Karate Champ
System: NES
Release Date: December 1986
Developer: Data East, Sakata SAS
Publisher: Data East
Genre: Fighting
Karate Champ comes in here as the second fighting game on NES and it’s like watching Daniel-San, but like on mountains and stuff instead of in a normal tournament. The goal here is to flatten your opponents with your superior martial arts skill. However, you have to make sure to do it fast, as the clock is constantly counting down against you.
You must be the first to earn two points through contact with your opponent. That wins you the round. Winning two rounds wins you the match. If the time counts down to zero, the referee will award the round to whoever is ahead at the time. The referee likes to find himself on all sorts of odd places to judge the match.
There are a surprising number of attacks, even if I don’t know how to get them to land all the time. You throw an attack by pressing the A Button, the B button, or both at the same time. Then you can modify them further by pressing the D-pad in any of the four directions. Learning what each attack does and when they should be executed is the point of the game. Some attacks are worth one point, others only half a point. I wasn’t clear on what differentiated them.
You have to get a clean shot in on your opponent, that is against an area that is vulnerable. If you’re both attacking, it seems that getting a shot in is difficult, unless you happen to be throwing rock at his scissors, if you catch my drift. The computer beat me several times in a row before I started to figure out which attacks were the least likely to be blocked. Then I spammed those and moved forward through the game.
The stages have some neat variety to them, despite the fact that they all do the same thing. After winning a fight, vases start flying at you from off screen. I think you’re supposed to choose the right attacks to break them, but I didn’t have much luck with that. As a kid, I thought the NES had no fighting games. Now I find two were released in the first couple years of the system life. I guess there’s a good reason I’m doing this series after all.
Graphics: 2.5
The sprites are large enough for attack animations to look decent. The stages are all differentiated backgrounds.
Sound: 1.0
I bet most of the room on the cartridge is the digitized speech of “point” and “begin”.
Gameplay: 2.0
The amount of attacks is enough to give this game some points. Some attacks work better in certain situation than others, which leads to cancellation heavy gameplay.
Difficulty: 2.5
You’re going to get your butt kicked until you learn the moves. It’s as if you are graduating to higher belts as you learn the ins and outs of the game.
Fun Factor: 2.0
I would say Karate Champ was reasonably fun. I’d probably give it another shot someday.
Overall Grade: 2.0
Karate Champ earns a solid C. If I think I was too generous to Urban Champion, I think I rated this one fairly.