This week's Games of our Lives makes me giggle. The subject is one of my childhood favorites, Kung-Fu Master. Here's a little bit:
. . . Thomas found a note from "X": "Your love Silvia is in custody now. If you want to save your dear Silvia's life, come to the Devil's Temple at once. 5 Sons of the Devil will entertain you."
Well isn't that nice? Mr. X doesn't want to kill Thomas, he just wants the Kung-Fu Master to enjoy his temple's top-quality entertainment. Maybe when Thomas finds Silvia, they can join X at the late-night comedy buffet, which we hear gets a little blue.
Gameplay: The Devil's Temple is a lovely five-story building, decorated in the style of a '50s Chinese restaurant. Each level is filled with those Unknown Guys from the prologue, who attack Thomas using the ancient "raised-arm hug of death" technique.
At the end of each level, a different Kung-Fu Bad Guy must be defeated before you can move on, and all your favorites are here: Beating You With A Stick Guy, Boomerang Guy, Wizard Guy, Freakishly Big Guy, and, of course, Mr. X himself.
Kids today might like it because: Okay, we all know that she's just a cartoon, but holy shit, is Silvia hot. She's got this totally sexy china-doll thing going on, and that silk dress is just—what?
Now check this little bit that had to be cut for space, which my editor and I both thought was funny. From Gameplay:
Level one is pretty easy, but starting at level two, Jumping Midget Guy will join Knife Throwing guy and the Unknown Guys, and they'll have help from the various Jars of Death: snake-releasing jar, fire-breathing dragon jar, and deadly exploding confetti ball, uh, jar.
Hyuck. Hyuck. Hyuck.
Remember this game when it was on NES? I remember playing it like crazy, marvelling at how much it was like the arcade version. In fact, the only real difference between Nintendo's Kung-Fu and Irem's Kung-Fu Master is the graphics. The game played almost exactly the same at home as it did in the arcade, and if you played it on PlayChoice10, it was identical.
Do you associate certain games with certain arcades or places?
- Donkey Kong will forever be associated with Verdugo Bowling Alley in La Crescenta, because that's where I first saw it. In fact, I thought it was some weird bowling game because the barrells on level one look like bowling balls, if you're nine years old and in a bowling alley.
- Centipede will always be Shakeys Pizza in Tujunga, where this young couple in their 20s let me play their last man at the cocktail version because their pizza was ready, and Ms. Pac-Man will always be associated with this head shop in Sunland, where I got to the pretzel level on the first try.
- Super Pac-Man, Defender, Gyruss, and Mouse Trap take me back to Sunland Discount Variety and Hober's Pharmacy (they've become interchangable in my memory) and Donkey Kong Country on SNES will always remind me of when I lived in Nice, France, during production of Mr. Stitch, and my brother and I beat it when my family came out to vist me for Christmas.
- Crystal Castles is Alladin's Castle at the mall in Eugene, Oregon, during the filming of Stand By Me, and Burger Time and Tutankham will always remind me of the smell of chlorine and concrete, from the basement-level pool at the Eugene Hilton.
Funny, just writing about those places I can almost conjure up sense-memories, like smells and other ephemeral things that I can't quite put into words but I can feel, but I can't quite make them out, like the boobie channel on cable in 1984 that was scrambled but would occasionally resove into view for two or three glorious seconds, which would be the subject of much discussion the next day at school.
There are also all these games that just remind me of the happiness of my childhood, too: Journey, Riddle of the Sphinx, and Dodge-Em on Atari 2600, and the robot gyroscope game, Excitebike, and Super Mario Brothers (the turtle trick!) on NES are just a few. Writing about those, I can feel the orange shag carpet at the house in Sunland, the blue berber carpet in La Crescenta, and I can see the little television in my friend's bedroom where we played RC Pro-Am until we had "NES Thumb."
The kids and I bought this game controller thing in the mall a few weeks ago that has a ton of NES games built into it. It has Kung Fu, Ice Climber, Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley, Contra, and a bunch of other NES classics. It is the most fun to play these games that I played from 8th-10th grade at every opportunity, with my kids (I just had this flash: after ten years, I think they're finally okay with me calling them my "kids" instead of my "step-kids" - that's awesome) who are just as excited to play these games with me as I was to play them with my friends when I was their age.
You know what I need to find and play again? Castlevania.
