Kung-Fu Street

If there was ever a genre that dominated the early nineties gaming landscape, it was the one-on-one fighter. Naturally, every console needed its own martial arts tournament, and the Watara Supervision was no exception. Kung-Fu Street, released in 1993 by the ubiquitous Thin Chen Enterprise team, was their attempt to capture that arcade magic. However, rather than trying to mimic the complex, multi-button inputs of something like Street Fighter II, the developers wisely looked further back into arcade history for their inspiration, delivering a game that is essentially a direct, albeit heavily scaled-down, homage to Konami’s Yie Ar Kung-Fu.

The premise is as straightforward as it gets. You step into the plimsolls of a dedicated martial artist who must fight his way through a gauntlet of single-screen, one-on-one matches against a roster of increasingly specialised opponents. This is not a side-scrolling brawler where you chew through dozens of identical street thugs; every fight is a dedicated duel. Your adversaries include a surprisingly varied cast for a budget title, ranging from a nimble ninja and a lunging fencer to a heavy-hitting boxer. Each opponent possesses a distinct fighting style and specific attack patterns, which means you cannot simply rely on the same aggressive strategy for every bout.

When it comes to the actual combat mechanics, the game is heavily constrained by the Supervision's simple two-button layout. Your repertoire of moves is incredibly modest, limited to a mid-height punch, a low kick, a high kick, and a rather floaty flying jump kick. The controls feel quite stiff, and the overall movement is somewhat sluggish, turning the fights into a tense game of spacing and attrition rather than fluid combo-chaining. Interestingly, players quickly discovered a bizarre tactical exploit involving the edges of the screen. If you position your fighter with their back firmly against the invisible wall of the arena, you negate the game’s knockback physics. This allows you to absorb an enemy's jump attack and instantly counter-strike without being pushed out of range, a slightly cheap but utterly essential strategy for surviving the brutal later rounds.

Visually, Kung-Fu Street makes some necessary compromises to run on the hardware. The developers opted for large, chunky character sprites. While this means the fighters lack the intricate details found on competing Game Boy titles, it was a brilliant choice for the Supervision’s famously blurry four-shade LCD. Big, high-contrast figures are significantly easier to track when the screen starts to ghost during a frantic exchange of blows. The trade-off is a severe lack of animation frames; the characters move with a jerky, almost robotic stiffness that strips away the intended grace of the martial arts setting. The backgrounds are also kept completely bare, which certainly helps with visibility but leaves the whole package feeling rather spartan.

The audio accompaniment is exactly what you would expect from the era. A short, high-energy chiptune loop tries its hardest to sound dramatic but ultimately becomes a bit of an earworm after the third or fourth match. The strikes are punctuated by simple, static-heavy crunches that offer a decent amount of feedback when a hit connects. While the game inevitably becomes repetitive once you have memorised the patterns of the enemy types, Kung-Fu Street still holds a strange sort of appeal. It is a brutally honest, no-frills fighting game that demonstrates exactly how developers tried to squeeze massive arcade concepts into the most limited portable technology available.