Kick Challenger: Air Foot

Our list of Famicom Disk System games to play was largely built off of binging the Year of FDS series by Random Stranger on Youtube, and as such its appropriate to link to the Kick Challenger video since its a great primer. The charms of this particular game become apparent from watching only a few seconds of gameplay footage, and so it was an easy include on our list. We wanted to try it out!

To briefly summarize the mechanical premises of Kick Challenger: You're a tomato with feet. They are very explicitly human-shaped feet and toes and there is no way to avoid thinking about this. He does not wear socks. At any given time, one of your feet is planted firmly on the ground while the other is hovering, lifted off the ground, and directly controlled by the player using the D-pad. Pressing A takes the step, effectively switching which foot you currently control, while pressing B does a little kick with the currently-controlled foot. It also fires bug spray from your main body if you happen to have that powerup, and the fact that both attacks happen at once, from different locations, is another interesting quirk of things. We'll get to that. The point is that moving straight up the screen with no intervening obstacles is a matter of holding up and tapping a rhythmically.

It's hard not to think about QWOP while playing this sometimes, as it basically originated what we'll call the Control Comedy genre. Biologically, running on two legs is extremely complicated, but humans are capable of doing it without thinking much about it once they've had the practice. Video games are abstractions, and they abstract things like "walking" into a single button press. QWOP realized that if you don't do that, it's hilarious. Later titles like Octodad have another element to the humor: the standards for completion being very low. Like, you have to clean out the fridge so you just sweep everything out onto the floor all over the place, and everyone accepts that as normal. Kick Challenger doesn't seem to be attempting to be a comedy, exactly, but the interactions of the systems are inherently goofy. For example, the game doesn't model legs in any way, so you can be walking with your legs crossed and experiencing absolutely no problems from it. In that regard, the truest point of comparison to this thing is Trespasser, but its not on that same level of ambition.

Of course all of this is totally ignoring the game's actual structure and challenge. That's all fine. There are plenty of different obstacles that play with the controls, from slopes to conveyor belts. We think mostly the game suffers from being designed a little too 'typically.' There are holes you can step into leading to side areas that are largely just detours or punishment for guessing the wrong path. There are a lot of enemies you have to fight, all bugs, but they kind of just swarm you. There's some interest to be had in the various powerups, like the bug spray that replaces your main body for some reason, the different kinds of sneakers including ones that let you walk on water, and poop. You step in poop and it freezes enemies, which doesn't quite make sense but the fact that you're stepping into poop, potentially barefoot, has to be worth something right? Each level ends with a really big, detailed bug as a boss. We could see them being actually pretty unsettling if you don't like bugs, but that in itself is pretty memorable.

Kick Challenger is like the epitome of "75% of the way there but you gotta play it" for us. It's not incredible. It's not really a 'hidden gem' or whatever. It's just weird and unique enough that playing it for 20 minutes is going to be really amusing. Haven't beaten it, might never beat it, but that's okay. This is gaming.