Karate Kid: Part 2 - Atari ST (Full Playthrough & Opinion)

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Published on August 8, 2018 6:55:48 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4JTMOAPHws

Game:

The Karate Kid (1987)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 9:21

916 views

9

It turns out that Tristar actually renamed the game due to an expired licence Shaolin Warriors is the Karate Kid Part 2. So the cover is different, but the game is the same. I actually got confused between this and Shadow Warriors.

The Karate Kid was released in 1986 by Microdeal and is one of the many movie cash-ins that you will littered throughout video game history. It loosely follows the movie of the same name with Daniel travelling to Okinawa in Japan and getting into a bunch of trouble with the local youths. I wouldn’t be surprised if the game started out to be something else and later on they got the Karate Kid licence and slapped it onto the cover. Asides from a few screen grabs during the special stages, there’s not really substantial to link it to the franchise. It’s a 1-2 player one on one fighting game with bonus stages after every second round - yes you do get to capture a fly with your chopsticks or smash some glass (see the film if you don't understand).

The animation is smooth and overall the game is presented with some reasonably well drawn visuals and some good music and sound to boot. The game is however very lazy in the fact that every fighter is simply a colour swap of each other, so it’s no wonder that the character animation is good – they only had one sprite to do.
However the problems start to arrive when you begin to play it. Most of your punches and kicks will go straight through your opponent. You seem to have to be very precise with your positioning, if you are too close then it becomes impossible to hit them, I have actually gone entire bouts actually failing to hit the opponent despite smacking my opponent in the face multiple times. Often when I win a bout it never seems like a measurement of my skill, it’s more of luck of whether the game will register the blow. Furthermore each enemy is virtually identical in appearance, asides from the coloured uniform and speed difference over the last, and meaning that repetition will happen quickly.

If you want a good karate game for the ST then try one of the International Karate games. The first International Karate does have some collision detection problems, but looks and plays a lot nicer despite them both being released in 1986. This is truly a terrible game and has to be one of the worst fighters ever made.
Now I have never actually beaten this game on my ST, not because of the difficulty but because my ST crashes the game on the second bonus stage. It’s the one where Daniel is trying to smash the ice, for some reason my STE just freezes up, maybe it’s trying to tell me to stop playing. I don’t know if this is like this for all copies of the Atari ST version and they never bothered to test it because they thought that no-one would ever get this far, so for the following video I decided to use a cracked version on a emulator, just so I could actually beat it. Strangely this cracked version completely skips the aforementioned bonus stage before the last fight, so maybe it is bugged, but ultimately I finished it in under five minutes, so really who cares?

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