
Gamers love to nostalgia-wank about the good old days of gaming, back when everything was bits and women werenât interested so it didnât even matter that they werenât allowed. Iâm not immune to it, myself: I adore pixel art and Iâll always remember where I was when I first found out ninjas kidnapped the president. Games werenât better then. The good ones were, and still are great — and if you have anything bad to say about Chrono Trigger I will pick up my best friend, who is a frog with a sword, and throw him at you. But there was also so much forgettable garbage that you, perhaps understandably, have forgotten about.
Letâs talk Karate Blazers.

104% of all games in the late â80s and early â90s were just reskinned arcade brawlers that the developers knew you would never beat, if only out of disinterest. They werenât designed to be good, they were designed to bilk you out of seventy-five cents because Super Hang-On was busted. And Super Hang-On was always busted. It was the McDonaldâs ice cream machine of the arcade. Hereâs the secret: Thereâs no such thing as Super Hang-On — itâs just a demo screen and a plastic motorcycle, there to lure you into the arcade where youâll settle for Day of the Punch or some shit.
Karate Blazers is the perfect example of that mindset. It actually starts kind of awesome, before it becomes quickly apparent that the game does not want you to play it.
Look at this amazing cast of characters in the intro screens:

Okay, not Mark. I honestly forgot about Mark, just like the casting director of Degrassi Junior High did when Mark was up for his dream role: âboy in background.â Mark is a cunning design trick: Heâs a quarter-burner. Sometimes youâll panic while hitting continue and accidentally pick Mark, and then you have to kill yourself as quickly as possible to pick someone cool again.

Hell yes, thatâs better. Glenâs got a flat top, thunderous fists, total invincibility, and flat top again. Youâd be an idiot to pick anybody else.

Oh. Oh, but you didnât know about Gil! Whatâs justice, to a man like Gil? I didnât have that question in my heart before, but now thatâs all thereâs room for. What is justice, to Gil? Is it a righteous wave that does not break early? Is it a crowded, sandy handjob in the back of a VW Bug? Is it some kind of conditioner? Gil is a question, and my quarter is the answer.

Good god, this is Sophieâs Choice. The only thing I like better than an unkillable flat top or a mysterious himbo is an idiot ninja. You canât make me choose between these three amazing warriors and also Mark — itâs just not fair!
If Karate Blazers is skimping, itâs not on characters. Itâs not story, either. In the early â90s, a video game was only as good as its story was short. If you needed more than two sentences of plot, you were making a Kojima game. And even Kojima only got four sentences back then. Hereâs the story of Karate Blazers, in its entirety, and I promise Iâm not leaving anything out:



I did not omit a single screen, I didnât crop out any text. The story of this game is âgirl has scrolls, then bad guy, then no scrolls and girl glows.â
You must stop him! Rescue her! Or wait, rescue the scrolls and avenge her? Hmm. That glow is suspicious. It could be rescue her from the power of the scrolls. Listen, all of these questions have the same answer: Uppercut.
But hold on, letâs go the wikipedia page that this game hilariously has:

Oh, so⌠yeah. âGirl has scrolls, then no more scrolls and girl glow.â Actually a pretty good way to convey that story, Karate Blazers.
Incidentally, Karate Blazers only has a wikipedia page because some of the characters later make a guest appearance in a better game. A fitting legacy for Karate Blazers, also known as âthey moved Final Fight two spots down and I didnât notice in time.â
Shit, I forgot the most important test. Before we go any further, we have to make sure this is a proper â90s brawler. Where is the racist Jamaican caricature we beat up?

Oh okay, cool. It has to have at least one Jamaican or it doesnât count as-

A-all right. Well, it can have more than one Jamaican so long as-

Well, dang. Iâm wrong about everything. This was actually the best â90s arcade brawler. It had the most racist Jamaicans to beat! Thatâs the law, I didnât make it!
I suppose we should get started talking about the video game Iâm talking about.
Hereâs Mark again. Haha, you forgot about Mark already didnât you?

I got as far as seeing Markâs walk before I restarted the game for anyone not Mark.

