Let's Play... International Karate

International Karate+
1987, System 3 Software

originally played on Commodore 64

Sometimes you just have to beat a person down. Punches in the face, kicks to the ribs, whatever. We can tell each other that we shouldn’t, but the reality is that we love the pleasure of overcoming our own weaknesses by overcoming the weaknesses of some other fuck. Especially through punches to the face, in fact. Of course, with most respectable elements of society thoroughly frowning upon violence – unless it gets ritualised for financial gain through military conquest and sports, or is hidden as slave wages within industrial society – there are only a few outlets for the realisation of this pleasure. Mainly, there’s the whole ‘trying to be a civilised person’ thing that most people won’t shut the fuck up about. And so we have violent films and videogames and aren’t we all so much better for them. Surely.

One reason for the goodness of violent media is that they let my brother and I punch each other in the head without damaging our future cognition-oriented careers. My own enjoyment from mediated martial arts was provoked by an unsuccessful attempt to learn aikido, a failure caused not by lack of discipline or coordination but by my inability to pay for classes. From grades four through eight the school board subsidised a month-long period of phys ed lessons (called ‘options’) in activities expensive for kids such as hockey, football, skiing, dancing, and one or two martial arts. For a lot of us, this was the only time we could do some of those kinds of things. Equipment rentals were a cost I couldn’t afford, so martial arts and dancing were my choices. The military industrial toy complex which ascended with Star Wars and patterned masculinities into rigid forms of consumption and behaviour rested its guiding hand on my shoulder – aikido it was. Four weeks of twelve lessons and I was hooked and like a junkie I couldn’t afford to continue.

Martial arts culture was everywhere in the 1980s and early ‘90s, the west having rejected pop trends for pacifist and spiritual elements of eastern culture in the ‘60s and ‘70s in favour of a mythologized culture of violence and discipline anachronically appropriated from the aristocratic warrior class, and which was more easily commodified than Indian ragas and Buddhist meditation, Beatles be damned. Toy weapons and war-themed action figures were best-sellers in major department stores, ninjas made cameo appearances on late-night television, and the philosophy of the samurai code was adopted by Wall Street wolves. Right-wing teenage male power fantasies such as American Ninja, Lone Wolf McQuaid, Big Trouble in Little China, and The Karate Kid linked the libertarian elevation of individual agency with the conservative desire for social order, deference to authority and tradition, and personal discipline, all captured in the symbol of the ninja superhero.

New martial-arts action superstars emerged, as Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Stephen Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Jackie Chan replaced the gun-toting Dad types of the previous generation such as Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman, Charlton Heston, and Clint Eastwood. ‘Martial Arts’ was its own section in video rental stores, often next to the horror section as gloriously shitty (and often quasi-amateur) b-movie and direct-to-video releases like Enter the Ninja, Miami Connection, and Ninja III: The Domination as well as badly-dubbed Asian imports like Ten Tigers of Kwangtung, Five Element Ninjas and Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky were much more violent and weird than the Hollywood mainstream. It wasn’t long before every action hero and pretty much anyone involved in a fight on television and in the movies was able to break out top-drawer fighting techniques without breaking a sweat or ever appearing to train. Of course Van Damme and Segal can turn every encounter with a bad guy into a death ballet; that’s fine and no one has a problem accepting that. But the sheer absurdity of a non-stop stream of anachronistic ninja clans proliferating in contemporary crime syndicates and police departments quickly overstayed its welcome, and guns once again emerged as the cinematic death tools of choice, mainly because any idiot can shoot ninjas dead without much hassle. Action film and television retreated from action stars being preternatural jujitsu masters with convenient helicopter piloting skills to their mastering an amorphous, generic, rapid-edit fighting style suitable for exploitation within a broad range of distinctive genres: witness the culturally-indistinct fight styles presented in modern James Bond films, superhero franchises, revenge films like Taken, or the Jason Bourne series. Suddenly, every IRL wimpy non-fighter from Matt Damon to Scarlett Johansson to the old man version of Harrison Ford can be made to look like a kickass fighter. Perhaps it’s even more ludicrous to cast Liam Neeson as a Dad assassin than it is to use ninjas in a bank heist, but fuck it. For big-budget entertainment, production efficiencies have always punched logic in the head.

