Game 319: Karate Champ

Aren't you a little old for video games?

 

Few genres have proven so resilient to evolution as fighters since Street Fighter II carved the modern template into stone with a well placed uppercut. This isn't to deny the genre any advancement since, but fact is, decades later, Street Fighter II and its contemporaries feel nowhere near as foreign as Wolfenstein 3D does compared to later shooters, or King's Quest to later adventures, or Ultima Underworld to later dungeon crawlers. The modern fighter differs from its codifying ancestors mainly by degrees of breadth and complexity. Groundbreakers that carved out a niche within this niche have at best coexisted with the Street Fighter formula, but even the most successful have yet to truly revolutionize it.

The fighting games that predate Street Fighter II, though, are a diverse array of weirdness, as one may expect from a landscape where dozens of developers all have different ideas on how to simulate a martial arts tournament without having any one particularly successful example to take notes from. Technos Japan & Data East's Karate Champ is, in my opinion, the first attempt of significance, and the first to directly influence many key elements to come, even if the holistic experience feels both primitive and alien.

Karate Champ sides more toward simulation than most, with its realistically proportioned and fluidly animated practitioners, its limited but authentic set of karate strikes, and full contact kumite rules. There are no health bars here - each hit scores a full or half point depending on the difficulty of the move and the skill of its execution, and the first to score two full points wins the match. There's a weighty, physical feel to the movement, where every footstep forward or backward counts discretely, and each strike is a commitment that can be reversed at any point but never taken back (i.e. you can do a fakeout roundhouse but forget about kara-canceling a fully extended foot).

Move execution itself is probably the most unique aspect of Karate Champ. Lacking any face buttons, the cabinet presents you with twin 4-way joysticks, and each combination of directions performs a different action. Some combinations are even context sensitive -  for instance, pushing forward on the right stick performs either a front kick or reverse punch depending on how close you are, and pushing back on the left stick normally backsteps, but may also cause you to block incoming strikes (sound familiar?)

Moves differ by reach and speed, and the quicker ones never score you the full point. Any move is a bit risky; slower moves can be blocked, dodged, or just plain miss, exposing you to counterattack, and quicker, short-ranged moves require moving in close, risking a hit from a long-reaching strike as you step in. The system is a little intimidating at first, with so much presented up front, and expecting you to memorize a matrix of unintuitive lever motions just to do basic moves, but basic moves is all you get here.

I soon found a strategy that let me win consistently for quite awhile.

Flip over the opponent, and the AI will invariably try to swat you out of the air. And nine times out of ten, it will miss. Then you can position yourself in just the perfect spot to deliver a back roundhouse to the face for a full point. Or if you land too close, you can use a quicker move for an easy half point. Even if you screw up and completely miss, you can still sometimes salvage the half point in the ensuing melee, and it's no tragedy if you fail. The AI rarely uses full point moves on you, so you only need this gambit to succeed two or three times to win the match, but you must fail four times to lose it.

You win some, you lose some. Mostly I win some.

This cheesy tactic got me all the way to 8th dan (that's how karate tournaments work, right?) where a 9th dan promptly beat my ass.

This is why you always wear a cup.

Karate Champ also has score-boosting minigames between matches, and likely inspired the same in Street Fighter & Mortal Kombat in the years to come.

Haven't you learned? Always wear a cup.

Granted, it won't help much here.

 

I'm pretty good at the cinder block chop.

So, even though Karate Champ doesn't really play much like what we expect of a fighting game, there are a lot of elements pioneered here. That universal side-view format where fighters face each other and nonsensically can somersault over one another but not walk around, controls being reversed depending on which way you face, a variety of punches and kicks, squatting, jumping, and blocking, minigames between matches, and multiple venues are all seen here. It even made me think of Mortal Kombat when the students applauded after winning the opening round in the dojo.

 

One crucial genre element not seen here, though, is competitive play. Even though the cabinet has a two-player mode, all you do is take turns against the AI. And that brings me to the "versus" version.

