Karateka

Even though it was 1984 and that was a long time ago, this game was highly monotonous and irritating. Defeating a single opponent took many Melania and each guy's health would increase as yours decreased. Also, if you don't run fast enough to clear some obstacles, more opponents would show up, again taking long to defeat. The graphics and sound were minimal and really sucked. Control of your character was also very difficult and you didn't have too many moves or any flexibility despite the relative toughness of your opponent. This game is extremely limited, annoying and disgusting to look at. Counting the number of squares on the ceiling was more fun than this.

Karateka leaves you with the impression that the game was an experiment. Almost a prototype of what was to be seen in the first consoles after the '82 video game crash. The characters were amazingly fluid for their time, in some ways superior to the stick-figure sprites seen in 8-bit consoles. Karateka is the earliest example I can think of that uses modern cut-scenes - and uses them effectively. The game probably taxed hardware of its time a little too much: the lags in game play were terrible. It might have played much better on later hardware such as the Macintosh, NES, or a 286 PC. I doubt any original copies exist on magnetic media. Since the game is well over 20 years old, the data on original media has long since decayed. I did find a disk image recently to play on my Mac using an Apple II emulator and was overwhelmed with a wave of nostalgia. If you get a chance, check out a fan film called Karateka II, a very silly although somewhat buggy parody.

I cut my gaming teeth on a C64 and a Vetrex in the early 80's and have fond memories of playing this game on the C64. Back then the color, animation, sound, cinematics and game mechanics were sweet, though I never did get around to completing the game back then.

Fast forward to 2013 and I find this game in it's full classic form (complete with faux 5&1/4 floppy disk load sounds) as well as a new version in the app store.

$.99 for a classic piece of history, sure what the heck. When I finally beat the game, all these years later, it really brought back some great old-timey gaming memories. As a player of B3, Civ5, L4D2, Shogun 2, etc, I'm constantly amazed at how far video gaming has come as I started at just about the beginning of the video game history time line. It is really refreshing to be able to revisit the classics from time to time, to remember video games' revolutionary yet comparatively humble beginnings.

Whats more, while my 4 year old son loves all the Angry Birds games (a little early for Battlefield but he'll get there) it was fun to see his eyes light up equally for Karateka, to see him get excited and anxious as his orange life-triangles appear and disappear, to hear him yell "head kick, head kick, head kick" in the middle of Buffalo Wild Wings (don't worry, we talked about this:), and to get to glimpse part of my childhood literally reflected in eyes staring intently at the screen and metaphorically in his determined gamer-poker-face.

I admit, right now I would not play this game, with today's standards this game sucks.... very very bad Visible pixels, crappy sound, tough gameplay...

However, I played this game around 1991-1992 and it ROCKED then. Had a lot of fun with it.

It's a very simple fighting game, but back then it did not matter. It was It even had some cut-scenes.

So in my opinion it really deserves more credit and less comparison to modern-day games.

Never got to finish it though... when I was a little boy I jumped from 1 game to another, this game was in the time of Kings Quest 3, larry 3, Space Quest 1 and perestroika We ran games straight from DOS command prompt back then.