Karate Champ

"NES Fighting Game....what a contradiction of words..."

Karate Champ is a game that really has some historical value in terms of what you played and what kind of action it features. However, when you really boil the game down to what it is, it is you against a computer controlled opponent in a point match where scoring a point against the computer takes timing and patience with the reward being the win. Ported over from the arcade, Karate Champ is an exercise in learning control, timing and generally trying to forget that a game like this actually exists. With a limited amount of moves that your character can perform, you could honestly consider this title to be a game that puts more into the fact that it is one of the first fighting games and nothing else! Fighting the same opponent over and over again, you’ll face off against the same computer controlled opponent several times before you really get tired of the lack of moves and such and shut the game off.

The game play is relatively simple, and has nothing of the complex move lists or buttons presses that we have in most fighting games today. Giving you a total of four moves, the basis of the game is timing and being able to counter whatever your computer opponent was using against you. Strategy is what becomes apparent, right in the first few seconds of play, simply because the game requires you to use a different move that will beat the speed and the accuracy of the one being thrown at you! With this being a two player game, you and a friend can go head to head, toe to toe, in a game of luck, skill and timing that will really be simple to play and relatively repetitive at the end. When you consider that this game goes back as many years as it does, you’ll find that most of the fighting games we have today were based off of this title and really show that the simplicity of fighting is set with a punch, kick and jump. Even if you defeat the opponent and move onto the matches in later stages, you’ll find that the game really isn’t about computer difficulty, but just changing up your tactics in order to get the flag and ultimately the win. The point scoring of the game is set to where the hard and more difficult the attack, the better your points will end up being, so be prepared to learn how to use that roundhouse kick effectively!

The control of Karate Champ is so simple that anyone can learn how to use it and pull off the moves without really breaking a sweat or getting aggravated at the fact that there are advanced moves. When I say that, it is because the game has nothing more advanced than the hard roundhouse kick, and that is done with a simple button press and directional pad movement! Breaking it down, the control is easy enough that anyone who is used to playing combo extensive games like Tekken and special move intensive games such as Street Fighter can pull off everything in a matter of seconds. The only thing that really hinders the game is the fact that the control can be stiff and unresponsive at times, and that the timing needs to be dead on in some cases that you’ll end up missing instead of hitting about forty percent of the time.

Visually, the game is as simple as it gets without being Pong. You have two characters on the screen with a referee in the background that waves a flag of a different color depending on the point that is received. You’ll also see that the two different characters have a color scheme that is either white {first player} or red {second player/computer} and that they are pretty much palette swapped animations with no real detail to them! If you’re looking for special moves and fluid moving characters, than you really need to move onto a different fighting game, because the NES doesn’t offer anything like that here, and you’ll quickly see that. The characters themselves move stiffly enough to be considered pasted onto the screen, and the different moves that you pull off look chopped up and poorly animated, so be prepared for that also!

Audio wise, Karate Champ has nothing to offer you other than a couple of sounds here and there for the hell of it. The music of the game resides in the title screen and before the matches, and is more or less MIDI music that is supposed to have some sort of adventurous and exciting theme to it that escapes you within the minute the game starts! The sound effects are also low key, in which the only thing you’ll hear is the poor sounding collision of feet and hands and the occasional warble of the referee when someone scores a point. When you take this into effect, you’ll have to think and imagine just how in the hell most fighting games were based off of this, and praise the fact that we have technological terrors such as Tekken as a result!

Karate Champ isn’t a bad game, but in the end, it isn’t a very impressive one either. With the lack of moves that you have at your disposal, the lack of characters that you face and overall, the lack of challenge, it’ll be hard to really get into this game and enjoy it for what it is. The visuals and the non-existent audio track are what really drive this game away, but if you take into effect that this is truly one of the first fighting games that we had to play, it was probably worth its weight in gold in its prime! NES collectors would do well to pick up this copy based solely on the fact that it really is the grandfather of all fighting games that we have, while fighting gamers will probably do well enough to leave this title alone and for the collectors to

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/06/01, Updated 12/06/01