Titled "Taisen Karate Dou" in Japan and simply "Karate Champ" in the U.S., this is for all intents and purposes a different game from the original, though I have not seen a single game database catalog it as such. It plays the same, with some tweaks to the physics and AI, and more challenging minigames. The venues are completely new and much more varied, more in line with Street Fighter's urban rumbles than solo Karate Champ's tournament setting. The voice samples are a lot clearer, though the (still) goofy-looking referee sounds like a teenage boy with a stuffed nose in the U.S. version.

The main difference, of course, is the addition of two-player versus matches, in which the white and red karatekas fight a best-of-three format match to impress a girl who appears to be ten at the oldest.

"I like being strong"... ?

I played a set of matches with "B," a somewhat avid fan of fighting games. I've cut out a few of the embarrassing early matches in which neither of us has any idea what we are doing, but left one of them in.

 

As you might expect, it's a very different game against an opponent who isn't bound to a rigid script. With one-hit knockdowns, it becomes a tense game of reading your opponent, anticipating their moves or baiting them into a mistake that you can exploit. When a plan doesn't work out, discipline tended to fail as I'd flail around, often executing the entirely wrong (and nearly as often useless) move in the ensuing panicked melee.

GAB rating: Good. This rating is for the "versus" variant; solo play gets "above average" as while the fighting mechanics are otherwise solid, the computer doesn't make for an enjoyable opponent for long. But the methodical, simulation-like gameplay holds up well in two-player mode, and is rewarding of smart, skillful play, as any fighting game should.

Games 285-286: Minky Monkey & Tag Team Wrestling

Technōs Japan is best known in the U.S. for the Double Dragon series and River City Ransom, and not much else, though I personally have fond memories of Crash 'n the Boys Street Challenge. Founded in 1981 by Data East members, their earliest whale, Tag Team Wrestling, is preceded in 1982 by Minky Monkey, a title so obscure that Mobygames has no record of it.

Game 285: Minky Monkey

 

I guess everyone had to start somewhere, and Technōs started off with this strange little Donkey Kong Jr. knock-off where your character looks like an eternally screaming bomb and has to follow a monkey's directions while another monkey tries to screw you up and/or kill you, much to the first monkey's delight.

At the top of the screen, the first monkey scribbles orders like "🍎 BRING UP" and "🍋 BRING DOWN" and you just have to make your way to the indicated fruit and bring in in that direction before the other monkey reaches it first. Sometimes you'll realize that you have no chance of beating him to it - if he has a head start, it's often impossible to, but that's okay as you can fail up to four times per stage without penalty.

And I don't know what else to say here, other than that I encountered a bug, seen around the 5:00 mark in which I jumped to a climbable pole and got stuck in a walking animation instead of a climbing one, clipped to the other side of the screen, and died. That was the first gameplay session I bothered recording, and I didn't bother trying to replay or improve on my score.

GAB rating: Bad. Minky Monkey is weird, but it isn't particularly interesting, or any fun.

 

Game 286: Tag Team Wrestling

Not featuring: Franz Liebkind, King Hippo, Hägar the Horrible, sunburnt Grimace, Party City Dracula, or Billy the Kid.
Scan provided by FlyerFever.

 

Tag Team Wrestling holds the distinction of being the earliest wrestling video game listed on Mobygames.

I don't really get wrestling games. Maybe they make more intuitive sense to players who actually watch it, but my limited experience with such games has always more or less been pressing random buttons, which sometimes did a move on my opponent, and sometimes did nothing, with no clear feedback mechanism to tell me why one player "wins" a particular grapple or not, or why I'd want to use any given move over another.

