You've just made a long, hard climb up the rocky cliff beneath Akuma's Castle. You pull yourself up onto solid ground only to find yourself standing before a massive gateway, your way barred by the first of the palace guards. Beyond looms Akuma's palace, where the fair Princess Mariko is being held captive. You must rescue her from the evil Akuma.
You can withstand only a limited number of hits. The row of red arrows across the bottom left of the screen tells you how many. Every time you get hit, you lose one arrow. If your last arrow disappears, you die. The row of blue arrows across the bottom right of the screen indicates the strength of your opponent. As long as you avoid getting hit, your strength will be replenished.
Every guard has a different headgear and fighting style. As a rule, the guards get tougher as you advance into the palace.
When you kill a guard, take advantage of the opportunity and run forward. Watch for danger when you're standing or running. In these positions you're vulnerable to attack—one well-aimed blow could kill you!
Karateka came to my attention because it was the first game by Jordan Mechner, the creator of the legendary Prince of Persia and later the lead designer of the interesting Last Express. Furthermore, it was the first fighter game for a home computer system ever, and whoever did the PC port had a very good hand with that pesky CGA palette: note how cyan and magenta, when dithered, give quite a decent blue.
Like many of these old games, Karateka had a renaissance on the new portable platforms: In 2003, it was ported to Palm.
Playing Karateka on a PC is rather weird. It has to be run from an A: drive with two system disks on it. Since the game is about 1M, this will have to be a 3.5" drive. Of course you can create a virtual floppy drive with the SUBST command:
SUBST A: C:\KARATEKA
This is, of course, assuming you have put the game into the folder C:\KARATEKA. If it is somewhere else, change the path accordingly. As far as I know, the SUBST command is supported by all versions of DOS. It even works under Windows 98.
Apart from this oddity, the Karateka will run on about anything. On my Duron I did not have the PC speaker sound effects, which is no great loss. When you start the game, it will run into an infinite demo loop that is nice to watch once and can be exited at any time with the Enter key. You get a view of the evil overlord's castle, and then the action begins. The interface is simple. Use the space bar to toggle fighting stance (if your character gets attacked while standing at leisure, he will immediately die), use the left and right arrows to move, A for a punch and S for a kick. I found no real use for the punches, the kick is a lot more effective.
The guards on the outside are no big challenge. As soon as I entered the castle, it was game over for me. My character simply did not react to any commands and got killed pretty fast. Maybe there's an interface change, I have yet to figure it out.
Back in the days when most games were simple ideas, a game came along that seemed to stand above the rest. That game was Karateka, programmed by Jordan Mechner. Featuring an actual storyline (mostly unheard of outside of adventure or role-playing games of the day) and cutscenes (yes, cutscenes), the game stood out as a memorable experience.
The finest aspect of Karateka, and one that hasn't lost anything due to the game's age was how well Jordan Mechner could tell a tale with nothing but visuals and musical cues. There is no dialogue, not even text. Characters merely make gestures and the music plays their mood so wonderfully that one knows what the characters are 'saying' without hearing/seeing a single world.