stellar power lines

Wimpy white people kicking ass on screen is one legacy of 1980s martial arts culture. Another was its influence on hiphop, figuring not among the fashion trends of street culture and the videotape fetishism of mainstream ‘90s rap, but also in the ritualised emcee battles which replicate ninjitsu agility and Shinto philosophies in language. And of course, a videogame genre emerged focused on martial combat, staring with traditional martial arts before exploring more fantastic, cartoon-like themes, and this is where my virtual fist most often struck my brother’s virtual face.

stay down

International Karate is a one- or two-player arcade-style fighting game which came out for most home computer platforms in 1987, the same year that the first Street Fighter game hit arcades. Unlike that most famous of videogames, IK does not provide a health meter for fighters. Action follows the rules of tournament karate, in which two fighters (three in the updated International Karate+) score points adjudicated by referees who halt the fight after each strike. Animations for the original 8-bit releases are detailed and evocative, and hit-boxes are pixel-accurate. Bonus rounds between fights allow players to defend themselves from balls and bombs. Button mashing will work to some degree, but players will have to strategically place and time their attacks and defences in order to defeat more challenging opponents. Punches and kicks which land are awarded either half or a full point, with three points winning the match. Being an early fighter which adheres to The Karate Kid rules, there aren’t any combos or advanced moves to learn. To strike your opponent or defend yourself, you press the only button and move the joystick in one of its eight directions. Someone has to go down before the timer runs out, you know the drill.

IK+ motivates everyone to greatness

The 1987 UK release from System 3 on Commodore 64 (released the following year as Chop N Drop by Activision in North America) is perhaps the most well-known version of the game, thanks to pirating but more importantly because of Rob Hubbard’s fantastic score, which fully exploited the famously idiosyncratic SID chip in the C64. The 1988 releases for 16-bit Atari and Amiga computers feature significantly upgraded sound, graphics, and animation, with detailed character sprites and very fluid motion, although Hubbard’s score was replaced with the kind of percussion-heavy ‘80s midi funk which soundtracked movies plotted around Kawasaki ninja attacks. 

Two-player videogame duels are the oldest form of digital games, with the earliest games relying on human players to provide gameplay when artificial intelligence and enemy strategy algorithms were non-existent or in their infancy as processor and storage requirements for artificial opponents were too high. (For comparison, IBM’s Deep Blue chess machine – the first to beat a grandmaster human opponent in 1997 – used 30 central processors and 480 specialised chips). Once artificial opponents did start to appear in digital games, intelligence routines were often simulated rather than actually computed in real time, leading to the necessity for pattern recognition of enemy behaviour to succeed in games (and infinite play once the patterns are learned). Of course, games which were not played in real time but were instead turn based, such as many strategy and role-playing games, could more readily implement intelligence routines. The inevitable progression of computational capability has allowed for the utilization of increasingly complex intelligence routines. The first digital game – 1962 mainframe-based Spacewar – predated arcades and was an academic marvel of violent destruction as grad students and professors took turns lasering the living shit out of each other. Spacewar came to arcades in the form of 1971’s Galaxy Game and Computer Space. Many of the early and mid-70s arcade games such as 1972’s Pong, 1975’s Gun Fight, and 1976’s Barricade required two players to operate, as did Atari VCS launch title Combat. As computer hardware continues to develop, digital game players have continued to engage in multiplayer mayhem, although in the 1980s and early ‘90s competitive social gaming occurred more often in arcades than in the home. The release of Doom in 1993 and Warcraft in 1994 inaugurated a new era of competitive multiplayer gaming, a phenomenon centred on networked digital computers and thus unavailable to consoles, which were limited to fight games until the release of Halo on the Xbox in 2001. For most people, multiplayer digital gunplay is a 2000's thing. Social gaming in the ‘80s and ‘90s was dominated by fight games.

