Quick, Thomas! Your girlfriend Sylvia has been kidnapped by ninjas. The mysterious Mr. X is keeping her at the top of a five-floor dojo of sorts where each floor is filled to the bursting point with progressively more and more generic bad guys. Thankfully Thomas is trained in all areas of Kung Fu: jumping, kicking, kicking while jumping, punching, the works!
The game goes like this: you walk to the left, fighting bad guys that mostly all go down in one hit. Right before you get to the stairs to go to the next floor, there’s an unusually ‘unique’ guy waiting to bash your skull in. Kill him and you get to go up the stairs. On the next floor you walk to the right, but it’s the same song and dance. Keep this up until you get to the top floor where your girlfriend is being held captive. Beat the snot out of Mr. X and you win the day, get your girlfriend back and then get to start the game over with more of the generic ninja fodder thrown at you.
You have to love the sheer simplicity of this game. It can be summed up in the two sentences on the attract screen. It gives you just about the flimsiest excuse possible to fatally maim dozens and dozens of ninjas just because they kidnapped your girlfriend for an unspecified reason. And although I never quite had the chops to finish this game, I’ve seen it done. Apparently, once you get good, the game takes about 10 minutes to finish. Interestingly, that’s also the same amount of time it takes to play it if you’re not good at it.
So, everyone’s a winner.