Created in 2003 by Vicarious Visions, Bruce Lee; Return of the Legend is an excellent side-scrolling beat ’em up that presents Bruce Lee in the role of a martial arts student fighting an evil crime syndicate in revenge for the murder of his master.
It’s an excellent game too – surprisingly so.
Continue reading Bruce Lee: Return of the Legend, Game Boy Advance
The portable version of Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection was published for the PSP in 2006. It’s a conversion of the 2005 arcade game from Namco, converted by Japanese studio Eighting.
This handheld conversion of Archer Maclean‘s classic IK+ was published in 2002 by Ignition Entertainment and is generally quite excellent.
Continue reading International Karate Plus, Game Boy Advance
Karateka was Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner‘s first published game. He programmed it (originally for the Apple II) while attending Yale University in 1984.
It’s a simple martial arts fighting game that uses rotoscoped graphics to create realistic animation. Back in 1984 they were pretty revolutionary.
This terrible Spectrum conversion of the mighty arcade game, Kung-Fu Master, was developed by Ocean and published by US Gold in 1986.
This 1983 action game sees you playing as Chuck Norris – the infamous action hero of the 1970s – and it really is quite bad.
Jackie Chan himself was involved in the making of this Canadian PlayStation game, and not just in terms of lending his voice talents.
International Karate was released in 1986 by System 3 Software.
It was written by Archer MacLean and was one of the first beat ’em ups – ever – to actually feel like a decent game to play and not a ridiculous slug-fest.
Programmed by Archer MacLean himself (the man behind the original Commodore 64 version), and published by System 3 in 1988, the Atari ST conversion of the classic International Katate+ is pretty much flawless, and is also arguably the best beat ’em up on the entire system.
This terrible scrolling beat ’em up was released for the Atari Lynx in 1992.
Kung Food features poorly-drawn, downright silly, food-related characters and enemies and takes place mostly inside a refridgerator.
