Maximum Letdown: Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu (NES)

A word to the wise: just because something comes from the Far East, makes no sense, and flops commercially, does not make it a cult classic, a good game, or even an above average game for that matter. (Oh, and before you hit us up with any hate mail, I should let you know that I count Madworld amongst my top 10 games from last year, enjoyed No More Heroes, got a good laugh out of Katamari Damancy, and even loved Killer 7 enough to try to make sense out of its plot, and I even featured 3 of those 4 games as previous $20 GOTWs). Crap is crap, regardless of which side of the Pacific Ocean it comes from. Such is the case of this clunker, produced by Taiwanese company Joy Van and released in the United States by our friends at Color Dreams.

Remember Color Dreams? Sure you do, I mentioned them in the Christian video games feature I did last Christmas. For those of you who didn’t catch it (and are too lazy to click) however, here is a quick refresher: during the heyday of the NES, Nintendo held third party publishers and developers to a strict set of standards. Color Dreams was one of the few that didn’t wish to be confined by Nintendo’s strict licensing, so they reverse engineered the 10NES lockout chips and released their games unlicensed. Color Dreams could be considered true innovators of the era; that is, if they didn’t go out of business and if their games hadn’t sucked. Their games were so terrible that they formed a sub-label, Bunch Games to release lower quality games so as to not harm their reputation even further. Picture that for a moment. A publisher creating a sub label to purposely release crappy games. Another sub label they created was called Wisdom Tree, a company dedicated to creating games based on Christian themes. Joy Van, or Sachen/Thin Chen Enterprises/Commin as they are also called, had quite the history themselves. They produced a lot of unlicensed games for the NES, Game Boy, and Sega Mega Drive, many of which were released overseas by other developers who also either sold or created unlicensed titles. Most of their games were ripoffs of more popular console and arcade games, and they even produced hardware clones and those 4 in 1 Game Boy packs that you see with the bootleggers. In fact, they were at one time one of the most prolific developers of unlicensed software.

Enough about that. Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is a 2 player screw-up of a platformer. The Hindu god Shiva has cursed Chu’s village, and Hu, in his despair turned to alcoholism. The two set out to stop Shiva with their array of slow firing shots, and a crappy fan/knife attack that fends off projectiles but is mostly useless. It should be noted that despite the fact that Hu is allegedly a drunkard, he has the same abilities as Chu. Of course since Chu also moves slow and his shots are also slow, it could be argued that Chu is also a drunkard, or maybe they’re both just stupid. Since both A and B are assigned to attacks, you have to press up to jump, which just isn’t practical at all for a platformer. Not only that, no matter how hard you press up, your character floats to the top of the screen. With things like spiders and bats on my case, this gets excruciating. Not only that, to complete the first 7 levels, I need to find 8 yin yang symbols scattered around each. If I have to continue on levels 8 or 9, I’m sent back to the start of 7. Good thing then that the bosses you’ll battle aren’t very tough and defeating them requires little more strategy than standing in front of them and repeatedly press the A button.

If Shiva’s curse made Master Hu turn to alcohol, being in this game will turn Hu into a cocaine addict. If Color Dreams was still around to day, they could have done a sequel to this entitled “Master Chu and the dope fiend Hu”. Since it’s an unlicensed cart, the chances of this, as well as any of Color Dream’s other ‘classics’ showing up on the Virtual Console are absolutely nothing. Good thing too. As much as we love those quirky Japanese/Korean/Taiwanese/Chinese/Vietnamese/Thai developed games, one must remember that for every Burning Rangers or Chu Chu Rockets, there are a thousand Master Chus and Drunkard Hus.