Not every threeway goes according to plan

So you kick and punch your friends to beat and humiliate them for hours of joyful play. Most everyone likes that. My brother and I certainly did, at least a few thousand rounds in International Karate+. We never did fight all that much IRL, at least in the ‘punch that bastard’ kind of way, or more accurately we stopped fighting once my little brother got big enough to punch me back. “Just hit him, he’ll stop,” my Dad always told him when he cried about me bullying him for toys or the TV remote or just because teenage boys try being assholes before hopefully figuring out other strategies. And so one day at the age of twelve and a height over six feet he did punch me back and it hurt so I stopped being a low-level dickneck bully. Fights became verbal, markers of quick wit with a touch of emotional abuse, more like the verbal swordplay of the Monkey Island games than anything approaching real violence.

the sound effect is pain

Videogame fighting was a good release for us, and so we moved on from International Karate to Palace Software’s amazing Barbarian and Barbarian II (which uses the two-player combat style for a one-player game), published by Epyx as Death Sword and Axe of Rage respectively in North America, but nobody bought or pirated those versions because everyone in North America was apeshit Nintendo and the most widely-pirated software came from European cracking groups. Barbarian was amazing not only because of the amazingly cheesy mid-80s fantasy cosplay box art (cleaned up for America, of course), but also because you could decapitate your opponent at any time, bypassing their health meter. A grumpy lizard would then swear at you before cleaning up the corpse and kicking the head off-screen. Slick shit. Somehow I could destroy my brother at this game, which gave me an unfounded confidence betrayed by the next decade of fighting each other.

With occasional diversions into Thai Boxing (which was amazing because between rounds your trainer would clean up your bloody, broken face like a window washer), Knight Games, and the brutally hilarious Blood ‘N’ Guts, my brother and I chopped off each other’s heads well into 1991 before the Street Fighter II arcade machine came out and everybody lost their collective shit for the next decade of game design clones. There was a very brief interest in Tongue of the Fatman, largely because of the box art and surreal fighters, but the game itself was kind of shit. After SF2 every fight game used combo moves, hopefully dozens of them, and allowed for character selection from a collection of mutant cartoon weirdos and psychopaths. Of course, as consoles began to totally dominate the digital game market by the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, computers suddenly weren’t the best place for fighters. Other than decent SF2 and Mortal Kombat ports, the only decent fighting game to come out for computer systems in the ‘90s was the excellent manga-inspired giant robot fighter One Must Fall 2097, a shareware title which thoroughly outclassed its big-budget corporate competition by incorporating equipment upgrades and RPG-style skill system elements.

It was with the robots that my fights with my brother ended: a Tuesday in September 1995, just back from school, and my brother challenged me in OMF2097 with a new joystick he picked up. Overconfident from almost a decade of punching my brother’s virtual face really murdered, distracted from videogames by a bullshit sixteen-month attempt at being a musician in a string of unheard weirdo bands, I took up his $10 challenge that he could beat me left-handed with his eyes closed and turned away from the screen. Of course you can’t win, fucker. I’ll destroy you in 90 seconds or less you dumb... and I lost without landing a punch in slightly more than thirty-one seconds. Pay me, bitch! was the last thing I remember before figuring out that in addition to being blind and handicapped my brother was also drunk and realizing suddenly that I actually hate motherfucker fight games.

the cow palace -- endosymbiosis

Let's Play... Surgeon Simulator 2013

Surgeon Simulator
2013, Bossa Studios

originally played on PC

So I always wanted to be a surgeon. Along with astronaut it was one of the job boxes I ticked off every year in that big blue book parents in Ontario used to track their kids' progress through school in the 1980s. Another consumer memory brought to us by the fine folks at Jostens. Of course, this ambition disappeared as I grew older and came to realise that I wanted to memorise songs and books instead of physiology and stress-relief methodology. So the humanities and a long life of poverty for me, then. Both my parents worked in health care, and my brother and I spent a lot of time after school wandering around the hospital waiting for the age of ten so we could stay home alone as latchkey kids. You see a lot of things wandering around a hospital unsupervised. Patients in various states of recovery are obviously interesting to a young kid raised on horror films, but so are the small dramas traced into hospital waiting rooms and hallways along with family members, worry for loved ones made supine like a struggling dog by the rules of the institution. Parents annoyed by their loss of control to institutional processes, fighting with doctors and nurses for tiny scraps of hopeful good news and just a quick glimpse and please maybe let me hold their hand. Friends visiting the infirm and the elderly who only wish them to leave if they didn’t want them there in the first place. Spouses hiding their frustration and loneliness as their love for each other strains and sometimes breaks in front of a quiet public. Sublime horrors of bodies objectified, flesh drawn and quartered to find out what’s wrong, what needs fixing, a painful and necessary violence fundamental to understanding. Like Councillor Krespel in Hoffman’stales, medicine must often destroy its object of study in order for understanding. A poisonous cure, to be sure. Walking through the hallways and backrooms of the hospital alone or with my brother, sometimes we would see something very graphic indeed. Seeing a few fingers in plastic wrap abandoned teaches a person that medicine is an abstraction as much as it is an abjection. Distanciation and humour are the only recourse for sanity.

