Just as I expected, this game plays wonderfully on hdmi. The jaggies don't show and the non retina graphics look awesome on the tv due to the cartoon and 3d like graphics. The controls work well on tv too cause they are simple. Great hdmi tv game. The more i play this game, the more I like it. Gonna finish this one fairly quickly cause I hear it is a short game, and could use the disk space for something else. That's why I don't mind kind of short games as long as the gameplay is fun. I like the theme, it's pretty simple, yet a little challenging to time the blocks. But the best thing about the game is that everything seems to work well, the story, graphics, and the gameplay. At first I bought it mostly cause I knew it would play excellent on hdmi tv, but after playing a bit both on hdmi and my new ipad, i think there is a lot of value for a buck, and I would gladly buy it again for such a good price. Highly recommended!
Impressions as requested. As usual, I'm on my iPhone4S 16GB model. I played through my first game to the very end. There are 3 main characters in the game to play as... each one representing an actual life. Not understanding the timing on waiting for the enemy to swing before tapping for defense in whatever sequence was presented I ended up dying by about the 8th guy or something so the Monk took over. I figured out the timing and ran with the monk all the way too the end of the game and finally during the final battle I was defeated by the big boss of the game. The video sequence began to show the monk fall and so I tapped the screen to skip the sequence but instead the game crashed back to the iOS interface. Oh... bad burgers ... I thought ( "bad burgers" tm & copyright 2012 nightc1 ). A bug finally reared it's ugly head and after playing through the entire game and it crashed. I figured that was it, 15 or so minutes of gameplay down the drain. But upon returning to the game it actually started back at the battle with Akuma or whatever his name is and I was still the Monk. SO, yeah, big bug again... but one that worked to my advantage. I defeated the final boss but also got an achievement for not taking any of Mariko's flowers that replenish your power along the path between every other battle or so (though I did, but the crash must have wiped out me doing that so Achievment GET!). In the end I watched the 3 second ending (maybe it was 4 seconds?) and the game without credits returns to the title screen. Um... that was a crappy ending. Though I wasn't convinced the Monk actually loved Mariko but rather just cared for her and wanted to rescue her. I will say the Monk vs another Monk battle was pretty interesting. No spoilers but I was 100% perfect in the defense sequences so it ended possibly different than those that got hit. In one run I managed 11/15 Achievements (270 points). I still need to Rescue Mariko as the True Love, Strive for Perfect Blocking, Reach The Final Battle without taking a hit, and defeat the Eagle without taking a hit. The eagle one should be pretty easy and I think the True Love one is what I'll go for then I'll delete the game and move on. As for if it's worth a buck or not... I guess it is worth a buck as long as you have the device to run it. I could have one of my kids see how bad it is on a 16gb ipodtouch 4th gen but I can imagine the bugs that creep up if it even managed to crash once on my iPhone4S. It's not a deep game at all. Most of the battles are pretty simple and max out at about 7 attacks during the end boss with most average guys doing no more than 3 or 4 attacks and bosses going upwards of 5 attacks. Once you get the timing down it's not a big deal. Plus the little circles that show up to indicate how many times to defend also light up in sequence when the enemy is attacking .. which makes the game pretty easy.
Hmmm... Thanks very much for the in-depth impressions, night! It seems like I'll be passing on this one... Seems like an alright game, but the space is what's killing me, especially on my PC. (I already have to go through the apps I have on my PC and delete those! ) Second reason for not grabbing is I already have a ton of games to play on my backlog lol.
Probably a wise decision to pass on this one. I think maybe one or two tries and I'll finish the game with the main character and then delete it and reinstall The Last Express. For me, maybe it was worth it for a quick game since I have so many that'll take a lot longer to finish.
I still haven't quite grasped all the cues for blocking. The circles don't really indicate well how fast a series of attacks are going to come. At first, there's a steady tempo but at some point, it gets much faster in general and then the last few enemies mix it up more between slow and fast. As it stands, I get through about half the journey with the True Love with mostly perfect wins and then he'll get destroyed by whoever starts breaking up the timing pattern. Then I lose the Monk on the final boss and finish with the Brute. One thing I should point out is that you actually have more than three lives, actually quite a bit more. If the Brute "dies," you are given the option to revive at the cost of 3000 points to your score. I'm guessing you can keep doing this so long as you have the points. I think people are being a bit hard on the game. It's the right length for a game that's designed to be won or defeated by in one sitting, just like the original as well as most games of the 80s, and just right for highscore seeking without following an endless format. I also thought the game captured a certain enchanting quality that I haven't felt from a game this simple since I was a kid and playing things on the NES. I haven't experienced any bugs yet, but I pretty much never experience the 4s issues people claim to have in other games either.
Here's what I have gleaned from my 1 play through... the circles and sound effects show up to indicate the timing and space of an incoming attacks. Once the enemy starts to attack (actually swinging a fist) is when you repeat the pattern (the dots will pulse during each attack) but it's not timed to the sounds but the movement of the enemy. Nicely it is possible to recover from missing a block during multiple attacks as long as the last one is effective. I'm going to play through one or two more times and then move on. It's not a bad game but I shudder to think about the game crashing again. I am thankful though that I don't have to purposefully lose to play as the brute to finish the game that way for some achievement.
