Kusoge Sunday: Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu

Color Dreams, the developers of numerous unlicensed NES anti-delights, is not normally thought of as a publisher. But publish they did, in between coding classic kusoge like Menace Beach and Baby Boomer. One might have expected them to put their limited resources behind a game that represented a step up from their usual garbage. Such expectations would be misplaced, as Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu makes abundantly clear.

Developed by Sachen, a Taiwanese developer whose unlicensed Famicom games were similar in reputation to Color Dreams' NES games, Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is an unqualified disaster. It should be enough to say that the game seems to have taken its primary inspiration from The Legend of Kage. Its main character (who I suppose is Master Chu) looks, jumps and fights like Kage, and the title screen even has him standing on a high tree branch.

The similarities are all superficial, though. While The Legend of Kage is no masterpiece, it is playable. As nearly as I can tell, there is no way to progress past the third stage in Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu. The object of each stage is to collect eight hidden yin-yang symbols, which opens a door to a boss room. Levels are small and scroll left and right, and there seems to be no way to uncover all the yin-yangs in one trip across the screen. Rather, there are a limited number of hiding places which turn up a different item each time you shoot them, so opening a boss door requires running back and forth through the level a few times, shooting the same spots over and over until all the necessary items show up.

If you think that sounds awful, you're right. But it gets worse. Both characters (Hu is playable in the two player mode, but controls exactly like Chu) are woefully underpowered; it takes three or four shots to put even the weakest enemies down, and bosses feel almost invulnerable. Pressing B causes Chu to swing a fan, which on a few random occasions blocked projectile attacks, but either timing blocks is completely unintuitive, or the mechanic is simply broken, because attempting to block the projectiles that stream out of bosses usually just led to dying.

It's hard to say whether Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is an improvement over Color Dreams' own attempts at game development. On one hand, it looks worlds better. Even though the level designs are depressingly bad, the characters at least don't look like google-eyed monstrosities. But as floaty and loose as the average Color Dreams game is, at least it feels like you could, with enough practice, acclimate to the controls and win the game. Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu, on the other hand, feels like it was released before they coded the bit where your attacks actually damage enemies. In short, it looks marginally better, but is essentially unplayable.

Call it a wash. Just don't let Color Dreams' rare moment of inspiration in renaming this game trick you into actually playing it.