The Karate Kid

"uhm...."

Introduction
Well, once again, the NES treats us to a very bad game based on what in my opinion was a very bad movie. Home Alone was much better than this. Karate Kid is supposedly based on the movie of the same name. I went into my local game exchange looking for something new, (to me anyway), and I saw this game. I'd been looking for NES RPG's, but there weren't any that I didn't have. I bought this game hoping I might find some entertainment in it, but when I got it home I discovered that I had been horribly wrong! The reasons for this will become clearer if you read on, for I shall explain in more detail in the breakdown of this abomination which people call a game. Even for the NES this game sucked!
Control 1-10. I hated the controls in this game. I found them to be too difficult to learn, and then once you learned the moves they were really hard to pull off. I especially had issues with jumping. THe play/control makes it hard to time your jumps properly, so you would then fall off a cliff and die.
Audio 1-10. Oh god, noooo! Please turn it off! The SFX were below average, and didn't fit what they were used for, except for maybe the swinging hammers in the bonus games. In the fly catching game, the fly's buzz got really annoying really fast. The only other cool sound was the sound it made when you broke ice blocks in the other bonus game. The music was very bad in my opinion, except for two tunes, the level complete theme and the stage 3 theme. Other than that the music sucked.
Challenge 10-10. Note: this is not a good thing. This game was way too damn hard. Stage three had you racing against a typhoon while at the same time trying to fight off a bunch of guys who are after your life.
Story 1-10. I don't know the story, except you go beat up guys and rescue some chick. The ending really sucked, and there wasn't even a proper ending theme. It was just the crappy intro theme.
Replay value 0-10. Once you beat this game, (assuming you don't smash the thing first), there's really no point to come back to it. It's just not that entertaining, and the bad control abominable audio and unbelievable challenge make it not worth the effort.
Overall 1-10. I will only say that I was severely disappointed with this game, even though I didn't like the movie very much either.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 08/27/01, Updated 03/01/03