Inner Focus (Krusty's Fun House, Kung-Fu, Kung-Fu Heroes)

Do you remember how we began exploring this universe? We were meditating and attempting to find our own inner Zen. Our own Valya, the Light of Hope to burn away the darkness of despair. I have been searching for inner peace for quite some time, and I've found it. For now, anyway. Let us focus our thoughts and turn back time. Back to the NES. Back to the finale of the letter K. Back to another letter down for this blog. This makes our third that we've completed all by ourselves. Three is a number of power. Three games will see us out. Meditate a while as we escape to lands unknown. Lands that will offer endless adventure. Be you Valyan apprentice, constant reader, or confused newcomer... here is what awaits us.

Oh, rats. Krusty's Fun House exists on the precipice of the end days of the NES. The beginning of the end, as it was. The SNES was out for a good year. This game did have a "super" version. Of course I didn't know that when I began playing it. This is another one I had as a young child, so it's one that I can talk about for a bit. The Simpsons will, of course, get its own entry months down the line... because it's the fucking Simpsons and it deserves it. Every other Simpsons game on NES is frankly kind of shit... but this one is okay. Whether or not that's due to the deluded nostalgia that colors all of us who grew up with this system, I'm not sure. What I do know is that the premise of this game is absolutely batshit, and this is coming from a series of games that previously had aliens invade Springfield. Krusty the Clown's fun house is infested with rats, so he now has to delve into the labyrinth room by room, leading the rats to elaborate rat extermination machine operated by Bart and Homer. That's it. That's what you do for five worlds and god only knows how many levels. It's reverse Lemmings. You lead the rats to their imminent deaths without fucking up and getting them stuck in places you can't get them out of while avoiding Matt Groening pixel art snakes and listening to some sort of hellish calliope. I have also never beaten this game. Now that I'm some sort of monster, I should do it. I have little else to say without actually talking about The Simpsons, and I want to save that wad for a massive Simpsons post in the distant future. Come, then. The real reason for our meditation. You have honed your mind in a maddening nonsensical realm. The sensory deprivation has done you good. It is time to go back to the start of it all. It is time to use your body as a weapon.

Another of the black box games. Another black monolith existing in the space between Famicom and NES, the big bang that set this entire song in motion. Kung Fu. A martial art made popular in the 80's by several films. This video game capitalizes on that. It is also an arcade port of sorts, and its secret history has you playing as none other than Jackie Chan. The warrior of Valya whose original waterfall meditation inspired all of this, once I returned from my novel break. His prayers are miraculous. What could have been a simple brutal arcade port, slavishly filled with the dread beast GREED's snarling and drooling, is something more. It is the video game circa 1985, distilled. There are bad people and they have someone you care about. Go defeat the bad people in your way and save the person you care about. Super Mario Bros. did this. Ghosts n Goblins did this. It is the plot of the video game, purified. For a moment, let us try and forget that human creativity muddles with this. Folks like Anita Sarkeesan have made critical assessments of how this formula more often than not involves a woman being put into a situation of peril, an object to be saved. She's not wrong, and she should not be getting the amount of shit she gets for stating that fact... but we must focus on the purity of that message. Kung Fu, the martial art, is not a means to go hog wild and attack things. It is a means of focusing your body and mind. That is what one must do. Kung Fu, the video game, is by extension a focusing of what it was to be a video game in 1985. One kicks and punches because the alternative is to assailed by the enemy. One leaps over snakes to avoid nature's bite. Sweep kicks, jump kicks, all delivered with HI-YA noises. All to save the person you care about. Then you do it all again, for this is a video game in 1985. It doesn't have an end. Do it again, but harder this time. The dread beast cannot be fully tranquilized. He never will give you an ending, but at the least his appetite has been quelled enough so that he does not kill you in seconds.

Kung Fu Heroes, on the other hand... this appears to be carnage for carnage's sake. Punching men with loud yells and making them explode. Is this the measured and focused approach, or fucking Fist Of The North Star? What the hell is going on here? You can't even move on to the next level, it seems, until you murder enough marauding martial artists. This is not the land of Valya. This is a spiral descending down into sheer madness. This is nothing like what I have been preaching. Is this how we leave the land of K? I feel drained. I feel as if a giant fire monster has wandered onto the screen unceremoniously. Yeah, that happened during my play time with Kung Fu Heroes. Funny enough... I remember this game from childhood. Vaguely. The same people I played it with borrowed an NES game from me. It was Krusty's Fun House. I'm not even making that up right now. How much of this has been decided for me already? Who the hell knows? With that, we escape the letter K. It has been a wild ride, even if part of it already popped up thanks to overwhelming feelings. Most of those have been smoothed out, however... but that's a story for another time.