Kung-Fu Kid
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1987 Sega
Sega Master System
You know, it must suck living in Sega Master System land. It seems that whenever you have a girlfriend there, you can pretty much expect a bunch of thugs to show up and kidnap her, and also for some reason you just can't call the cops or pay the ransom. Nope, you've got to go out and beat the stuffing out of every single member of said gang, all by yourself (or maybe with the help of two or three others, depending on what kind of game it is.) I sure am thankful I live in the real world. Enter Kung-Fu kid, which is yet another side scrolling beat'em up for the SMS. I know this style of game was pretty popular back in the day, just seems like there's an awful lot of them available on Sega's 8-bit machine.
Anyway, if you've played one of these games then you've played them all, walk left to right, punch oncoming bad guy, jump over spikes and crap, repeat. This particular game seems to be set in ancient/medieval China, as you get to beat up generic ninjas, floating miniature Chinese phantoms, karate thugs, etc. Also for some reason various members of the animal kingdom always attack you on sight in these games, rats, bids, dogs, etc. In addition to punching and kicking you can also throw "cards," which I believe are actually Taoist charms, but I could be wrong. Like it really matters anyway.
The game's not bad per se, just a tad generic. There really isn't anything going on here we haven't seen ten thousand times before. Fight through endless wave after wave of generic thug, fight generic boss, repeat, end. Thing about this game is that the bad guys continuously generate as fast as you can kill them, however you soon realize that you can just jump over them and walk to the end of the level and thus avoid further molestation. Very bad and very obvious gameplay bug there that just screams laziness.
Decent graphics, good controls, but extremely shallow gameplay. Plus the game is too easy. You're not supposed to be able to beat a game the first time you play it. Avoid, avoid, avoid.
Graphics: Clear and well defined, if not a bit goofy. The bosses look good at least.
Sound: A "Bglumph!" when you hit someone, bings and boings when jumping and stuff, all set to extremely happy sounding oriental music.
Gameplay: very shallow regenerating enemies that you can just jump over, and since there only seems to be three on screen at any given time you can just run away and get to the boss with full health. Lame.