RETRO REBOOT!! Karate Champ (NES) "Kick! Punch! It's All In The Mind!"

Karate Champ, developed by Technos Japan, is a game where everyone knew it sucked, but we played anyway. In a time before Street Fighter II established the foundation for building a quality fighting game, there was  Yie Ar Kung-Fu, produced by Konami, and Karate Champ. Whereas Yie Ar Kung-Fu was a good, responsive game for its time, Karate Champ felt like a video game that did everything in its power to make you feel like your equipment has gone rouge. But many people enjoyed it, only perhaps we wouldn't have known any better.

The action starts, and you want to get a feel for the action, so you begin experimenting. Before you know it, you're facing the other way and jumpkicking the air while your opponent is reverse sweeping, while the referee, who looks like Game Grumps host Arin Hanson, oversees the action. To call hit detection "questionable is being way too kind. Strikes work when they feel like it. You'll sooner learn to speak fluent Klingon before executing specific attacks on purpose. Turning around isn't as simple as pressing the opposite direction of where you're facing. It requires negotiating with the NES controller to properly turn around, mostly by performing a certain jump kick. You just gotta hope your opponent hasn't clumsily shuffled behind you to punch you in the nose with all the speed and grace of a decaying corpse.

So what is it that makes this so fun? I think because it's impossible to be genuinely good at it. When you go over to someone's house to play Tekken 3, they've been playing it and practicing, so there's a skill gap an you'd get air juggled to death. In Karate Champ, the controls are so horrid and the fundamentals are putrid that everybody is battling with the exact same odds. It's the fighting game equivalent of the Price is Right game, PLINKO.

Karate Champ is the occasional horrible Nintendo game that's so lousy, so fundamentally broken, it almost works its way full circle into being awesome. You'll have zero clue how anything is working, probably outrageous at what counts as a hit, but you'll seldom be upset. Get the crew together for a retro night, maybe have a couple of drinks, and enjoy the train wreck.

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