See the bar thing at the top of the screen? The right hand side represents your health; the bit on the left is your 'chi' power

Has Activsion's attempt to create a beat 'em up for the yoof market resulted in a strong brew with bags of exciting gameplay? Or is it a weak offering with less action than a playground ruck in Grange Hill? FG spanks some monkeys...
Gideon Kibblewhite

We don't want the nation's youth corrupted by mindless, graphic computer game violence, do we? No! Because we don't want them to grow up into vicious bullies, do we? No! So we should give them games where, instead of beating up their fellow human beings, they get to beat up their fellow animals instead, shouldn't we? Errr...

You see, in T'ai-Fu, a game aimed at young PlayStationers, you play a heroic tiger named, aptly, T'ai Fu. (Cough.) T'ai Fu, the instruction booklet tells us, is 'a bad ass with a fierce attitude, a guy who can fight his way out of any situation'. He must kill all the evil animals of the jungle (the snakes and monkeys, for instance - and the cranes, strangely), through 20 3D levels, and slay all seven big bad bosses in order to save the world from the evil Dragon Master...

Mmm... a fine example to kids everywhere. What about sitting around a table and talking things over? But hey, you cry, never mind about that, what the kids want to know is: is T'ai Fu 'bad-ass' enough to keep them from their homework? Alas, the sad answer is no. In fact, they could get quite keen on algebra, in comparison, because T'ai Fu fails on many levels: it's too simple and unscary for all but the youngest players; it lacks the wonder of other non-violent games like Spyro, which can appeal to the really little ones; and lastly it's also full of bugs (not the jungle variety either).

What you do in T'ai Fu is simple: you plod and bounce around picking up points and power-ups, perform a bit of platform negotiation, beat up a few enemy animals along the way, and then carry on to the next level and another corny animation sequence.