He walks like youâve only ever told him about walking, but heâs never seen it done before. Thatâs what an AI thinks walking is, if you only feed it photos of people fighting diarrhea. Mark, there was no test, you offered no answer, and somehow you still got it wrong.
Letâs go with Glen:

Mark, watch this shit, are you watching? This is how you fucking walk:

Glen walks like heâs practicing for tits. Itâs kind of a sexy werewolf prowl. If you saw that motherfucker walking towards you like that, youâd have no idea what was about to happen to you, only that you did not properly prep your holes for it.
Hereâs how Glen jumps:

In Karate Blazers your only jump is also an attack, so every time you want to jump — and you will want to jump a lot — Glen does that fucking mental air-plank thing. Every one of his fights looks like documentary footage of a salmon going up a waterfall.

Once again, I do not understand how youâre possibly going to beat what Glen is bringing to the table. But we owe Gil a shot.

Hereâs Gilâs walking animation.

This is not off to a great start, Gil. Weâre barely registering above Mark levels here, and Mark levels are what we use to calibrate the scale. How about that jump, buddy?

Thatâs almost a normal jumpkick, you beautiful idiot. Gil, unless you summon a giant neon hair scrunchie and hula-hoop across the battlefield right now, thi-

Thatâs Gilâs super move, and I didnât mention Mark and Glenâs because they were nothing. I didnât bother recording them. Mark did a jumpkick that shot out force waves, and Glen punched the ground which glowed a bit. There was simply no precedent for Gil to turn himself into the spokes of a glowing hair wheel and drive across all who oppose him.
This is it: This is whatâs justice to him.
Akira, that is a tough act to follow.

Look, youâre clearly awesome. Youâre both a dipshit and a ninja. Youâve got purple jeans and youâre wearing pantyhose for a shirt. Torn pantyhose. But Gil brought Magical Girl energy to a Double Dragon clone. This walk better be something else:

Akira! You walk like a crab trying not to wake up the kids. You walk like your underwear is around your ankles and you’re trying to fuck something that’s only slightly faster than you. Are you trying to guide an invisible, drunk bear toward freedom? Thatâs what happens on Fun Fridays when the physical therapy nurse asks patients to try the Running Man. This walk alone easily puts Akira in the lead. But letâs see that jump:

Pretty funny. Itâs not ânature is telling Glen to spawn” funny, but itâs up there. Thatâs not a double jumpkick. Thatâs how modern dance communicates the joy of spring. Keep in mind this is an attack, so all of Akiraâs battles…

Look like the theater kid snapped. There are six racist caricatures in this gif and one of them is wearing Princeâs laundry-day outfit. Whateverâs happening here is clearly a hate crime, but which one? Or rather, how many?
You may have already noticed that Karate Blazers has like four enemies, and its secret is putting eighty of them onscreen at the same time.

Quick, how many Andrew Dice Clays do you see here? Three? Youâre wrong twice: There are six, and theyâre all Joe Piscopo.
This isnât just lazy, it breaks the whole game. When all 17 of the same guy converge in the same place, thereâs no way to tell their attack animations apart. You canât time a counter when one punch is actually ten punches, so you end up just getting mobbed by more minority hunks than a Lindsey Graham wetmare.

But the game isnât hard. Itâs just cheap. There are a lot of leather-clad dudes, but theyâre only dangerous when they gang up on you, and theyâre all dumb as shit. Itâs like fighting an Idaho biker gang, or 4chan.
Like check out this guy, who spends an entire boss fight pee-dancing behind a box.

Hereâs that boss, by the way.

He is disappointingly bland. Heâs got kind of a wrestler open-mic night vibe going on – like heâs really just trying out some new material on Thursday to see whatâs worth bringing into the ring on Saturday. âEyepatch? Is it eyepatch, you think? Eyepatch and rave hair? Surely not eyepatch, rave hair and dick board. Two out of three. What do you think?â
But itâs just the first level. The bosses are the only place games like this really get to shine. Theyâll ramp up as we go. They must!
Anyway, hereâs our next gang: The portly weebs.

Their main and only form of attack is attempted handshake:

And when the game puts thirty of them onscreen at the same time it looks like a Limp Bizkit mosh pit.

