Best of the Best Championship Karate

When a game's as tightly focused as this, it's vital that it does what it does extremely well. And, to its credit, Best of the Best features some excellent animation and a wide range of different punches and kicks which it takes a while to learn properly. However, there are also a lot of frustrating moments when the two players are standing alongside each other on the screen and can't hit each other. Or when one player is facing in the wrong direction, and can't seem to turn round to face his opponent. It also seems that, no matter how hard you try to learn how each move works, and no matter how hard you try to discipline yourself into thinking about what you're doing and which move you ought to be using in a particular situation, matches always tend to degenerate into frantic pressing-all-the-buttons-at-random affairs, with the eventual victor being decided more by luck than anything else.