Of course, to deal with all of the domestic trauma, heartbreaking grief and loss, as well as the mountains of gore, many people who work in medicine adopt a form of gravedigger’s humour in order to compartmentalise the abject and the horrific in order to maintain their capabilities on the job. Ankle-deep in blood and crying loved ones, you smile and enjoy the smells as you wipe blood across your forehead. Metaphorically, of course, as hygiene must be maintained, in Canadian hospitals at least. I’ve noticed this attitude in friends who are cops as well – humour used to paint over otherwise horrible experiences. A friend of mine who drives ambulances spent the first day in his job cleaning up brain matter from the highway to Toronto before coming over for a birthday party for my brother and revolting every single one of the guests by not having changed his uniform first. I’m covered in brains. You’d think I would have had the bright idea to change, he said before forgetting his Asian alcohol allergies and passing out in a closet upstairs after drinking the neck of a Molson Canadian. Similarly, my father edited film and video for medical procedures, sometimes while we ate supper in the living room. The likeness of my mother’s lasagna to the fleshy subdermal parts of the inner leg was a constant source of amusement for him.

don't tell me you don't want to shake his head around, because you do

Surgeon Simulator 2013 (2013) brings this laisez-faire attitude to home medicine games. While most games dealing with health care are managerial simulations – SimHealth (1994) and Theme Hospital (1997) being the most obvious examples – or cheap licensing entries in film and television-based transmedia franchises, such as ER (2005), Grey’s Anatomy: The Video Game (2009), and House M.D. (2010), there are some examples of games which try, realistically or otherwise, to depict actual medical procedures. Life & Death (1988) and Life & Death II: The Brain (1990) are perhaps the most well-known iterations, having been compiled on numerous shovelware releases in the early CD-ROM years. This was in fact the manner in which I came to play both games, for as a farewell present when our family moved to Southern Ontario my father’s co-workers at the hospital gave him a CD-ROM drive for our fancy new 386. A collective effort in financing, as these drives were very expensive back in the day (starting around $1,000) and quite the gift. Within computer geek circles, our machine was the envy of everyone around for almost a year. Except for libraries and universities, nobody had a CD-ROM drive in 1991. The technology was so new that in order to fully experience what it had to offer, sound routed from the drive had to be sent to a mixer along with the output from the computer's sound card. Likewise, publishers had little understanding of how to properly use the medium, either filling titles with uselessly small (75x75 or sometimes 130x100) video clips often repurposed from extant video media such as television and home video, or compiling as many non-related games as they could get their copyright licenses on. A database medium, then, and unless dictionaries and encyclopaedias are of particular interest to you, nothing interesting came out on CD-ROM until Sierra started releasing ‘talkie’ versions of games such as King’s Quest V: Absence Makes The Heart Go Yonder! (1990) and Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers (1991), quickly followed by Interplay titles such as Star Trek 25^th Anniversary (1992) and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I (1990). More often than not, however, such exciting multimedia versions of popular games were marred by their decidedly non-professional voice acting, often invoking the indie DIY spirit of the time and using members of the programming team in character voice roles. It should be noted that this dynamic of economic necessity forcing the conscription of terrible voice acting from programmers is different than occurred when designers purposely put themselves into their games, as Chris Jones did when he took an increasingly prominent role as the character Tex Murphy in a series of adventure games from Mean Streets (1989) through The Pandora Detective (1996). Shudder-inducing as thespian delusions, these early non-professional multimedia experiments are often fantastic if appreciated in the right spirit. Of course, some of these releases were very well done indeed; the CD-ROM editions of Interplay's Star Trek adventures were in face the last collective effort from the cast of the original television series.

