[Throughout this project, I will be inviting others to write guest posts. This is the first such post, by my awesome friend @GoldfishFight, who has also supplied two of the gifs]
I remember playing Way of the Exploding Fist a lot as a kid. I don’t remember winning much. I played on the family’s Amstrad CPC, a machine my big brother had talked our parents into buying in hopes of turning him into an highly employable computer age whiz (a plan which actually worked). Thanks to said brother, we had floppies filled with approximately 300 games and a very useful, annotated punch holed printed list of said games.
Faced with a plethora of games, there was probably only a dozen games we played regularly: Sorcery, Sram, Fruity Frank, Trailblazer… classics for me but games you rarely hear about when video game history is discussed. Except for Way of the Exploding Fist.
Way Of The Exploding Fist received rave reviews in its time. It’s not hard to see why when you look at it next to the games we’ve seen on this blog so far. The fighters move with complex and realistic multi-frame animations. They have sixteen moves, two for each direction on your joystick, depending on whether you press the fire button or not. On top of that, there’s the sound: each time one of the fighter hits, a compressed-to-hell cry of pain is emitted. It’s something out of a chiptune nightmare.
You can’t bash your way out of these fights (which explains why pre-teen me didn’t win a lot of fights) It’s all about timing and position. The fighters face each other, you wonder anxiously which one of you will dare get close enough to land a hit or be hit. Because each hit matters. A lot. There’s no combo, no energy bar, no Special Fury gauge filling up. Your fighter cannot take multiple high kicks to the head and keep going full steam. As in a real Karate tournament, the fighting stops at first contact. Then the judge gives you either a point or half a point depending on how “perfect” your move was. Once one of you gets two points, the fight is over.
These simple game mechanics make for a lot of tension. Every move matters. Every false move risks costing you a precious point. The pain when your sprite takes a hit, screams at the top of his sound processor and falls down holding his stomach… it’s real. You feel it. More so than in your average fighter at least. And so, as a kid, I used to come back to this game to get my shit kicked by a computer much better at it than me.
That was the experience I had with a lot of games back then of course. Most of the 300 games on those floppies were extremely difficult due to a combination of poor design, absent instruction manual, designers hoping difficulty would make their games last longer and of course, my limited video-game skills as a kid. One of the exceptions was Ikari Warriors, my bootleg copy of which came with an infinite lives and infinite ammo cheat version. My (other) brother and me used to play this as a kind of power fantasy. We couldn’t cheat Exploding Fist though. Still we came back to that brutal game because from that brutality was born dramatics.
