Kung' Fu Master

The Good
Kung Fu Master is a Beat'em up made by Irem; it's a sequel to their own classic Arcade Machine from 1984. You control the title so called master, according to the manual the name of the character is Bruce Leap (those days, right?) ... and you kick and punch your way through 6 levels till facing an end level Boss. Then the game becomes like a fighter, cause you need to plan your approach to each boss. In fact the creator of the original Spartan X (it's name on Japan) Takashi Nishiyama developed the concept of fighting games upon these end level boss fights, and then went on to Capcom and SNK to start their Street Fighter and Fatal Fury franchises.

There are slight improvements over the original. It has responsive fast controls. The punches are more useful because they are a bit faster, but of course the kicks have more range. A little bit of platforming here and there - the original didn't have any - but apparently working on the Spartan FC port Shigeru Miyamoto found inspiration for its Super Mario game, so... it only feels suitable. There is a greater variety in enemies and some drop a recovering health item. There is also a new spinning kick (B+ up) and a backwards roll (Diagonal up + B) that has no use at all. The difficulty is just about right. The graphics are quite impressive, with large sprites and levels full of detail, and the music is ok too.

The Bad
It's a bit generic, even boring at times.

The Bottom Line
The Spartan X Arcade Machine was very hard and the gameplay extremely basic, here you can see how much gaming has improved in the lapse of six years or so. It's a good brawler and an improvement over the original, but not as groundbreaking, it doesn't really offer much of a memorable experience: you probably beat it and then quickly forget all about it.