by A few years before he became known as the creator of Prince of Persia, a university student named Jordan Mechner created the Apple II classic, Karateka. Telling the story of a nondescript karate guy out to save a princess from the clutches of an evil warlord (and his awful, awful pet hawk), Karateka was a big leap forward for in-game storytelling and animation, and essentially invented fighting games as we know them. Now, 28 years later, Mechner’s finally revisited his roots and produced a Karateka remake, and it’s… not quite what we were expecting.
Not wanting to work on a complicated modern fighter, Mechner instead made the new Karateka a rhythm-action game. As in 1984, the nameless hero spends the game running to the palace of the evil Akuma, engaging in one-on-one fights with his interchangeable minions along the way — but those fights are more about timing than anything else, with musical (and, in the iOS version, visual) cues to let us know when our opponents are about to attack. When they do, we tap to block — and if we successfully block each strike, we’ll get to tap madly on the screen in a brief counterattack.