It looks like a teenage employee trying to survive a Wal-Mart Black Friday. This is every Juggalo meetup when the girl arrives.
Thereâs just no elegant solution to this gameâs terrible combat. Well, not mechanically elegant:

Welp, hereâs the next boss:

I guess it scans that the boss of the portly weebs is just the portliest and weebiest. Dressed in a skimpy Mai Shiranui costume and so dedicated to his craft that he rolls everywhere like a fat Katamari.
Please meet your fourth enemy type: eight hundred robots.

And thatâs⌠actually pretty cool. I really did not see robots coming into this mix. So what are they gonna do different? Laser eyes? Plasma swords? Rocket cocks, which I call Cockets? No? Nothing? Just ordinary mobbing and punching? Here, you know the words. Sing along:

You know, Iâll give you this one, Karate Blazers: The best way to defeat robots is actually through interpretive dance. They understand neither love nor art, and Akiraâs battle frolic is both.
This is getting old fast. Letâs just air-sass our way through the robot level until we get to the boss, which is probably some lame scientist or something.

Wesley Snipes!
Holy shit, Karate Blazers, this is legitimately awesome. I never would have thought to put Wesley Snipes in charge of the robot army — in all my books, he fights the robot army. Wait, whatâs that you say? There are actually two Wesley Snipes standing in the same spot? Fuck. Yes. Has somebody been reading my screenplay, Passenger 114: Always Bet on Double-Black?! But I was told it was unfilmable! That Wesley Snipes had too much dignity! That I was misunderstanding the basic tenets of both movie-making and roulette!
Surely, thereâs no way to beat the Multi-Snipes.
Unless…

Honestly, the rest of the levels after this were a letdown. How could they not be? Itâs just like the tagline for Passenger 114 says: âOnce you go double-black, you can never double-back.â
Letâs skip right ahead to the final boss of the whole game. Eyepatch Dickboard wasnât very good, and Dinner Roll: King of the Weebs was directly terrible, but Karate Blazers gained a lot of goodwill with Blade II: II Blades. Iâm pretty amped to see what form their crazy final boss will takeâŚ

Itâs Eyepatch Dickboard again???
Karate Blazers truly never thought anybody would get this far. They never thought anybody would want to get this far. Who would waste sixteen dollars in quarters just to hit the prance button all afternoon?
This guy!

And thatâs Karate Blazers. There were five enemies sixteen thousand times, you beat the end boss at the very beginning, and from start to finish the only move that worked was a war jete. I burned a solid day romping through pixel stereotypes just to bring you this ending, which I present here in its entirety:


Again, I did not omit a screen. I did not crop out text. You and the boys are giving the casting director of Cats your best sex-yowl, and then there is girl.
Wait, also scrolls!
Nevermind, this ending works.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, toasty god: who is now serving six consecutive life sentences for Prancing With Intent to Kill.
10 replies on “Karate Blazers đ”
PoxCo Community Center for Dance and Race Crimes. Hahaha! Goddamn.
1900 hot dog has been a joy since the start but this is absolute peak. Laughed my ass off the entire way through.
If I was super generous, I’d saw the first boss returning as the main villain is that trope of a rematch but THIS TIME YOU FIGHT THE VILLAIN AT HIS FULL STRENGTH but that seems generous.
Also, I assumed the game was from 92 until I saw Blade. Nope, 1998.
What, no! It was 1991! Right? This cannot be 1998. Nobody rollerbladed.
Double checked. You are right. Except on google it shows this…
https://imgur.com/qMs0avz
Where it says ’98. But in the link itself it says ’91. I don’t know what it means except the game broke the space time continuum.
Also, that image shows an alternate title of “Full Contact Blasters” which… sounds obscene.
Fuck that’s way cooler.
I assumed a karate blazer was some kind of formal wear, like one would wear to a belt promotion ceremony.
A karate blazer is someone who only knows karate after they get high (its like not knowing how to dance… until after that third shot of vodka – then suddenly your Bob Fosse)
Fuck me, I would play the *HELL* out of a game called “Day of the Punch.”