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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 มิ.ย. 2024
- How one awful home arcade port changed my life forever.
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00:00 Introduction
00:42 History of Kung Fu Master
02:38 Home conversions
03:18 The Toys R Us experience
04:52 First boot blues
06:13 Apple II gaming and a hard lesson
09:07 My first Commodore 64
12:52 Easter eggs
14:17 Re-acquiring the game in 2023
14:45 Conclusion
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The fact that you could just flip over the floppy disc and it was compatible on an entirely different brand of computer is crazy relic of the past. Imagine being able to flip over a PS5 disc and put it in an Xbox Series S.
My first console was a *Colecovision* - there was an adapter you could buy that allowed you to play *Atari 2600* carts on it!
LOL
This was my first game I played on my NES in 6th grade. I pretended to be sick so I could play it all day. I was so excited to beat the game during that day. The good ole days.
Totally remember those days of sitting in front of the tv ❤
I love this video, and this is the kind of retro talk I'm about. I love hearing the stories. It feels like by this point most games have been talked about to death. We have so much information about nearly all of them, it seems impossible to talk about them with any kind of new context.
That's why we need these stories. Tales of the people who were there and lived through the era. The rollercoaster of emotion that getting a game and being heartbroken over it can be. ;)
With the discovery of CTRL+G, this game became Gun Fu Master. lol
I had this for commodore and always wondered what the Apple was like on the flipside. When I finally got a chance to see it at a friends house, I was glad I had a commodore...My mother wanted us to have an Apple, but my father insisted on a Commodore. I'm glad he knew what he was talking about.
Mom had good intentions too. She may not have known the technical side but she meant well and loved you.
@@curcumin417
Meaning well is not enough.
Single mother households are ridiculously more likely to produce dysfunctional children.
Criminals, hookers, drug addicts etc.
Let's just say I made more friends who owned a C64 than an Apple. Nuff said. :D
Kung-Fu Master is such an awesome game. Like you I really liked playing it in arcades back in the day. It's still a favorite of mine in 2023. I too have it for my Commodore 64 computer complete in box. The Apple II port is pretty rough compaired to the C64 version. IMHO the best home port of Kung-Fu Master is the Nintendo NES cartridge version, but the C64 version is really nice.
You hit the nail on the head for me a few times in this video. Mostly with the Toys ‘R’ Us recall, and the story about how you bought your first C64 home. I can vividly remember picking out the tickets at TRU to take home and dream about saving enough money to get the game I picked. I also remember delivering enough papers to get my first game purchased with my own money ; Earthworm Jim. A feeling that kept me working hard for the things I wanted.
Thanks for the memory lane stroll 🙌🏾
Always remember having to check where the screen shots were credited when I was looking at Apple II games at Waldensoft etc. So many boxes with "Screens are from the arcade version" on the back in fine print. The fact they were bold enough to show the C64 version on that box is amazing.
Yea, I learned about deceptive screenshots the hard way and didn't make that mistake again!
Many of us in the UK have a similar sad story. I was utterly addicted to the arcade game, and was thrilled when it was ported to the ZX Spectrum. If you think the Apple 2 version is a step down from the arcade, wait till you see what we had to put up with. Thankfully there is a modern report that addresses the issue.
Your story of saving up money as a kid to buy your own stuff was very relatable. Our family was poor, so we didn't have a computer. I pretty much had to wait until 1993 when my grandfather on my little brother's side was chucking his C64 out. Before that though, we had a NES, and once I was old enough to do babysitting I would buy used NES games with the small amounts of cash I had. Even when the games were "bad" I was proud to own them because I earned them.
It was and is still a great game on the C64 !
When I was 9 I worked the whole summer with my dad, doing overnight clean up at a large county park to buy my NES. Ill never forget that day of going to Sears and buying it with my hard earned dough. After being obsessed with VS Super Mario bros and Duck Hunt ar the arcade, having it at home, practically unaltered... was like a miracle.
When I was a kid, the arcade version when he does a jump kick. I always thought he was saying "What up?"
"And so I started blasting..." Unexpected Sunny reference + Nostalgic feelings + fun and entertaining video = New subscriber. Look forward to seeing some other fun old school goodies!
Glad you enjoyed it and welcome!
7:17 So _that's_ what the SS guards in Wolfenstein 3D say when they die.
I only ever played the NES port, but that is a beauty.
