Thai Boxing
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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Thai Boxing is a one-on-one fighting game shown from an isometric perspective. Different joystick combinations let your fighter perform high, middle or low attacking moves as well as dodge or block his opponent's attacks. Fighters receive scores for successful attacks. The more difficult or effective the attack, the higher the score. Unless one fighter is knocked out, the fighter who has the highest score at the end of three rounds wins. Although the game is shown from an isometric perspective, it is not possible to move in three dimensions.

Alternate Titles
"Taekwondo" -- German Amiga title

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Review

When I was a kid/teenager, I loved the hell out of this game for one simple reason: the increasingly bloodied faces in each corner. Me and my friends would play it solely to bloody them up as much as humanly possible within the scope of the time limit, partly because of the sheer amusement of having the little dude standing beside each face spending the halftime breaks wiping it all off. There. Good as new, now go out and get yourselves good and bloodied again! 

So, how does this novelty hold up now that I'm much older and, arguably, more mature about all of this? Well... I've picked up and been greatly amused with BroForce, if that answers your question. That catharsis is still there, to be sure. 

As a game, and with some significant competition in the 1 vs 1 fighting department, Thai Boxing isn't all that bad, really. I was a bit surprised when I fired it up on emulators and found the graphics to be curiously pedestrian, but that's the rose-tinted retro glasses for you. The title screen in particular was made solely up of normal text and ascii blocks, with you controlling a barely visible plus sign for the sake of selecting various options, including number of players and even giving them individual names. 

The ingame graphics is a bit better, thankfully, though it's still nowhere near the kind of quality you'd find in the International Karate games. The stage itself -- and sadly, there is only one of them -- is a flat, pseudo-isometric deal with a rather questionable color design. The fighters themselves are relatively small, but both of them animate reasonably competently and have a small, but diverse set of moves that look pretty kickboxingly as moves go. To try to liven up the game's design some, at the end of the first round, the two fighters would return to their "corners", and then do some jumps, changing the fighting perspective from a straight sideways one to a diagonal one. It was a nice touch to be sure, so kudos to the designers for that, but it also made the actual fighting more of a pain in the ass. (Instead of the face?) Due to the somewhat warped diagonal perspective, the game makes it a bit harder to gauge distances and, by extent, which attack move would work better. And of course I'd notice this now, when I'm trying to play the game more seriously, as opposed to back when I just wanted to see the face wipers work their healing magic. 

The game has a fairly decent main theme, and I think its the same melody you hear while playing, but it's hard to tell given how hushed it is. Confusingly, I tried two different emulated files for this game, and one of them had punch/kick impact sounds that were a lot louder and meatier than the other. What's up with that? 

Controlwise, I have absolutely no problems with this game. Joystick directions and presses are responsive and easy to use, though the whole defense thing seems a bit strange, given how little warning you get in advance. The moves include a jump kick and a sweep kick that sweeps your opponent off their feet, presumably to give you some breathing room when backed into the corner, but the computer player is being a bit of a cheating asshole, since he seems to be able to dodge all of them unless I catch him in the middle of doing another move. A little control input-based clairvoyance there, Thai Boxing? Not that it mattered too much, because I still won against the computer player without much training in the game. It's a little mashy, and you'll usually land hits without even really trying too hard. Unlike games like Karate Champ or International Karate, Thai Boxing employs energy bars -- or, well... maybe stamina bars would be more accurate; the game doesn't really name them as far as I know -- which decrease as you take hits, even if they're doing this mild jitter back and forth for some reason. If that bar reaches zero, your character will be KOed, which will end the game prematurely (out of the otherwise "best out of three"), but to manage this, you have to beat up a second player nobody plays, because even the worst button masher can somehow manage to land enough hits on you to keep you from downing them outright. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, you'll have to decide for yourself. 

Thai Boxing does have a bit of charm to it, but I have to wonder whether people would really care about it if not for the amusing addition of the increasily beat-up faces. I want to give this game the benefit of the doubt, though, because in a weird way, I went in expected it to be worse than it really was. After all, it's hardly a hack job meant to cash in on a popular game franchise. Even though the characters in the game is a bit on the small side, effort have clearly been made to make the game fun to play instead of just mindlessly trying to ape something it had no business trying to ape.


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