Granny Vinnie Reviews

7800 Rank: 40th Genre Rank: (Action/ Adventure) 16th Awards: 6th Worst Gameplay Don't Let the Title Screen Fool You... Karateka is Not that Great Pros: Tough challenge/ Game can be beaten Cons: These controls put the SLUG in sluggish Put Up Your Dukes, Sparkplug!

Overview: This was the first game I ever played on the Atari 7800, and needless to say I was blown away! Of course, this was 15 years ago. Karateka, even though it shows its age, is an interesting Karate cart that is still an incredibly challenging game today. In fact, Crossbow, the guy who helps us with reviews, told me he couldn't get past the 3rd guy! Basically, you take part in up to 6 fights against 6 different Karate warriors, with each opponent getting increasingly difficult. What was so attractive about this game in 1986 was that you didn't play the game to accumulate points. You played the game to beat it. That's still a tall task. Just ask Crossbow!

Graphics: The main gist of this game is one on one combat. So it would be important for the fighters to look good. And, considering the time this game came out, they look pretty decent. They aren't blocky, and their moves look like real karate attacks. Though these guys are not very detailed (i.e.: the characters do not even have faces) they come complete with karate garb and bad guys have a big fancy hat to make them look more sinister. The background is good. Whether you are breaking into the compound or deep within the castle's guts, Mount Fuji can bee seen in the distance. This is pretty cool, considering that a famous trend in Japanese art is the appearance of Mt. Fuji in the backgrounds of paintings. You won't hear 7800 graphics and art in the same paragraph often, but here you do!

Sound: Audio is very shy in this game. There is a terrible noise that might be music during the rolling of the opening story. Other than that, sound effects are limited to thuds that happen when contact is made with a strike. That's it! There is an interlude after the first opponent is defeated, and uses two different music scores that is fitting. One is the bad guy, Akuma's theme. This plays as he waits for your arrival. And the other is the princess's theme. This is played when she mopes across the screen in her prison cell. These were really cool back in 1986, I almost fell out of my chair!

Gameplay: Here is a problem. Karateka plays REAL slow. It doesn't slow down, it's just slow from the start baby. Moves have to be calculated in advance in order to make contact with the opponent. When you want the guy to throw a punch, it's almost a full second before he does. Bruce Lee would have a field day fighting these guys...heck, I would have a field day fighting these guys, and I'm a Granny! Difficulty increases by two ways, and neither one has anything to do with the computer AI improving. As you progress through the fighters, your life bar shrinks and your opponents grows. By the time you fight the big guy, you can only be hit a handful of times before they are picking you up and feeding you to the dogs. The other way is by the addition of birds. Birds are more deadly than the Karatekas, and this will be your main obstacle in beating the game. Another problem is movement. To move the character left or right, you must hold down the left button. To attack, you take your finger off of the button and point the stick in the direction of the attack you want your karate guy to perform. This is tough to get the hang of, believe me. Also, if you accidentally hit the right button, you karate man stands up straight. This leaves himself unprotected, and with one punch from the bad guys, the game would end!!! Just wait till you make it to the final guy and slightly tap the right button in the middle of a brawl. You might as well jump on ebay and bid on a new controller babe, cause you just threw that one through the window.

Interpretation/ Originality: I've heard this was a conversion of a computer game, but I have never seen it or played it. Odds are, neither have you. I also heard it wasn't a good conversion, but I can't go by what other reviewers say, so I will have to judge this cart on Originality. It scores fairly high in this department. The controls are definitely unlike any game I have played...but there is probably a reason for this...the controls REEK! The concept of fighting a man one right after the other in a match setting was a fairly new thing at this point. Games like Karateka and Kung-Fu surely had influence on future games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.

Value: This game is a tough monkey to strangle, but it is a very short game win or lose. Since there are only 6 guys, games should never exceed 15 minutes. And since getting beat constantly is no fun, odds are you'll play this three or four times a session and then set it back down. The good thing is, if you want a short game to whoop butt on so you can feel superior before you go into work, you can get a little action in without committing an hour or two to a video game. A two-player version where players could fight each other would have been great. Another cool thing would have been to have each fighter you face have a special move, like a crane kick, a spinning piledriver or a fireball. But hey, I'm dreaming now.

Overall: It would be hard for me to imagine tons of people getting excited about this game. Gameplay is poor, and the fights are not that memorable. Most battles are filled with filibusters, where fighters back off to let lost life restore. The challenge to this game is not outsmarting the opposition, but outlasting it. This may not be heaps of fun to play, but it is one heck of a challenge. So in short, this is like running a marathon. You beat it to say you did it, not because it's that much fun.



Other Reviews:
JoseQ's Emuviews: 7.3 out of 10
CV's Atari 7800 Panoramic Froo-Froo: 3.0 out of 5.0 (Fair)
Video Game Critic: F



Additional Info: I would like to take this time to thank Mitch Orman, owner of The Atari 7800 Page for allowing the use of his screenshots for this review.

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