Such was my initial experience with Tag Team Wrestling, in which at first, just figuring out how to do moves at all was a struggle. Sometimes after grappling, the word "NUTTER" would flash on the screen and I'd put him in a headlock. Most of the time I'd just get thrown against the ropes and drop kicked on the rebound. Sometimes I'd get thrown out of the ring, where a turbaned man would sometimes throttle me with a cane, and if I was lucky, I'd be able to climb back in before time ran out, or if I wasn't lucky, get slammed into the post repeatedly by an ornery heel who doesn't give a damn if we both ring out together.

But eventually I figured out Tag Team Wrastlin's game, and found it to be pretty easy to win, at least until later matches where it becomes basically impossible.

 

Tag Team Wrestling can be played two player as well, but not exactly simultaneously - it simply means control is given to player 2 whenever you tag in your partner. I did play a few rounds with "D" this way, but she didn't pull off any moves other than headlocks, and generally didn't attack aggressively enough.

The rule for grappling is is that if your arms are up and his are down, you may execute a move. Otherwise, it's the heel's move, but you have several seconds to break the grapple first. However, if you don't grapple for awhile, the heel will turn red and charge at you with an unbreakable grapple.

The timing on the arms is hard to anticipate, but it's not really necessary. Just be aggressive so that you don't trigger red mode - if you hear a beep it means the grapple was successful and you should select a move. If not, just back off and immediately try again until you succeed. With this strategy I was nearly invulnerable until about the tenth round, when the heels turn red so fast that you don't really have a chance of beating them.

The move selection part is very awkward - it's a menu-based interface where you cycle through a list of moves with the secondary action button, and execute with the primary. If you execute a W. Lariat, for instance, you must tap the second button eight times and the first button once, and you've only got three seconds to do it. It's awkward, but reliably doable with practice.

I did some analysis to figure out what moves are worth using - everything that follows is an educated guess about the inner workings of the game.

• You and the masked heel both have 16 stamina points.
• The fat heel has 15, but is invulnerable to the heavier moves and will counter you right out of them.
  
• When a heel's stamina drops to 5 or below, he'll try to tag in his partner.
• Each time a player is tagged in, they start with two points less stamina than before, down to a minimum of 8.
• Pins are only successful if the wrestler's stamina is reduced to zero.
• The rear drop automatically pins the masked heel if his stamina is 4 or less.
• The cobra twist is a submission hold and will be successful if the masked heel's stamina is 4 or less.

 

The move list - each move costs you stamina to execute. Heels expend no stamina to do moves on you.

Move	Cost	Damage	Points vs. masked heel	Points vs. fat heel	Reversal
Nutter	2	2	200	300	No
Kick	2	2	200	300	Yes
Straight Jab	2	2	200	300	No
Karate Chop	3	2	200	300	No
Drop Kick	3	3	500	700	Yes
Body Slam	3	3	500	700	Yes
Rabbit Killer	3	3	800	900	No
Pile Driver	4	4	700	50	No
W. Lariat	4	5	1000	50	No
Brain Buster	4	5	800	50	Yes
Rear Drop	4	5	600	50	Yes
Cobra Twist	4	2	600	50	No

 

So the optimal strategy? Use a reversal move to get the masked heel on the left side of the ring so that he can't tag in his partner, and then two more heavy moves, followed by a cobra twist. For the fat heel, use one reversal and four Rabbit Killers instead, and then pin. The only challenging part is selecting the move.

There's one big gotcha - I never found a way to reliably survive being thrown out of the ring, to the point where if I accidentally threw my opponent out, I'd just let them climb back in. It seems that outside of the ring, your opponent gains super powers and will easily lock you into a chain of unbreakable grapples, trapping you in the corner until time runs out. A mutual ring out is still a game over for you. You can also pull off some devastating moves outside the ring, but the risk of suffering a corner trap is just too great to be worth it. And incidentally, this is how almost all of my games ended.

GAB rating: Below Average. Tag Team Wrestling was kind of fun for a little bit, but with puddle shallow mechanics hidden behind layers of obtuseness, there's no lasting value. Time will tell if later, more sophisticated wrestlers appeal to me any better.