It was
Heh heh heh heh heh heh. Lol freaking mr x!
Love retro game videos like this, brings back memories, I had a huge c-64 collection.
The Apple IIc version is way, way, way better than the version we got in the UK for the ZX Spectrum. God, that game was terrible.
100%!!! It was horrendous. Someone made a new version for the speccy called mister kung fu which is pretty good.
Yep. I love the Speccy but US Gold’s port of _Kung-Fu Master_ for it was gash. Iffy hit detection, push-scrolling, hideous music that’s not that of the original arcade version, runs too slowly and has tons of unsightly colour-clash.
Yes, we suffered a lot lol. Thing was that didn't stop me playing. I would sit and play any old crap for hours lol.
@@AllOuttaBubblegum123 We all did that :)
I mean...it was the Speccy. You guys had naturally low expectations for that thing.
In 1988, Irem released Kung-Fu Master’s spiritual sequel, Vigilante, which was also published by Data East outside of Japan.
There’s even a reference to both games in Flame’s character bio in Irem’s beat ‘em up, Undercover Cops.
just wanted to say thank you for inadvertently answering a decades old question i played karateka on a old franklin pc in middle school without ever actually learning name of game and its bugged me off and on for decades
Oh man I feel for you. Having spent your hard earned cash on this, especially when your that age. Been there done that. You look forward to these games so much and it can be such a let down. I used to just take them back to the store if I really didn't like them
My first introduction to this was via the NES, a faithful port of the arcade as well. Also had a Commodore 64 growing up, great memories. Subbed. :)
I would guess we are about the same age. I really felt your pain! 😂 The 80’s was truly a time of deception and heartbreak! Good times!
Entertaining origin story. I think those flippy disks are a great idea and glad it helped you discover a better version of the game. Despite the chunky graphics I always liked the C64 version.
There were even a few 3 way discs that were commodore apple and atari. Neat trick that was due to custom disc formatting hardware.
Hey beleive me i love kung fu master when i play on the 80's... thus fame is aippoaed to be based on game of death..truth from Master Bruce Lee
this works because the directory tracks are in different locations. Atari, apple, and PC boot from track zero/one (outermost track), while the directory is in the middle track (18) on a c64 disk. So if the game is small enough, you can place c64 and another version on the same side. totally confuses copy programs too. :)
Man the memories of my own IIC and the process of buying games at ToysRus. Great stuff
Far too many children were deprived of Commodore computers in the 1980s.
I loved my Vic-20 and then my C64!
Thanks for sharing! I remember playing Kung Fu Master at the arcades as a kid GOOD TIMES
I fondly remember playing the cabinet version of Kung Fu at the pizza restaurant, as a kid. We lived out in the country area, so it was a bit of an event going out to eat or getting take out from there. I’ll never forget walking in, smelling the pizzas cooking, and pulling together my spare change for the arcade machine. It was one of my first games, when I finally managed to get a NES. That restaurant was also the first place I saw Double Dragon and Metroid, as they gained or swapped cabinets in and out, over the years. Fun times.
Thank you very much for this video. It brought me back loving memories from my childhood.
Kind regards.
I've never really went to arcades, but a local convenience store had this machine, I only played it a few times, but in comparison to the Atari 2600 at home, these graphics were haunting my dreams! When it came time to buy an 8 bit console, I had a choice of the nintendo entertainment system and the sega master system, and it was the fact that kung-fu was on the NES that decided which one to ask my parents for!
I used to play Kung Fu Master at a local pizza shop that had 2 arcade cabinets side by side. I used to drop a lot of quarters into that machine.
About a year later I had it on a floppy for C64 and that quenched by thirst for Kung Fu Master as a coin eating arcade cabinet.
After Kung Fu Master I got Yie Ar Kung Fu and Bruce Lee for Commodore. Those 3 games were so awesome to play in rotation.
The music in Kung Fu Master was great and the sound/response was solid in that game. It was suspenseful in the way that the music was always intense and the baddies never stopped coming at you. There was never any time to cherry pick.
My parents owned a pizzeria when I was a kid and we always had a couple arcade cabinets there. We had Ms. Pac-Man permanently and every 6 months or so the vendor would switch out the other game.
So for about 6 months in 1987 we had the arcade cabinet game of Kung Fu Master.
