Way Of The Exploding Fist

STORY / GAMEPLAY
You are a young martial arts fighter and your main cause is to compete in a series of one-on-one karate matches, all supervised by a wise old master. The game offers up to 18 different movements, including jumping kicks, roundhouse kicks and a variety of punches and other high and low kicks. In this game there is no health bar or something similar but a unique for its time point system with yin-yang signs. A loosely timed or borderline kick or punch will grant you with half a yin-yang token, while a well executed move will give a full ones. Get two full yin-yangs and you win the round! The game also supports a two-player mode, in which you can fight with a friend for the honor! The Way of the Exploding Fist is am addictive fighting game, and the greatest advantage that it has over many others is that it's well designed and instantly playable!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The ZX Spectrum version has great graphics for its hardware with nicely detailed colored backgrounds. Especially the sprites look and move pretty smoothly while the color palette looks better than any other 8bit version! Note that the ZX, C64 and BBC Micro versions share the same background drawing while the CPC has a different one!. In the contrary, the sound here is just basic for a fighting game featuring a few sound effects when punching and kicking the opponent and a short tune playing when each fight begins or ends. Note that the Commodore version is superior to all 8bit versions in terms of sound, offering great tunes and sampled sound FX!