I love the new fighting games and old fighting games (including Karate Champ). I've played them since their inception, and still keep up-to-date with the newer games now. These days I play Tekken 7, Street Fighter V, and recently Ultra Street Fighter 2 for the Switch -- which isn't exactly *new* per say. The next game I get into is probably going to be the new Dragon Ball Z game, which has an incredible toon shaded 3D rendering that makes it look like it's 2D drawn.
Fighting games are primarily versus games against human components, and are really only fun if you have a group of friends that you can play with on a regular basis. Single player it gets kinda boring.
Personally i have a small group of friends that we play on a semi-weekly basis, online. Before I moved away from them we would get together in-person, drink beer, and play against each other. You can get into fighting games a lot easier if you have people of like-mind looking to improve, and learn the games. This pushes you further at getting good.
The biggest misconceptions of fighting games are:
1. "If I don't know the combos, I can't win". This isn't entirely true. The basics of fighting games is more than just learning the special moves and combos. Just learning how to utilize normal attacks alone is a lot of what these games are about. "footsies" is a big thing in fighting games, where you use your range and normal attacks to pester and wittle down their health...or even to disrupt their rhythm.
But really the core of these games is how you keep your spacing, capitalize on opportunities and knowing when to apply pressure (being aggressive) or when to be defensive. Also, stop jumping!! A lot of newbs tend to overly jump, and even though it can be combo starters, you actually open yourself up a lot more because there aren't many options from the air -- stay grounded as much as possible.
2. "People I play IRL are ---uvulas---". If you're going into this with a negative outlook on your opponent, IMO you shouldn't be playing these games. