#honestly the 80s and 90s were all about the Japanese and Chinese martial arts

[alltingfinns]

Pretty sure this isn't even the first rodeo for the UK. Remember their 80s and 90s scare of everything related to ninjas?

True story: in the UK, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was changed into Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles for distribution. Because my dad on his work travels to the UK discovered that video cassettes were much cheaper there than in Sweden, he would buy all kinds of movies and cartoons on tape there and bring home to us. (I credit a lot of my early developed English skills to this.) The point is that is how I know that they very obviously edited the intro. Yet, funnily enough, the general references to ninjas remained throughout the show. Probably because it's one thing to cut in "hero" instead of "ninja" into an intro sequence, but doing so for all the dialogue just wouldn't work.

There was throughout the 80s and 90s a sort of ninja craze going on, as part of the wider action movie craze. Pretty sure it's to blame for New York's ban on nunchuks as well.

Who had “English government enacts Haito Edict” on their 2024 bingo?

[autolenaphilia]

Shadow Warrior (1997)

Shadow Warrior is a 1997 first-person shooter developed by 3D Realms. It’s essentially their immediate follow-up to their previous game, Duke Nukem 3D released the previous year. It’s very similar to their previous game in many ways, it’s another first-person shooter using the Build engine. A lot of what I said about Duke Nukem 3D applies to this game.

What is more distinct about Shadow Warrior is that the developers at 3D Realms were more familiar with the Build engine and thus able to push its limits even further. The faking of room-over-room is more sophisticated in this game. For example, water surfaces are now transparent, hiding the teleports going from the surface to below water even better. And Shadow Warrior might be the first FPS to feature sections where you could drive vehicles and use gun turrets. Keep in mind, this was four years before Halo. And weapons feature alternate fire modes that you could use by right-clicking, another innovation that would become standard in the years to come. Another minor innovation that would become ubiquitous is that there are useable ladders.

There isn’t much else to say, it’s similar solid boomer shooter action compared to 3D Realms’ previous game. If you liked Duke Nukem 3D, you’ll probably enjoy Shadow Warrior.

And liking Duke Nukem 3D might also mean you are able to stomach some painful 90s cis white dude humor, which kinda is a prerequisite for enjoying Shadow Warrior too.

It’s honestly quite a bit worse, mostly because this game ends orientalist/racist humor to the mix. If Duke Nukem is a parody of 80s action movies, Shadow Warrior is a parody of kung-fu movies, and also pop culture ninjas and anime. If that mix sounds like a weird mash-up of Chinese and Japanese culture, that’s becauseit literally is. This game stars Lo Wang, a horny old chinese man who seems right out of a Hong Kong martials arts movie, but actually he is a ninja who lives and works in Japan. He even has a katana and shurikens as weapons. He is voiced by a white man* doing a stereotypical chinese accent. It’s just as stereotypical and offensive as you might think, and popular white American impressions of Chinese and Japanese pop culture are mixed together into an one big “Asian” joke. Lo Wang’s name is basically just one recurring dick joke. The sexy naked women from Duke Nukem return, but this time the sprites are drawn in an anime-style.

(*The white man in question was the late voice actor John Galt. It turns out the real answer to “Who is John Galt?” is “the voice of Lo Wang in Shadow Warrior” although Galt was born before Atlas Shrugged was written.)

It’s no surprise that Duke Nukem has endured as a character, being memed about to this day, and people like Clint LGR or Gianni Matragrano have great fun doing their Jon St. John as Duke Nukem impression in youtube videos, while Lo Wang is kinda forgotten. If a gaming youtuber did a Lo Wang impression today it would be a scandal, and rightly so. This is despite Shadow Warrior unlike Duke Nukem having a succesful reboot series starting in 2013, with the third game in the reboot series released as recently in 2022. But the 2013 reboot reimagined Lo Wang pretty much beyond all recognition, precisely because of all the racial stereotyping in the original.

The original game does have some solid action gameplay though. And I do appreciate some of the gunplay in this game. You get a missile launcher, basically the standard FPS RPG weapon, except one of its alternate firemode is literally a tactical nuke. You can easily kill yourself with it, and the only viable method of using it is firing it and hiding behind a corner to avoid getting hurt by the blast. It’s amazing. I can’t fully condemn an FPS game that allows you to carry and use nukes. To quote Lo Wang himself when he picks a nuke up. “I like nuclear weapons” (in games).

The original Shadow Warrior is now available free of charge on GOG. And you can use dosbox to emulate MS-DOS, but a better alternative is the sourceport VoidSW which is based on and is included with downloads of the Duke Nukem 3D sourceport eduke32.