moar liek karate chump
Playing fighting games that predate conventions that were made popular by Street Fighter II is usually a comical affair. Karate Champ on NES really isn't any different.
To call some of the inputs for this game "unintuitive" would be an understatement especially when you're used to modern day standards. When you start playing this game you'll probably press forward and B, which will throw a kick that spins you backwards with your back to your opponent, which then probably spells doom for you and eating a kick upside your ass. As you can tell, there is no tracking in this game so you have to manually turn yourself around, or throw kicks backwards like in Double Dragon II. You also can't jump and attack at the same time, you can only either jump in place by hitting up on the dpad or tap A and B together to hop forward or backward again similar to Double Dragon. If you want to do a jumping kick you have to tap up and A at the same time.
The hitboxes are insanely touchy in this game, your foot sweep visibly looks like it should cover a decent amount of range, but in reality you have to literally be within breathing distance to hit your opponent with it. It's similar with every other attack to the point where it looks like the both of you are throwing punches and kicks straight through each other. The hitbox problem gets even more apparent when you try to play the bonus stages in-between fights, where you try to punch/kick flower pots being thrown at you from offscreen. You need timing akin to Buddha himself to be able to break these things without them clobbering you, and combined with the awkward control scheme and this game's amazing ability to eat your inputs it makes it feel like an impossible task.
The CPU is about what you would expect from a game from 1986, button-reading but also really stupid. I got through most of the ranks of this game by just standing in neutral with no input at the beginning of the round and waiting for my opponent to lumber into distance of my punch and nail them. Worked about 90% of time assuming my input wasn't eaten, or on the off-chance they decide to throw a high kick or jump over me which is met with me spamming the back kick which feels like the best attack in the game. At champ difficulty that obviously goes out the window once their button-reading goes into maximum overdrive, which then my strategy changed to jumping over them and spamming the back kick and hoping for the best. I beat about three champion difficulty opponents doing this before I lost interest in the game, since I consider the game beaten by that point.
The game isn't too terrible to play in 2022, it's funny to watch two supposed karate practitioners attempt to hit each other while getting walloped by flower pots especially with a second player. A fun curiosity.
Playing fighting games that predate conventions that were made popular by Street Fighter II is usually a comical affair. Karate Champ on NES really isn't any different.
To call some of the inputs for this game "unintuitive" would be an understatement especially when you're used to modern day standards. When you start playing this game you'll probably press forward and B, which will throw a kick that spins you backwards with your back to your opponent, which then probably spells doom for you and eating a kick upside your ass. As you can tell, there is no tracking in this game so you have to manually turn yourself around, or throw kicks backwards like in Double Dragon II. You also can't jump and attack at the same time, you can only either jump in place by hitting up on the dpad or tap A and B together to hop forward or backward again similar to Double Dragon. If you want to do a jumping kick you have to tap up and A at the same time.
The hitboxes are insanely touchy in this game, your foot sweep visibly looks like it should cover a decent amount of range, but in reality you have to literally be within breathing distance to hit your opponent with it. It's similar with every other attack to the point where it looks like the both of you are throwing punches and kicks straight through each other. The hitbox problem gets even more apparent when you try to play the bonus stages in-between fights, where you try to punch/kick flower pots being thrown at you from offscreen. You need timing akin to Buddha himself to be able to break these things without them clobbering you, and combined with the awkward control scheme and this game's amazing ability to eat your inputs it makes it feel like an impossible task.
The CPU is about what you would expect from a game from 1986, button-reading but also really stupid. I got through most of the ranks of this game by just standing in neutral with no input at the beginning of the round and waiting for my opponent to lumber into distance of my punch and nail them. Worked about 90% of time assuming my input wasn't eaten, or on the off-chance they decide to throw a high kick or jump over me which is met with me spamming the back kick which feels like the best attack in the game. At champ difficulty that obviously goes out the window once their button-reading goes into maximum overdrive, which then my strategy changed to jumping over them and spamming the back kick and hoping for the best. I beat about three champion difficulty opponents doing this before I lost interest in the game, since I consider the game beaten by that point.
The game isn't too terrible to play in 2022, it's funny to watch two supposed karate practitioners attempt to hit each other while getting walloped by flower pots especially with a second player. A fun curiosity.