The game I’m talking about today is not a classic. It isn’t a hidden gem, nor is it a game you should ever play. After the Atari 2600 the company struggled to stay relevant, and basically threw any ‘rad’ idea they had at the wall hoping something would stick. This is where Kung Food comes in to play. Beat ’em up games were all the rage in the arcades and were hitting their stride in the home console market. Atari had their Lynx handheld on the market but it was met with little fanfare. The reason? It ate batteries like there was no tomorrow. They wanted a beat ’em up for their system. They decided to make something with a lot of attitude, and what’s better than angsty vegetables? Kung Food was what they came up with, and believe you me it’s pretty bad. Let’s check it out.
Atari didn’t skimp out on a plot here. Your character is a scientist who brings a chemical from his lab home and stores it in his refrigerator. This transforms him into a muscle bound, but tiny fellow. He’s green like a sprig of broccoli. Let’s just call him Mr. Broccoli. Anyway, he has to fight his way through the freezer, fridge and other areas of the kitchen against an army of food items animated by the very chemicals he brought home. It’s classic Atari trying to be cool for better or worse.
Kung Food is a very traditional beat ’em up game. You can move left/right and up/down. You’ll need to in order to line yourself up with the enemies that walk in at all angles. The Atari Lynx has two face buttons (that you’ll be able to access at once anyway) and these allow you to either jump or attack. These can be performed in tandem via the flying kick, but this is largely useless. You have a life bar on the right side of the screen and can restore this with up arrow icon power-ups that are just laying around in each stage. The goal here is to move forward in a level by defeating all foes in the area.
That formula has worked for so many games. So what went wrong with Kung Food? Well, a whole heck of a lot actually. I don’t know if it’s the vertical plane being too high, or if the hit boxes are too small on opponents or what. The game gives you such a difficult time lining the character up to actually hit the opponents. I was often frustrated at what should be the simplest of tasks for a game like this. You have to constantly move yourself to just the right place. You can’t hit foes unless you’re perfectly lined up, yet they can still damage you if they aren’t. It makes Kung Food far more difficult to play than it should be.
This leads me to one of the game’s best points, surprisingly. Kung Food supports a huge amount of enemies on-screen at once. It absolutely blows Final Fight and Streets of Rage out of the water in this regard. That positive point is short lived when you can’t hit enemies unless you’re exactly lined up with them. That means the screen full of enemies is going to spell doom for you. If you get surrounded there’s no chance for you to move up or down to line yourself up in an effective manner. You basically have to retreat to a place you can set yourself up to actually hit them. This is beyond frustrating and is something the developers should have caught.
There are a few elements of the game that are unique to Kung Food. Obviously they didn’t become staples of the genre, and for good reason, but at least this game tried something new. The first element in question is the multiple vertical planes. In some areas you can jump between a higher area and fall to a lower one. If you can’t move forward chances are there’s an enemy or two up top that you need to take out first. It serves little purpose but it’s kind of cool. Next we have enemy spawns. These appear on the left hand side of the screen and enemies walk out from them. You have to destroy these to stop them from creating new food baddies. It’s actually kind of annoying.
There’s one last major nuance in this game. This is that many enemies are too small to hit with your standard punch or even jump kick. You have to duck down and hit them. This can be done by pressing down on the directional pad while attacking. Because you can move down this isn’t as natural as it sounds, and the combination is rather clunky. It only works half the time until you really get used to it. Even then, the system just isn’t intuitive. Again, you have to line yourself up just right and it’s terrible and far too difficult to do. If anything needed more polish it’s this aspect of the game.
Kung Food is a very weird game visually. This game was released in a time where developers were showing off how big they could make their character models, and that is a really sore note here. Mr. Broccoli is a huge character on-screen and takes up significant real estate. The same goes for the enemies. The art is very off-putting with angry icicles, tomatoes, and spear wielding carrots. The food theme does this game no favors, and Atari sure tried to cram as much attitude as they could into this little cartridge. Characters animate with very few frames of animation and everything looks clunky. The soundtrack is even more offensive. It’s downright offensive. I muted the game almost immediately. Aesthetically Kung Food is a real mess.
The Atari Lynx was a platform that was ahead of its time. Kung Food does not further this viewpoint. The platform has beat em up games that surpass this, and I really did not care for this one. The food motif is off-putting, the hit detection is awful, and the level design is terrible. For a system that was trailing behind literally everything else you’d think Atari would have tried better. Final Fight had a great formula to follow, so why didn’t they?
