As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #33, February 2007.

Many of those who have played video games throughout the generations feel that the era when fighting games really began to shine at home, was when the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo were released.  It's undeniable that the early 1990's were critical in the advancement and popularity of one on one fighting games.  However titles like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were nothing new when one looked to the past.  Arguably the entire genre began back in 1984 with the game Karate Champ, published by Data East and developed by Technos Japan.

Karate Champ was innovative for a number of reasons, the first being the controls.  The only buttons on the control panel are for starting the game.  A pair of joysticks is used to move each player's character.  By using a combination of directions between the two joysticks, a large and diverse number of special moves can be utilized.  The two player game was not cooperative but instead put players face to face in an all out martial arts battle.  A referee would award points, either a half point or full point, based upon single blow strikes.  First player to earn two points wins the round, two out of three rounds wins the fight.  There were two versions of Karate Champ released in the arcade - the standard machine and the Player Vs Player version.  While the basic gameplay is the same, the standard machine has some different graphics and modes, while the Player Vs Player version is straight up head to head fighting.  The NES version is based off the Player Vs Player version for the most part, which makes sense, since two player competition was the reason the game was fun.

Graphically things are nice, maybe even a little more detailed in some respects on the NES.  Neither version is really superior, they're just different.  Obviously control is going to be the big hurdle with the home version, given the limitations of the NES control pad.  The directional pad takes the place of one of the joysticks while combinations of the A and B buttons substitute for the other stick.  It's not the same but with a little bit of practice most of the moves from the arcade version can be replicated and gameplay becomes fluid and technical.  In that respect the NES version is very much like its arcade counterpart - you have to practice to get anywhere with this title.  Audio was far from spectacular in the original but it's replicated well enough on the NES, including speech.

While Karate Champ is well done for the NES platform, a major part of the game just isn't the same at home.  That is, of course, the human social factor.  This would be a problem with fighting games at home to this day.  In the arcade you're always playing against different human opponents, the challenge is always different and that's how one becomes a better player.  When these games come home they're usually always played between the same few people.  While there's a lot of fun to be had, in my opinion this prevents these types of games from becoming as enjoyable as they should be.  Still, if you liked Karate Champ in the arcade and wanted a solid one on one fighter at home, there really wasn't much else to choose from.  The game is ported well but removing the game from the arcade removes a large part of what made it fun.  If you don't mind that or only want to play the single player game against the CPU opponent then Karate Champ is a solid arcade conversion for the NES.
 

"InsaneDavid" also runs a slowly growing gaming site at http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi

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