Kung-Fu Master

I feel like this game being the first real beat em up seriously took risks and paved the way for the future of the genre. I like the sprite work a lot the detail of the main character with the shadow work is great same with the building outside. In terms of gameplay its brutal but its timing based. Do you need to be facing left or right? Do you have to jump or duck? Do you have time to land a hit? Much like Karate champ this had alot of some insanely solid mechanics that where used for years.

Also Can you kick 4 people off the map at the same time?

Hell yeah you can and it feels GREAT

The first arcade beat-em up has limited controls, only featuring a single punch and kick for standing, crouching and jumping, but manoeuvering is smooth and the framerate and response is high, giving progeny to the versatility of fighting game characters. It makes slapping henchmen with a snappy strike and a loud kiai so immensely satisfying. You get five levels of that as well as some obstacle courses with decent variety in enemies and traps, but it gets boring almost immediately just because of the soul-crushing difficulty. There's a slo-mo dip switch in the arcade(activated by holding down the P2 start button) that makes the game a lot more better for playing, in my opinion. Beat em ups could use more bullet time sequences. Arcade: 2.0

The NES version is really impressive in a lot of ways. The gameplay is very faithfuly and fluently ported, and its mere 40kb of memory still provides enough space for Thomas' iconic shouts and even the villain's laughter, but by far the biggest improvement is the leap in managability for surmounting the game. It's much easier than the arcade version though still pretty hard, but not enough so that it will harm your play while using rewind or save states. 3.0

ZX Spectrum version is bad, with sloppy controls, and graphics that are just a skeleton of the arcade game. 1.5

Its perhaps the first beat em up, but its not a very good game apart from innovation. The animation quality is very awkward, and the music soon gets grating. Most enemies die in 1 hit, and the game is fast to react to your input. Unfortunatly, most enemies grab you leaving powerless while you mash the buttons, which makes the game very frustrating to play as it has a tendency to throw waves of enemies at you. It feels like its way too hard for the sake of it, and unless you play with endless credits game over means back to the beginning. The damsel in distress is not worth the amount of frustration it provides.