My older brother and I got really good at it because we played it all the time. My brother was the first one to beat all 5 levels and had his initials in 1st place for the high score. He had that for a while. The game had a memory chip in it so even when we turned off all the power at night, in the morning when we turned everything back on the high scores were the same and didn't reset.
My brother was proud of his high score and his mastery of the game. He even kind of strutted around because of it. Eventually I became good enough to beat all 5 levels too, but my brother was first and he also kept the high score.
The thing is though...once you beat all 5 levels, the game doesn't end. It starts over but it's much harder.
So one fateful night after closing I'm pumping quarters into the machine playing. At that point beating all 5 levels was something both I and my brother could do on a regular basis. But I was *really* in the zone that night...I was playing the game and beat all 5 levels, but then in the same game *I beat all 5 levels again* on the more difficult setting.
No one had beaten the game twice on the same quarter before, including my brother. Not only that, I had achieved the high score, once I put my initials in *I* would be in first place!
I was jumping up and down yelling, "I did it! I did it!"
Then the power went out.
5 seconds later the power came back on and the game started back up but it was in demo mode with the "insert coin" instruction on the screen.
You see, not only did I not have a chance to put my initials in, my game wasn't even over yet. After beating all 5 levels twice it started back at level 1 _again_ with an even greater difficultly.
When the power went out then came back on, it didn't reset everything, it just erased the current game being played...so there were all the high scores as they were before I played... with my brother still in 1st place.
The other thing, when the power came back on I was looking around like "What happened?" and I happen to look back toward the utility closet...the utility closet where the circuit breaker was. And I see my brother coming out of it.
To this day he denies he did anything...😡 😡 😡
Haha, great story, thanks for sharing! That sounds exactly like the sort of thing brothers would do. At least you know in your heart you beat his record :)
I know exactly how you feel. This happened to me as a kid with Fist of the North Star on the NES. It took so long to save up and it was a huge mistake. It was a hard lesson.
I had this for my C64. Just hearing the music brings backs memories. My copy was on cassette.
I will never forget the day my parents bought me my C64, it was truly momentous and I don't think I went outside that entire summer. I played the heck out of that system...Questron, Ultima IV, Hunt the Wumpus, Legacy of the Ancients, Telengard, the SSI gold box series of games, Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, the Apshai trilogy, heck I even taught myself some Basic programming.
Data East did this stuff all the time. I was personally duped by the NES box for Karnov showing arcade screenshots, my best friend had the same experience with Karate Champ. At least Karnov was still pretty decent.
Another one that fooled me as a non fine print reading kid was the Atari 2600 box for California Games showing screenshots from the friggin Amiga.
Haha Amiga screenshots on an Atari 2600 box, now THAT is brazen!
Hearing the music gave such a flashback thank you sir
Great video, g'day from Australia - ah the memories! When you first fired the game up on the library computer.. and it worked, must have been exhilerating!!
I loved these "origins" story of your passion!! I had a simmilar one with Doom, that made me get my first 486 PC
great memories from the 80s playing this on the c64 for hours and never getting past level 2! :)
They did that a lot over here in the UK with ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC464, and Commodore 64 games. They would put screenshots of the arcade versions on the back of the cases. I got fooled by that as a kid.
My uncle had a bar with a pool table and 2 arcade boxes.
He switched the boxes every few months.
Kung Fu Master made it in 1985 when I was 11.
My uncle let me use the quarters of the register and I played non stop.
Ah okay, so this is your super-villain origin story.
Lol, your face at the first Apple IIC screen 😂😂😂😭
Great video! I enjoyed your story! That gun cheat is crazy never knew about that!!👍
Love your story! Thank you for sharing!
I remember when I learnt where this game began on the tape and could load it myself. Played a lot of this on the c64
Loved playing that game on the arcade machine when on holiday in North Wales where the pub in Pwllheli had it in back room
Kung Fu on the NES was the staple rental for many a Saturday night at our house. Man what fun times.
For some reason, Kung-Fu Master was never released for the Amiga. I even wrote to Data East on this topic, as a 'request' (from Belgium), leaving behind my C-64-years... However, many-many years later, a kind of Kung-Fu Master II appeared: The Devil's Temple - son of Kung- Fu Master.
Yeah!!! The gun Easter egg! I'm not sure how we knew about that as kids either, maybe it was in Ahoy or Compute Gazette or something.
