ROM, that’s where you get it. I don’t want to know very much about the game. I didn’t even watch the trailer above. I’m going to review this when it comes out, and I want to be ice cold for it. But, they’re good folk. So, what AM I playing?
Nope.
I have a busy IGC/TPC weekend. Contra Force is next. We’re delaying Camp Bloodbrook coverage, at least for Pinball FX. It’s not ready. I assume the mode start isn’t meant to drop balls between the flippers to the degree it does. This is not “challenge.” This is just awful design, BUT, it doesn’t happen on “normal physics” so we assume this isn’t meant to happen. The problem is, we don’t happen to like the normal physics either. Our options are (A) review now and give it straight scores of THE PITS because none of us can have fun with a table where the mode start might qualify as the worst pinball shot of the year or (B) assume the table is broken but it will be fixed. We’re going with option B for now. In attempting to duel on “realistic” physics we had a Vice Family first: everyone tilted at least once. This weekend, we’re going to play on Pinball M and might have to split the review, assuming it works on M. Also, Princess Bride was patched extensively, including fixing some houseball issues. So we’ll be playing that.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
And, we’re going to look at some of the tables exclusive to AtGames Legends and Legends4K tables. Now, almost all Zen tables will eventually be on the digital pinball machines built and sold by AtGames (UPDATE: I meant ONLY the 4K tables. Zen’s tables will NEVER be on the standard Legends Pinball or the Legends Pinball Micro), but the magicians behind Zaccaria Pinball have AtGames exclusive tables, including ones based on Taito games. The Taito pins are mostly tables inspired by classic 70s and 80s pins. For example, the table based on Elevator Action above is actually a reworking of the 1984 Gottlieb (Mylstar) classic Alien Star. Sasha, heir apparent to IGC, wants to work on these with me. Let’s do it! And hey.. wait.. if Zen is working with AtGames and Magic Pixel are working with AtGames.. does this mean older Williams/Bally pins could possibly hit? Throw us a bone, gang! Surely the two companies can come to some kind of arrangement.
Super Back to the Future Part II
BURGERTIME
WESTERN BAR
WESTERN SHERIFF
CUPHEAD
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
Mickey to Donald: Magical Adventure 3
The Great Circus Mystery Starring Mickey & Minnie
The Great Circus Mystery
Super Mario RPG
Kung-Fu Master (Arcade, 1984) aka Spartan X
Black Belt (Sega Master System, 1986) aka Hokuto no Ken/Fist of the North Star
Kung-Fu Master
Kung Fu Master
Seiken Achoo
Knuckle Joe
Shao-Lin’s Road
Kung Fu
Dragon Wang
My Hero
Flashgal
Kung-Fu Master
Lady Master of Kung Fu
Kung-Fu Master
Mr. Goemon
Black Belt
Kung-Fu Master
Kung-Fu Master
Kung Fu Kid
China Warrior
Kuri Kinton
Vigilante
Splatterhouse
Kung-Fu Master
Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu
Kung Fu Master
Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu
Spartan X 2
Splatterhouse 2
Castlevania Chronicles
Aerobatics
Indie Gamer Chick 
You must be logged in to post a comment.