Fist II: The Legend Continues

The quest

Find the scrolls, beat the guards, clear the way

The adventure asks three things of the hero, over and over. He finds the scrolls and carries each one to its temple, where meditating on its trigram teaches him what it holds. He fights the Warlord's men, who wait along the way and have to be fought one at a time. And he gets past the obstacles that close the paths: heaps of stone, trees, the way to the river, a crevice and rooms of poison, each passable only once the right scroll is learnt. When enough of the way is open, the volcano's last room starts the ending ($218C).

The land is 123 joined screens ($4AEC). The Maps tab draws all of them, and the Solution tab gives a route through.

Controls

Eight directions, with and without fire

The joystick in port 2 does everything. Each direction means one thing with the fire button up, and another with it pressed. The diagrams are the manual's, drawn for a fighter facing right: "forward" is the way he faces.¹

Press a direction to see the move. Each one is the game's own move script for that stick position ($33C3, $AF46): a list of steps, each a pose held for a number of frames and a step across or up ($1AA1). A blow plays out and then back, as the game plays it backwards when the stick is let go.

To turn round, start a roundhouse and let go of the button. Blocking is automatic: step back just as the opponent is about to land a blow, and the hero blocks high or low as the blow needs, so holding a block does not work. The kneeling punch, "the true Exploding Fist punch", is a crouch followed by a push forward.¹ RESTORE pauses the game ($3C23), and F5, which the manual says ends it and returns to the demo, starts a new game on this disk ($2444).

In the code, a table turns the joystick position and the fire button into a move ($33C3), and a second says which moves may follow which ($33E3). The forward somersault is how the hero clears a hole or a drop: it carries him about ten columns off the floor ($371D).

Chi

One energy bar for the whole journey

The manual calls energy Chi.¹ The hero's bar is the scroll at the bottom left ($2563), the opponent's at the bottom right ($25D2), and the hero's carries over from fight to fight. There is no dojo and no referee, as there was in the first game: the bar is all the hero has for the whole journey.

The manual says the limit grows "depending on the number of opponents you have defeated since your last meditation".¹ The code counts every defeat since the game began instead: the counter ($048C) is cleared only when a game starts ($2135), and meditating reads it ($396F) without clearing it. The limit reaches 127 after twenty defeats and stays there, wherever the hero meditates. The counter itself stops at 31 ($352D).

Scrolls

Eight scrolls, eight trigrams

Each scroll carries a trigram, three lines whole or broken, and the manual gives each a hint "as to how and when their knowledge can be used".¹ The status band shows the trigram of every scroll found. Matching the game's icons to the manual's drawings puts a name to each scroll, and the code says what each one actually does.

The icons are drawn from the game's status-band font ($E800), two characters per scroll from two small tables ($054B), top line first. Eight bytes record the scrolls ($0405): 1 when a scroll is found, $80 once it is delivered. The manual lists the trigrams in a different order (Ch'ien, Sun, Chen, Kan, Ken, K'un, Li, Tui); the names here follow the lines, not the list. Where each scroll lies and the way to its temple are on the Maps and solution tab.

Enemies

The Warlord's men

The manual names peasant soldiers, warrior guards, ninjas who throw stars, masked shoguns, assassins who "cannot be outrun", and mud warriors from the caves, with snakes, panthers and bats besides. Fighting is optional: "you need not fight them to continue your exploration ... but you will not gain beneficial experience".¹

Opponents fight with attack combinations, short scripts of moves chosen from a jump table ($3288) and a random number. How a blow is judged to land is below.

Blows

How a blow is judged to land

Whether a blow lands is worked out from the move and the frame of its animation, not from the pictures touching ($379C).

For each move and each frame, a table gives either $80, no strike in this frame, or a value the game compares with the distance between the two fighters ($379C). There are two tables, one for fighters facing each other ($7CA6) and one for both facing the same way ($7E53), so a kick behind you is judged by its own numbers. The hardware's sprite collision register is read as well ($3328). A blow that lands scores 100 points times the move's value ($051D).

A move is a script of four-byte steps ($AF46): how long to hold, which pose, and how far to move across and up, read one step at a time ($1AF0). There are 44 scripts. The opponent's combinations are picked with a random number from an 8-bit shift register ($3141).

Late game

After thirty defeats, the dead come back

Every place where an opponent waits is a record in a table of 54 ($E609), and beating him marks the record done ($3522). A done record stays quiet until the hero has beaten 30 opponents. From then on, each time the game checks a done opponent's place as the hero reaches it, it rolls a random number and brings him back one time in four ($2820).

A player on Lemon64⁵ saw the same rules in play: enemies "start respawning later in the game", tied to "a kill count threshold" rather than to the scrolls; an opponent scrolled off the screen before he is beaten is still there on the way back; and in the late game a returning opponent "may re-appear, or he may not". The code agrees on all three. The same player found that the fifth trigram has "no measurable effect", and the code agrees there too. Scroll 5's only reader is the check that cuts a horde short ($27AD), and no encounter in this copy calls for a horde ($E609).

A 2023 review on The King of Grabs⁸ counts "bugs that make defeated enemies re-appear" among the game's faults. The code shows the return is meant: a counter, a threshold of 30 and a random roll, not a slip.

The player⁵ tested the cassette version; this site's reading is of the Mindscape disk. The rules match what the player saw, but the two releases have not been compared byte for byte.

Tournament

A second game on the disk, for practice

The manual describes a Tournament mode for one or two players, against "a series of computer opponents or a friend"¹, with keyboard controls for both fighters (F7 switches between keyboard and joystick). The Mindscape disk offers it as Training, beside the Adventure, and the Mindscape manual⁹ sets out its rules. One player faces opponents of rising skill in different settings and must beat each one twice to go up a dan. Two players fight eight rounds of sixty seconds, two in each of four places. Points come for every blow that lands, and for the time left on the clock after a knockout. Training is a separate program, and this site covers only the Adventure.