Sadly, I doubt there is anyone from back then who was a gamer who does not have such a tale to tell in regard to the hope of what a game would look like to the actual reality - had this many times with spectrum games with c64 artwork/arcade artwork on the back of the game.
This happened a lot more with the early Atari 2600 games having the box art look way more impressive than the actual game. Then came along Activision and iMagic that produced some of the best games on the 2600 back in the day.
I feel your pain. Software publishers would post Amiga screenshots on the IBM/Tandy version of games that invariably only ran in CGA 4-color mode on the latter machines. Even after upgrading to a 486 VGA system, it was still a crapshooot how well the game was ported to your platform.
I LOVE THE FRANK REYNOLDS REFERENCE ❤ What a great video. You got a new sub.
Glad you enjoyed it and welcome!
Kung Fu Master was the first video game I truly loved playing and pumped a ton of quarters in. I sucked at it as a kid as the arcade version as ULTRA HARD MODE. But I still loved playing it.
You covered the game that got me into side scrollers. Subscribed!
Nice! Welcome to the club :)
I still remember experiencing this game at an after-school-care place as a young kid. First on the C64 then later on the NES.
If you think Apple had a bad port, then just look at the ZX Spectrum 48k version, also the Amstrad CPC version was extremely colourful if a little slow plus it didn't have stairs to climb at the end of every level instead Thomas would get into a lift which always made me smile.
Kung Fu Master was a favorite of mine, too, back then, and even now. I played it a lot at a 7-11, and got it for the C64, too. When I heard you say Commode 64C, you had me flashing back to the white C64, I believe it came with GEOS, which had a nifty proportional-spacing word processor. I remember blowing away my 9th grade English teachers with that, lol. Nowadays, I play Kung Fu Master on the iiRcade. In fact, I have the high score on their leaderboards. Come get me!
My family had an Apple IIe with the green and black screen so my gaming experiences were always even more dismal than the story you tell here but somehow we were able to get a copy of Moon Patrol, which I played a ton. Between that and Tetris, I had many fun memories of playing on afternoons when it was too rainy outside to play.
It was stuff like this that made me a lifetime console gamer. Had a similar experience with a terrible port of Double Dragon on the PC.
Great video, you’ve got a new subscriber!
Glad you enjoyed it and welcome!
Lol the old 5¼ inch disk. God bless it. I had a tape player on tbe C64. Thank you. That was a great romp down memory lane. Lol
This was a recurring feeling at the time. You would buy a game and hope it would be minimally similar to the arcade.
Loved the video, I had an Acorn Electron while everyone else was playing Spectrum and Commodore so a very similar experience with conversions, even of games written for the other systems !.
Wow. I've never seen KFM on the Spectrum. Was it fun to play? But yeah, I also have an Electron. Cool machine, but wow, some really poor ports on the machine!
@@erwindewit4073 The ZX Spectrum version was very very bad. It made the Apple IIc version look brilliant.
@@JonoHalle Haha, ahh, I got the picture. It’s interesting how there are many brilliant Spectrum games and a lot of poor ones too.. But then again, same for the C64. I still love the Horace games, Robin Of The Woods, Manic Miner and Hard cheese as the weirdest..
I remember Karateka - My favorite one besides BRUCE LEE was The Way of the Exploding Fist...Random Fact - If you flipped the Karateka disk over and loaded it - It would play the other direction...
Oooooh, I had the exact same reaction to Double Dragon on the C64!
Yes! Kung-Fu Master inspired me to become a kung fu world champion.
I got this game when it was remade for the NES, just known as Kung Fu. It was fairly challenging but we beat it with not too much trouble. I recall then playing the original in the arcade and the difficulty was ramped up like 10X! That game was tough!!
the fact that they named the characters after people from wheels on meals blows my mind
lol "anyway I started blasting"
This is an excellent video. Great first buyer's remorse story
Bondoggled by box art hahahaha the scourge of the 80's gamer
Loved this game as a kid and I play the arcade version on MAME now.
One of my first games on my Amstrad CPC 6128, with green monitor. Good old days.
I can absolutely see the Street Fighter 2 inspiration, here. Thomas attacks a lot like early Ryu did and Ryu's stage was also rather similar to the levels in this game.
I got this for the Atari when it was passed its prime and this game was awesome on it.