Well, I gathered that much. I've played through a few times now. However, there isn't usually a pattern cue--because there isn't really a pattern, per se--but rather just attacks evenly spaced. They do show you when someone is going to pause between attacks, but that's not what gives me trouble; I usually respond to that correctly. The issue is more about being a bit too slow/fast somewhere in a sequence. The subtlety between say, three fast attacks and three slow attacks is quite great and since the time difference between what is fast or slow is a fraction of a second, it takes a lot of intuition to keep switching it up like that. Even if I focus very carefully on the circles, I still can miss attacks when, as far as I can see, I'm correctly blocking based on that cue. Usually, when a game is this picky, they use a visual template where a circle in the background has circles in the foreground pass over it and you can see when it's going to hit dead center. Anyway, no biggie. I am getting better as managed to get the True Love as far as the enemy monk this time.
I'm in my second play through but am past the monk... past the next couple bosses and pretty low on energy in one try but I died after the 3rd or 4th bird attack. I have discovered an exploitable flaw in the game. Cover your eyes if you don't want to know... but ... Spoiler If you die, before the game can do anything put the device in standby then power back up but go into camera rather than unlocking the device, then circle button back to the main interface. Double click the circle button to show running apps and close Karateka. Relaunch the app from it's icon then you should continue at the start of the battle you died in and with however much energy you had when the battle started.
Spoiler I messed around with that myself. You only need to exit the game and un-run it though. It's glitchy, however. When I did it, I got the achievement for not using any flowers and my score was cut in half.
Thats good to know smegly. I guess I went the long way around. I think in the end I just want to see the ending once with the main character and move on rather than keep replaying for perfection. One thing I have noticed between my 2 times playing the game is that the audio the first time around was not as in sequence with the actions on the screen as the second time around. Still at points the audio got a bit out of sync .. and sometimes for the worst where I had almost no time to react.
Smegly and night, Thanks for your excellent impressions, interesting to read. I think since this game is a one gigabyte game, and kind of short, it is a game that is best reloaded from time to time to replay, since it's pretty fun overall. It's a little bit simple and repetitive, so I would think one really wouldn't want to play too long at one sitting anyway. But as smegly mentions, it has an enchanted storylike martial arts theme which is great, better than many games on ios in achieving that so called enchanted feelings. Night, After reading the main thread, it seems this game has problems with crashing and lagging with lower end devices due to the 3d graphics and kind of poorer software optimization. I hear that the iphone 4s version is just passable. You may like the game alot better when you get an iphone 5 or newer ipad. This game looks shockingly good on my new ipad with hdmi out. But I would NEVER play this game on my iphone 4, the software demands too much from the 3d modelling. I wouldn't want to play this game with lagging or crashes. But I better not speak too quickly, cause there is no lagging on my new ipad, but maybe it'll crash on me too sometime. I'll let you know if it does, I plan on trying to finish it in two days to save on disk space for all my xmas sales. Just got mc4, so Fifa 13 had to go, also I want to load up horn cause now I am on a fantasy binge, playing wild blood, bastion, orc vengeance, wraithbourne, lili, mc4, nfs mw, and other huge filesize apps on my ipad. Sure Karateka is not quite as good as those games and does have a lot of flaws, but I find it fun and I will definitely load it on from time to time to replay it cause it is fun for me. Nowadays I don't mind shorter huge disk file games if they are fun or interesting, makes it easier not having to worry about what to delete permanently on my ipad. Just reload this from time to time when you have the itch.
I don't mind shorter games either. It's easy to put a big game like this on my iphone, play it for a day or two then let it go. In a way, that is probably the most refreshing part of the game. I don't have to feel like I've not completed something and need to put a ton of time into it. In a way it's got that "Dragon's Lair" kind of appeal ... though not as memorable since you're only doing the one thing the whole game and most of the enemies are pretty generic.
Yeah, I agree with you, I wonder if the developer is planning on any updates to make the game longer or optimize it a bit for older devices. I would figure they would want to fix the crashing problems at a minimum to prevent some bad itunes reviews. Once you get a newer device, I think you will like it somemore. Well, gotta play tonight, hopefully I'm going to solve it by tomorrow, I need the disk space cause I just got modern combat 4, and I want to also reload horn back on to see how it looks on hdmi tv.
Well, one last post on this game. It locked up and crashed again. This time when I was battling the first boss after the monk inside a building. When I opened the game back up all I got was a black screen and some sound. Even killing the process for it and then relaunching, no loading up stuff just a black screen. Game... Deleted. It was a fun short diversion but I've got other games to play that are much better than this. Reloading The Last Express (or something else big that's good).
As there's nothing to unlock, it's perfect for that kind of treatment. I think the borderlineness of this game on the 4s might be contributing to my confusion with timing. I'm adapting, but I do suspect I should be better at this game than I am. I can win with the Monk now anyway. I'll see about trying to play it on my girlfriend's iPad3 although she has the tiny hard drive so we'll see if she has room. Another bug I've noticed is that since I beat the game the first time, my additional high scores haven't been being sent to Gamecenter. I also have no idea why, in the iOS version, they dropped the screen that comes up after you beat the game in other versions that tells you your score and time; instead it just goes back to the title.
Anywhere except for the special power which shows as a small circle in the bottom center of the screen and fills up after getting a lot of successful blocks in. That you have to touch to activate. I tend to play with my right thumb just due to past music games.
Need some help here. Everytime I try to buy Karateka, I am told to contact itunes support. Thought something wrong with my apple id, but when i buy other apps, no problem at all.
