China Warrior is a lot more fun than it has any right to be.
China Warrior is my next game in my TurboGrafx journey. It released in November 1989, just a short while after the TurboGrafx became (more) widely available in the United States.
China Warrior is, what we would call today, an auto-scroller, largely synonymous with mobile games, but certainly found in many classic games as well (remember those levels from Super Mario Bros 3?)
As enemies and objects come towards you on the screen, your China Warrior can either punch, kick or jump, and...that's about it (well I guess you can duck as well - better than taking a rock to the face).
After you navigate through various enemies and objects, you come face-to-face with the stage boss, who starts out looking like that big dude in Raiders of the Lost Ark that got taken out by the airplane propeller (awesome stuff).
Sadly, there is no propeller here, so you have to punch and kick the dude into submission.
After defeating the stage 1 boss, you move onto a stage seemingly set at sundown, and basically do the same stuff you did in stage 1, except the green enemies now crouch before they come at you, to try and throw off your timing. The China Warrior will have none of this, however, so just punch them square in the face. Other than that most of the objects thrown at you are either exactly like the ones in stage 1, or slight variations of them.
When you finally reach the boss of stage 2, he... looks exactly like the boss from stage 1. Still sadly there is no propeller in sight (can you imagine how cool stage fatalities would have been in this game), so you just punch and kick him until he falls asleep (at least that's what I assume happens). The boss is a bit more competent in this stage, so you have to time your kicks a bit better to ensure he doesn't hit you at the same time, otherwise China Warrior will be reduced to nothing more than day-old takeout.
If you want to see gameplay from my very first run in the game, you can check it out on YouTube:
Ultimately, I played a few runs of China Warrior, but sadly I never got farther than I did that very first run. That dark variation of Bruce Lee kept kicking my ass, and I got to see the game over screen several times.
While China Warrior isn't the greatest game ever made, it's certainly not as terrible as the reviews online would lead you to believe. For the time, the graphics looked really good and the gameplay really wasn't any worse than a lot of popular games back then.
Now for my next game...
Dungeon Explorer!
I've been reading the manual for this one and it sounds pretty cool. Looks to be the first RPG released on the TurboGrafx. Might need to consult a guide for this one.
Until next time...
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