Story Time

OK, let's get this out right away, I'm an International Karate guy and I've played IK as well as IK+ rather intensively with my brothers and friends on our C64. With both games being top notch, there wasn't really any reason for us to search for other fighting games (oh, we've played lots of Barbarian too!). With the end of the C64 era and folks starting to sell their tech and software for peanuts, we've doubled or maybe even tripled our gaming library and with that stumbled upon other brawlers for the ol' breadbin, e.g. the good looking but very slow The Last Fight, the disappointing Street Fighter games or the at that time very dated Yi Ar Kung Fu.

We've also discovered Exploding Fist and Fist+ on some of the disks and while there are of course enough differences between those and the corresponding IK titles, the Fist games always felt like cheap knock-off titles to me. That of course is not the whole truth and there's a whole lot more to research in regard to who ripped off who between these two series but for that, please go check your trusted retrogaming sites & mags, I'm just sharing some of my own memories here.