Karate Champ

"Let's talk about Collision Detection."

Karate Champ gets its fame from being one of the first fighting games. Unfortunately, this does not excuse the rather serious flaws that prevent the game from being enjoyable.

Premise: You are a karate student (WHITE). You fight with the other karate student (RED), while sensei watches and acts as the referee. The goal is to hit your opponent with a karate move before he hits you. It may sound simple, but it is not.

Gameplay is the heart of a fighting game, and Karate Champ is in desperate need of cardiac surgery. A round ends when one player hits the other. There is no life bar; one hit does the job. So much for actually getting involved in a battle. Hitting your opponent is no small task, however. Karate Champ features the worst collision detection on this side of Superman 64. Your fist may hit your opponent, or even go through your opponent, and yet he remains standing. There may actually be rhyme and reason behind what constitutes a hit, but I have yet to figure it out.

There are other problems. While there are many moves, figuring out which one to use in a given situation is tantamount to guessing random numbers. You don't know which ones are going to hit, so you might as well bang on the controller and hope for the best. Again, there might actually be logic to how this game works, but several hours of playing the game have not yet uncovered it. The simple task of turning around is, as far as I can tell, impossible.

One of the better points of Karate Champ is graphics. Most of the levels have colorful and well-drawn backgrounds. Some are a bit simple, some are hard to understand, and some are downright ugly. But most of them are pretty good. The animation of the two fighters also actually resembles real karate moves, which is saying a lot for the NES.

Karate Champ has no music except for the little blip at the beginning of the game. There are sound effects, though. Namely, the irritating sounds of swiping at your opponent and falling over. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at the NES's sorry attempt at digitized speech.

Seeing how Karate Champ actually has a few fans and decent graphics, it didn't seem right to give it a 1 or a 2. But the bottom line is that, after several hours of playing the game (mind you, I had nothing else to do), I neither figured out how to play nor actually enjoyed it.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 06/17/01, Updated 06/17/01