Kieta Princess and Fuuun Shourinken for FDS

While I am trying out my FDS games, I came to these two games.

Pretty depressing in my opinion. After playing I lowered their prices to 49 SEK (8$?).

Fuuun Shaolin Kyo or Shourinken is an early fighting game. Have you played Yie Ar Kung Fu or Urban Champion? Urban Champion was made by Nintendo and may be their worst game. Fighting games in those days really were fighting games and not what they became later. Controls are stiff because they are real.  But unfortunately all early fighting games are terribly boring. To be fair, Yie Ar Kung Fu has a certain charm to it. The speach they make when hitting "ya ya", "huh huh" gives it a comedic touch. The later Karateka for NES/Famicom is playable too.

Amazingly a guy on strategywiki has written pages on this Fuuun game. What a waste of bytes?

Attacks in this game are initiated by a direction, or a direction button combination. The direction that you input is relative to the direction that you are facing. Note that your character will not automatically turn around if the opponent is behind you. You must instruct your fighter to do so by pressing the appropriate direction. Refer to the chart below for a full listing.  -- http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Fuuun_Shourinken

Hardcoregaming said that the game is quite good. That's the first time a page is more positive than I am. ( http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/fighters/fighters4.htm )

After you die two times in Fuuun Shourinken you are game over. But on the first level you are game over if you die once. That's boring...

For the other game, Kieta Princess is a game so simple that I must say it is a crappy game, for real.

I tooke these pics from http://www.mobygames.com/game/nes/kieta-princess

 You start off in this simple puzzle like level. I honestly think a 5 year old could play this.

Then you come to the town. You walk around to collect clues. Strategywki has a page on this game too...

You must visit five different towns and collect information. Neary every house and building can be entered, which was unique for its time. The game also features a high degree of freedom, allowing you to visit restaurants for a bite, or a Dojo to train, or to hunt for vegetation to sell for money, while you are looking for the princess. The degree of difficult throughout the game is considered quite high, with very few hints to help you out, while other hints are misleading. -- http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Kieta_Princess

Being able to walk into all the houses and have freedom to interact with anyone reminded me of Pizza Tycoon and other Tycoon games on the PC. Except those game was fun. And all the text here is in Japanese, so it is impossible for most of us to make progress.

Maybe it is just that the freedom aspect of gameplay has developed so much in the last 15 years and these early games are too outdated. To be fair, this game is not the worst NES game. I think the developers had enough interesting ideas to create a playable game. But I am now confident about one thing: a lot of crappy famicom games involve someone walking around in a town.  

Kieta Princess game was sold with a notepad and a cassette tape you could listen for clues. I do think that box looks cool. I'll try to pick one up from Japan.

I didn't know there were so many bad FDS games. Bad memories of Chatran and Dirty Pair appear... I still tell people that the FDS is worth it just for the original classic games such as Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, SMB2, Doki Doki Panic, Castlevania, and a couple of other titles. I do think so.