Let’s Play! Yie Ar Kung-Fu

Let’s Play! Yie Ar Kung-Fu

Or as established earlier in the week, Yie Ar KUNG-FU.

Yes, this is the game I pestered my mother about, endlessly, tirelessly, and she never bought it for me. As you play it, you’ll realise that was probably for the best, as it isn’t great. I know, some of you will think it blasphemous to say such a thing but I felt the same about pretty much all games of this type that appeared on the Spectrum – Ninja Hamster, Human Killing Machine, and even (although to a lesser extent) International Karate+.

yie ar kung fu
Worst waiter ever. You’ll spill the chips if you hold the tray like that.

They just don’t work well on a joystick with a single button, and on a keyboard, they’re even more ridiculous. All that nonsense about holding fire and pressing a direction to do different moves just shows there’s a reason why the Street Fighter II method of control became the standard for one-on-one beat ’em ups.

Anyway. Your man there, Oolong, has to punch and kick his way past a variety of possibly racist stereotypes, each wielding a different weapon, and most called things like “Star” and “Club” because they’re obviously just named after the item they attack with. As the manual itself puts it:

Your ultimate goal is to become a grand-master but to achieve this you must defeat a variety of opponents each more deadly than the last. They are armed with differing skills and weapons and must be overcome with a combination of 16 different attack
moves.

16 moves! Woo! With one fire button. See, I told you.

[includeme src=”http://torinak.com/qaop#l=https://lofi-gaming.org.uk/tools/speccygames/YIEARKF1.TAP” frameborder=”0″ width=”440″ height=”330″]

Controls: You can redefine them, but the default is as close to “best” as you’ll probably get:

yie ar controls

S is fire, by the way. Unless you’ve changed it, of course. Also, you switch between kick and punch moves by pressing the space bar. Ridiculous.

The emulator used is Qaop/JS – a rather spiffy HTML5 Spectrum emulator.

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