Yie Ar Kung Fu Review (Xbox 360)

The race for fighting-game supremacy was hotly contested in the early ’80s. In fact, this is the only place that the battle for best fighter honors could occur, since the home consoles weren’t quite in the league of coin-op ROMs at this time. Oh, how things have changed.

While the home schoolers were playing Gunfight or Martian ball or whatever exactly it was that Atari called Football, arcade folks were throwing down with Karate Champ. Karate Champ was ahead of its time for sure, but Data East’s rigid, tournament style of hand-to-hand didn’t sit well with every arcade rat.

Just over a year after Karate Champ’s release, Konami came strong with Yie Ar Kung-Fu. Those old enough when Yie Ar Kung-Fu first came out will remember it being quite revolutionary. It sounds completely trivial now, but the fact that the background waterfall was animated in Yie Ar Kung-Fu was worthy of at least one quarter from most onlookers. Little did we know at the time that animated backgrounds in fighting games would become a staple (look at Dead or Alive or Street Fighter II for examples), or that multiple enemy types would become the norm. Another interesting thing at the time was that Yie Ar Kung-Fu featured enemies with weapons, even though Oolong—the game’s player character—had to rely on hand-and-fist martial arts only. Add in some early digitized voice work, fairly smooth animations and a high degree of difficulty, and you can understand why Yie Ar Kung-Fu was the top dog arcade fighter for so long.



Not surprisingly, the gameplay in Yie Ar Kung-Fu is quite basic (the game does come from an era where you had to actually use a corded phone receiver to dial a computer connection). There’s a kick and a punch button, and all movements are handled via the left stick or D-pad. Non-offensive movements are plentiful, such as crouching, jumping vertically and diagonally, and moving quickly fore and aft. With each movement is a clever animation that perfectly suits the kung-fu theme of Yie Ar.

A punch or a kick won’t be thrown unless you are pressing on the stick or pad, which is kind of strange and takes a bit of getting used to. A move is based strictly on stick position when a punch or kick is thrown; no A+B combos here. Even without the punch-and-kick combos in Yie Ar Kung-Fu, the offensive maneuvers are numerous. Each position on the stick plus either kick or punch produces a different attack pinpointing a different area. You can strike low, middle and high, not to mention at various depths, depending on the move.

The large-ish move inventory comes in handy, too, as each of the eleven enemies in Yie Ar Kung-Fu has a different weakness. The first character, Buchu, can fly over Oolong’s head, but O-face can lean back and kick vertically to combat this. The Club character has a shield that makes it tough to land a blow, but you’ll quickly learn that lunging moves with range can circumvent the blocker. Low snap kicks breeze right under Club’s shield, too. Whether its Tonfa boy, Star girl or your doppelganger Blues, there’s always a weak spot and a way to exploit said soft spot in Yie Ar Kung-Fu.

Yie Ar Kung-Fu is a challenge, but sometimes not for the right reasons. The controls never seemed that tight in the arcade version of Yie Ar Kung-Fu, and the same pretty much applies to this XBLA version. You’ll zig when you wanted to zag with regularity, which usually ends up in a whippin’ by the tougher opponents in the Masterhand section of the game. There’s an arrow accompaning your character that displays the last movement made, but it does little to help the fact that the controls aren’t as good as they could be. A shame, since you’ll need to be precise to take on some of the pesky baddies in the game. It also seems as if the best way to defeat any foe in Yie Ar Kung-Fu is to confuse them with jumps. The demo shows straight-up fighting, but with the aforementioned control issues, it’s better to jump around like a lunatic looking for an in, or to try and catch a bad guy in the corner for a repeated beating.

Platform:
Xbox 360
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Publisher:
Microsoft
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Developer:
Konami Computer Entertainment
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Genre:
Fighting
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Release Date:
7/18/2007
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Game Features:
Offline Players: NA

Ratings :: 1
Average :: 1.0
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