Yie Ar KUNG-FU

Yie Ar KUNG-FU, was the forerunner to most modern fighting games released after the mid 1980's. The gameplay involved controlling your character Oolong to battle against several Kung-Fu masters each of whom had different skills and weapons which you had to overcome to attain the title of "Grand Master".

I played Yie Ar KUNG-FU almost as much as I played Elite! That's how good it is!

On a technical note, Yie Ar KUNG-FU featured palette switching to increase the number of colours on screen at the same time. The game was implemented in MODE 5 which supports 4 colours on screen but if you examine the screenshots below, you'll see that the game screens contained more than the 4 colours available with the main play area changing the colours used based on which character was being fought.

The top part of the screen where the score and health levels of the players were displayed used black, white, red and green.

The next part of the screen where the background image was displayed used black, white, cyan and blue.

The game area used black, yellow, cyan and the "opponent colour" which was white for Buchu, red for Star, blue for Nuncha, green for Pole.

Given each BBC Micro had slightly different timing, the game allowed you to manually tweak the timing using the arrow keys whilst paused so that the palette switching could be tuned to perfection.

Once the game progressed past the first level featuring the unseed Feedle, the background is changed to a pagoda for several oponents before facing Feedle again. After facing Feedle for a second time, the backdrop changes to the cave again and the game repeats with increased difficulty.

Screenshots