Retro Game of the Day! China Warrior
China Warrior by Hudson Soft, released in 1989 in the West for the TurboGrafx-16 (appeared two years prior in Japan).
A game which has lived on in infamy! Many Turbografx-16 players hate this game. Really, is it so bad? The game was obviously designed to show up games like the much older Kung Fu running on Nintendo's 8-bit hardware, particularly early in the TG-16's advertising campaign.
Sadly, the game is quite shallow (you have a very limited amount of moves, and gameplay is essentially a very simplistic side-scrolling brawler). Of course, when the game released people didn't really get too hung up on the drawbacks. The sprites were huge, and the game looked remarkable. Mind you, this was still several years before the Street Fighter II phenomenon took hold, so there was not much else that looked like this available.
The game may not have held up very well, but there still is some satisfaction to be had in clumsily walking to the right and pummeling and kicking away at the endless waves of opponents and odd boss characters. It's a pretty empty game, but memorable for it's time period and still a bit fun to watch, if only for a moment.
I liked this game a lot when it was first on demo back in the day. Like Keith Courage, I don't understand why these games get torn apart so much these days. Both of these games were fun and incredable looking titles after years of NES and Master System games but I guess you had to be there.
ReplyDeleteYeah, these weren't "bad" games, they just have not held up very well. It is exactly as you said "you had to be there!" A lot of people give me flack when I bring them up now, but plenty of people will also come to their defense because, back in the day, they were quite enjoyable for what they were :)
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