Cool Subbed , never knew you could use a gun in this game on the C64😁
I got the NES version the same Christmas i got my NES. I did not know about the arcade at the time but i loved the game. Had Super Mario, excite Bike, Ghost n Goblins and King Fu. What a Christmas
I used to love this game! My neighbor had the NES version and we would play it for hours and hours!
I begged my Mom for a commodore 64, and bless her heart, she thought she would surprise me by getting me a much fancier computer. It had to be better, since it was $1295.00! It was an Apple //c. With green mono monitor. 😢 I was a good sport though, and any computer is better than no computer!
Oh man, that was nice of her to make the effort but yea... Well at least you could do some serious 80 column word processing and spreadsheets!
I remember this game but can't for the life of me remember what system I had it on. I know the music was there though. Back then I couldn't help comparing it to Bushido for IBM, which I had gotten perhaps a year or so earlier, which was another fantastic game. That and Zaxxon stood out to me for early 80's PC gaming.
Great video! Did you get just the C64C? When I got my C64 I really got only the naked machine. I had to wait two month or so to get a Datasette. That power brick burned into the carpet because I left the machine running after typing in a listing from a magazine ... with no means of saving ... ... and I loved Kung Fu Master on the C64.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it! I bought the 64C with a 1541-II which added another $100 to the pricetag. I was making about $3.50 an hour on the farm so it took about 64 hours of work (under the table at that age, of course) to buy the machine, not counting taxes. Destiny :)
@@retrobitstv When I bought mine it was 600 DM in Germany. That must have been around $400 in US money back in the day. Same for the 1541. So $800 for the package you got. We just could not afford that. A Datasette was $100. ... and yes. Destiny. Did you ever mention on your channel what your "day job" is? Are you still in IT?
@@RetroWK For most of my career, I have been involved in Unix/Linux admin, web services, later DevOps and release engineering, and most recently technical management. But it all started off with pulling weeds and boxing cabbage to pay for a Commodore 64!
They used to do that with Spectrum aswell. Screenshots were always taken from the better systems but they did put the Spectrum shots on the back. Sinclair was a bit more honest.
It’s a fun game and I remember it fondly on the C64 as well.
This takes me back, Mid 80s PC gaming was always hit or miss. I had a Tandy 1000. Half the time games were great, but all too often I'd buy a game with awesome Amiga screenshots on the back, but the PC port only supported 4-color CGA graphics, and clearly very little effort went into the PC port.
Same deception happened to me with a version of Double Dragon for DOS. I think the back of the box had arcade or commodore screenshots. I feel your pain. 😁
Always sunny refer! 13:10
I enjoyed the video. I was actually disappointed when I spent a whole summer mastering the Nintendo version, discovering the arcade version at a local arcade, and thinking how easy it will be to crush the arcade version. I was sadly mistaken. I couldn’t clear the first level without multiple tries. I never played the arcade version again and walked away feeling defeated.
The flap-and-counter sales method reminds me of a similar sales model utilised at pharmacies to deter people from buying cold medicines in bulk so they could synth them into meth.
And I personally prefer calling versions of (arcade) games to home consoles as conversions rather than "ports" as the latter implies having been derived from the same source code base which is at the time difficult if not impossible due to vastly different hardware.
Good honest review mate 👍
Very entertaining and interesting!
As a result of my childhood's tech deprivation , my kids now have everything from C64 to PS5... little bastards
* Loads up Apple 2 version * "Where's my colours?!?!?!" * Loads up C64 version * "Where's my colours?!?!?" * runs away *
It's videos like this that make me wish there were hundreds of like buttons to click.
It’s funny. Best Buy is bringing that back, only you scan their q code from the empty box on the shelf
i had that moment when i had my Amiga
I’m a simple man, I see a game on 5 1/4 floppy being inserted in an Apple llc with a Commodore 1084s monitor, I hit subscribe.
I think I like the NES kung fu most of all, even for the graphical downgrade, just because it plays so well.
It seems like putting NEO GEO screen shots on an NES box art and saying “not all systems look the same”
The first one I played wasn’t in the arcade but on my Atari 2600
Your school and home computers were the reverse of mine. The schools were I lived all had Apple ][s and we had a C64 at home.
Man I used to love this on my NES!
nice one! the music and sounds brought me back instantly to my bedroom back then ^^ concerning the AppleII version maybe someday someone will make a better port :)