That’s right – we’re doing arcade games now. I’m even playing them on an arcade cabinet! I’m extremely cool.
One thing that’s consistently surprised me when learning about older video games is that there are so many more old arcade games than you think there are. Even from well-known publishers like Namco or Taito, the golden age of arcades brought about a huge number of weird and obscure releases that had really small print runs (possibly as few as a couple dozen cabinets or so) and then faded into obscurity. Today’s game is one of those. I think.
Lady Master of Kung Fu is, to put it lightly, one of Taito’s significantly less popular titles. It’s exceedingly rare as an arcade cabinet – as far as I can tell, no arcade database has any images of what the cabinet even looks like. I can’t find any instance of a copy of the game’s PCB selling on eBay or anywhere else. Its digital version as part of the MAME library is practically the only evidence it exists at all. Where did this game come from? How did it become this rare and yet still end up in digital form? What IS this game?
In addition to what appears to be either bizarre product placement or just straight up copyright infringement, Lady Master of Kung Fu is an interesting mix of a few different games of the era, most notably a more notable Taito hit, Elevator Action. In both games, you take an elevator between floors to clear out bad guys and go through doors to pick up items. Where Lady Master differs is what happens when you go through those doors – in this game, going through them leads to what is essentially a very rudimentary fighting game.
The fighting is definitely pretty clunky, but it works (it feels similar to Yie Ar Kung Fu, a Konami fighting game that released the same year). The switch between the two styles is pretty cool, and the enemies are varied and interesting. It’s quite difficult (and the lack of a visible health bar is quite unhelpful), but I found myself spending a few virtual quarters trying to beat my own high score. It’s a pretty fun experience overall.
To Taito’s credit, this was also one of relatively few games of its time to have an explicitly female protagonist. That’s conceivably a good thing, right?
Oh dear. I spoke too soon.
You know how beating the early games in the Metroid series affects how much Samus is wearing during the game’s ending? Lady Master of Kung Fu does something similar, and by similar, I mean much, much worse. After finishing each level, you’re rewarded with an image of the title character wearing successively less clothing (and eventually, no clothing at all, and no, I won’t be screenshotting this). I’ve clearly expected too much from mid-80s Taito. Couple this with the title character’s unsurprisingly low skirt and somewhat ludicrous proportions, and it becomes clear that her mastery of kung fu is a secondary concern.
In my further research to figure out what this game’s deal is, I found it appears to be related to Nun-Chakun, game that’s more or less the same but has a male protagonist. However, info on Nun-Chakun is also pretty much non-existent, so it’s unclear what the connection actually is. It’s possible that Lady Master is a weird mod of Nun-Chakun, with the more salacious content added by an enterprising hacker (and if so, it’s possible that Taito had nothing to do with this). It could also be the other way around? Maybe? A Wikipedia list of Taito releases does mention a game called Lady Master that was released only in Japan so it seems plausible that this really was released in the 1980s, but a lot of the details are a total mystery. To be fair, an action game about a lady who rewards your success by getting progressively less clothed seems like something 1980s Japan would do.
What I can say for sure is that Lady Master of Kung Fu is an enjoyable game that suffers from being pretty problematic. If you care about that sort of thing (and I hope you do), just play Nun-Chakun instead. Or maybe just play Elevator Action, a very very good game with far fewer issues. Everyone loves action when it’s in an elevator.
Anyway, next week’s game is another arcade hit, and one that you’ve probably heard of! I’d say it needs a review badly.