[partomniscient]

Unless you turn them up to 11, and end up with Street Fighter and similar games, where it mixes twitch reactions with tactical strategy and rote memorisation no longer helps if you go into P vs P instead of P vs Game AI.

That being said, my possibly flawed memory of those fighting games spiritual predecessor was a karate game which had 2 joysticks and no buttons for a single player to use.

[lectrick]

> 2 joysticks

You must be talking about Karate Champ. STILL a fun game when played against someone else!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_Champ

[partomniscient]

That's it. Hazy memory is hazy.... I think I played it a bit and came to the conclusion that it was too expensive for me to learn. Most of my pitiful allowance went into things like Ghosts 'n Goblins or vertical scrolling shoot-em-ups. To get back on topic: Dragon's Lair value for money was even more abysmal locally for me - {hazy, contrived memory warning} - I put the money in and before I died, moved the joystick 28 times and hit the buttons 8 times, but I lasted 3 minutes.

That's roughly equivalent to a few seconds of player input for 1942 or Galaga. Pretty, but not particularly fulfilling.

For the young and poor, Dragon's Lair was indeed a great game to watch other people play.