Bruce Lee

Welcome to „Press Play on Tape”. Each Tuesday evening you will have a chance to read about some old and really damn old games that are still worth (in our opinion at least) playing or at least remembering.
The time range will be fairly vast and go all the way from Commodore 64 and Amiga 500 days to more “recent” PSOne and Nintendo 64.
As you probably already noticed the name and logo of the series (hopefully series ;) ) came form the C64 game Bruce Lee since it will be the first game reviewed.
So without further ado let’s look at one of the best games on Commodore 64 –Bruce Lee.

Bruce Lee is probably the first game that combined a platformer with beat’em up. The plot as well as game mechanics are incredibly simple, but then again that is what you could expect from an 8-bit computer game. You take control of the martial arts master Bruce Lee on a quest for eternal life and a shitload of gold. You ultimate goal is hidden deep inside an evil wizard’s tower and guarded but two fighters – a black ninja that will whack you over the head with a bokken stick and Yamo – a green sumo wrestler/demon/alien (take your pick) that will follow you all the way to hell and back – provided of course that hell is on the particular screen currently displayed.
The graphics were not impressive even for C64 standards, but the animation was surprisingly fluid and the characters had quirky moves.
There are twenty chambers to get though and you need to collect “laterns” in each to open hidden passages in order to reach “cash and fame”. To make things a bit harder apart from fighting Ninja and Yamo you need to watch out for flaming traps, flying daggers, spikes, electric floors and moving walls that populate the chambers. To add another merry annoyance both enemies will respawn a few seconds after they are killed so you never get bored. The good thing is that both Yamo and Ninja are not immune to traps and leading Ninja to a fiery death always seems to brighten my day for some reason.
The controls are basic, but efficient. You can run, duck (which makes you immune to enemy attacks), jump and attack in two ways – punch when you’re standing still, or do a flying kick when you’re running.
The game is very short – you can finish it below fifteen minutes and you will need to spend two or three days of training to know how to avoid all the dangers that await you.

“Bruce Lee” features two multiplayer modes. One, where players take turns to control their own Bruce Lee and a second, where one player controls Yamo and tries to beat the crap out of the unfortunate player controlling Lee.

You might be wondering right now why I bother to write about this game as it seems to be nothing special, but the game is highly addictive in its simplicity. You will have a strong urge to find the treasure chamber and before you know it you will either be trying to beat the game as fast as possible or fight legions of Yamos and Ninjas to get as many points as possible. After you beat the game you will be instantly put at the beginning of the first chamber on higher difficulty level and you can continue the adventure.

The game was ported to several systems including: ZX Spectrum (which unfortunately had even worse graphics than its C64 counterpart), Amstrad CPC, MSX and MS-DOS.

Also, I would like to thank my sweetheart for showing me a PC remake of the game that can be played on modern PC. The remake was made by Mark Rosten and can be downloaded for free from here.