World Karate Championship

Karate is a sport that looks best in computer games when you don't imagine what it would look like in real life. World Karate Championship from 1989 is proof — characters hypnotize each other with stares, deflect blows like magnets, and fall like deflated sandbags when you catch them at the right angle.

It's a straightforward sports take on karate dressed up as a tournament. You pick your fighter and progress through opponents with simple K.O. logic: more health, better techniques, you're good. The graphics are bland — characters moving on neutral backgrounds with minimal detail, looking more like plastic figurines than a clash between two qualified fighters.

The game plays with a basic system — directional keys and buttons for strikes and kicks. It's a straightforward beat-em-up without combos, without timing, without anything you could call animation. The fights lack rhythm. They fall, get up, fight again, as if every confrontation were scripted, just without the script. Stiff controls and dumb AI opponents make this more of a simulation of a simulation than actual fight control.

In 1989, titles like this were filler between card tournaments and rice — something to say you'd played the games. Today you'll only take away the fact that such things existed and that they're the oldest way to play sports in pixels without being fun.

If you want to see what this looked like before Mortal Kombat showed up and changed what fighting games could be, you can fire it up in your browser and watch for five minutes. Then it'll be clear why you ignored it in the nineties and why you still do.