Retro Game of the Day! China Warrior

Retro Game of the Day is a daily look back at some of the games we loved - and some that we didn't - during the formative years. Today's entry is China Warrior.

Ron Alpert, Blogger

October 2, 2010

2 Min Read

Retro Game of the Day! China Warrior

China Warrior by Hudson Soft, released in 1989 in the West for the TurboGrafx-16 (appeared two years prior in Japan).

A game which has lived on in infamy! Many Turbografx-16 players hate this game. Really, is it so bad? The game was obviously designed to show up games like the much older Kung Fu running on Nintendo's 8-bit hardware, particularly early in the TG-16's advertising campaign.

Sadly, the game is quite shallow (you have a very limited amount of moves, and gameplay is essentially a very simplistic side-scrolling brawler). Of course, when the game released people didn't really get too hung up on the drawbacks. The sprites were huge, and the game looked remarkable. Mind you, this was still several years before the Street Fighter II phenomenon took hold, so there was not much else that looked like this available.

The game may not have held up very well, but there still is some satisfaction to be had in clumsily walking to the right and pummeling and kicking away at the endless waves of opponents and odd boss characters. It's a pretty empty game, but memorable for it's time period and still a bit fun to watch, if only for a moment.