Super Adventures in Amiga Fighting Games

This week on Super Adventures I'm writing about fighting games on the Amiga! Lots of fighting games, a dozen in fact! Why? Because I'm taking a two month break from Super Adventures after this and I wanted to give you something that takes at least that long to read.

Plus the more of them I play, the less I have to write about each of them, which is good because I am the last person who should be writing anything about fighting games. The only technical terms I know are 'special move' and 'block' and I've had really limited success ever doing either. Though Amigas and I have something in common, as they suck at fighting games too! And not just because of the one-button joystick and floppy drive.

So far this sounds like a lot of reasons why I shouldn't be playing these games, but I think there must be some good screenshots hidden in them somewhere, maybe even some good gameplay. Plus it's given me an excuse to create that nightmare crossover between IK+ and Human Killing Machine's title screens up there.

Anyway, here are 12 fighting games in vaguely chronological order:

Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Arcade)

Developer:

Konami

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Release Date:

1985

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Systems:

It's all over the place

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Today's 'Y' game on Super Adventures is arcade classic Yie Ar KUNG-FU!

In Chinese the title means 'One Two Kung-Fu'... or perhaps '12 Kung-Fu' I suppose. I wouldn't really know, as my understanding of Chinese is even worse than my knowledge of Japanese. Though one thing I do know is that this is likely one of the most influential games ever made, as it basically kicked off the 1 vs. 1 fighting game genre when it hit arcades way back in 1985. That's two years before Street Fighter 1!

Okay there were a quite a few other games that introduced important elements of the genre, like Sega's 1976 version of Heavyweight Champ, Data East's Karate Champ and Nintendo's Urban Champion, but Yie Ar Kung-Fu has the proper health bars, the varied cast, the freedom of movement, the punch and kick buttons... nearly all of the basics in one place. I suppose its greatest gift to the fighting game genre though, was to prove that you don't have to have 'Champ' in the title to be successful, because otherwise today we'd be talking about games like Ultimate Marvel vs. Champcom 3, Champgirls, Guilty Champ Xrd, Melty Champ: Champtress Again Current Champ, and Street Fighter II' Champion Edition.

Yie Ar Kung-Fu came out for a million different systems, but I'd hit my arbitrary word count limit just listing them all so I'll be sticking exclusively to the arcade version this time around. My plan is to give it an hour or so, fail a few (dozen) times, then finish off by blaming the game for all my mistakes.