As someone that is not good at any fighting games, I think this game ROCKS. I went to an arcade with a few friends that ARE good at certain fighting games, and I was actually able to stand up against them in this! That's because this game is the most barebones concept of a fighter, where spacing and reacting is key, but there's so little to the visual feedback that it makes it so much easier to understand than your modern fighters.

The stiff controls also add to how important every single one of your moves are. It adds a layer to understanding the spacing and such.

Fuck the haters, this game is dope. It aged so well, as all of us got really into this and competitive during our time there.

Meh, pretty obsolete game, just doesn't bring anything to the table.

In my opinion, any fighting game that only has a d-pad and 2 buttons is doomed to fail unless it's very movement based, and Karate Champ has extremely stiff and slow movement.

It's just a clunky silly little game. The levels are interesting to look at but change literally nothing, there's no music for matches either, which makes the game feel more boring.

Idk, just not much here.

i have very slight fondness for this and I appreciate it and why it exists. It is in fact bad though.

Played with a friend on a graphically glitched out semi-connected cart. Game worked normal otherwise though. :>

It is very difficult to tell when and why attacks won't connect. Can't tell if it's a hitbox thing or a mechanic we are missing?

It is actually pretty neat having so many moves and button combinations in such an early game. It definitely isn't an completely unimportant game in the line of early fighting games but uhh it's more difficult than some to go back to.

Very simple but frustrating fights that you are never sure why you are winning or losing. :>

Perhaps I am rating this very slightly low...

Oh well! ! goodbye

Initial concept is poorly translated into the NES port. The idea is that each attack is mapped to a combination of a direction and a button (A, B or A+B). The problem is that the game doesn't have strict focal targeting, so much as the character only turns after a proper attack, when the positions are reversed. In practice, this means that it is not possible to learn actions in terms of forward-backward, but rather in terms of absolute direction. This deviation from the norm is a concern, as it is not necessarily possible to estimate the direction of our character's gaze. On the other hand, the automatic guard is particularly permissive. Overall, the title does not accept priority, which means that two attacks made at the same time will cancel each other out, regardless of the direction. The game then becomes a mid-range battle to force a certain favourable pattern (in my case, I estimated that baiting a jump with a low kick allows you to hit with a front kick or back kick, if parried). Indeed, since it is a karate game, there is no confirmation system, since each hit will stop the fight. In short, this is a title that did not transition well to the NES.

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.