the most realistic four-colour surgery simulator ever released

The most popular use of the medium, however, was as a shovelware platform on which to dump a variety of unpopular titles along with a marginally-popular one. And so Life & Death came into my possession along with Beyond the Black Hole (1989), Bruce Lee Lives (1989), The Chessmaster 2000 (1986), and Cribbage King / Gin King (1989). By far the best part of Life & Death – and in likelihood actual medicine – is the screaming. Patients scream when you poke their sore spots during observations and when you perform surgery without administering an anaesthetic. Rendered in monophonic 8-bit sampled bliss and reproduced to everyone’s amazement using the famously crappy and useless pc speaker, the screaming in Life & Death is alone worth an hour of your drunken time at a party with friends. Life & Death is a fairly realistic simulation of these procedures. Players are expected to be very meticulous in performing the steps necessary to complete these operations. Ultimately, while enjoyable, the game presents players an often frustrating experience of the OCD required by modern health care practitioners as players slowly learn how to do things properly through trial and error, as well as reference to the game’s manual and in-game commentary on player performance.

surgery is definitely for the OCD set

Of course, the screaming stops should you ever choose to perform an operation properly. The game offers two surgical procedures, appendicitis and aneuritic aorta, in a small attempt at educational gameplay. Despite  the use of four-colour CGA mode for the game’s original DOS release,the presentation and simulation aspects of the game are remarkably realistic for the time and have yet to be matched in any other commercial release.

Surgeon Simulator 2013 is frustrating for quite the opposite reason. Basically a cartoon exercise in fun with physics, Surgeon Simulator tasks players with performing a variety of challenging and totally unrealistic surgical procedures. Players are in direct control of the virtual surgeon’s hands, thus providing a level of haptic complexity to the interface which guarantees that players will fuck up even the simplest of gestures, such as grabbing and maintaining a hold of an object. Don’t be turned off by the fact that the game doesn’t include a tutorial, as the fun of playing the game isn’t really about completing the challenges offered to players, but rather about enjoying the comic mayhem inherent to amateur surgery.

drunk interface. drunkterface?

The game drops players right into the matter with heart surgery as the first mission with little warning and a gleeful disregard for patient safety. Indeed, black humour runs throughout the game, evidenced not only by the playful main menu, which allows players not only to answer the phone and write on a notepad but also to play computer games (I should note here my own history with physicians who were early enthusiasts in digital gaming) and most importantly launch everything off the doctor’s desk in a flailing attempt to learn the game’s interface. Fun involves the comic mischief caused by the juxtaposition of the seriousness of surgical medicine and the autistic inability of the surgeon to control his or her own limbs, and also by the impossibility of the game to operate as a simulation of anything approaching actual medical procedures. Bones are sawed off and organs are removed and placed wherever there is room, all with no regard whatsoever for how these pieces would ever be put back together again ‘in real life’. Unlike in Life & Death, play is only concerned with opening patients up; the sawed-off bones and scooped-out organs don’t need to be reconnected after the procedure. While the game offers a variety of scenarios, such as performing heart surgery in the back of an ambulance while the doors flail open and elements of the surgery theatre continually fall out, or completing an alien autopsy / transplant in zero gravity on a space station. Of course, I have only been able to complete a few of the game’s surgeries and have not unlocked the full game.

careful... careful...

Fundamentally, Surgeon Simulator 2013 is a game of frustration, as controlling two human hands by means of the mouse and five keys on the keyboard is much more difficult than would initially appear. Simple movements are made exceedingly difficult as in a sense players relearn or recalibrate their hand-eye coordination. Of course, this leads to a variety of fun achievements on Steam, such as flashing metal horns or flipping off the patient before abusing his face like he’s in a Three Stooges routine, or successfully completing surgery after stabbing yourself in the arm with enough drugs to start hallucinating. This kind of fun only improves when playing with multiple intoxicated friends.

great, now you've hopped yourself up on goofballs

Sadly, the PC version has yet to be updated with the hilariously oppositional co-op mode from the PS4 version, in which each player operates one of the surgeon’s hands. Also sadly missing is the screaming. But the fact that as a surgeon I can inject myself with drugs and go to space while smacking the patient’s head around like Curley before telling him to fuck off and pulling out all of his organs with a hammer and replacing them with empty plastic water bottles and my watch makes me a very happy person indeed.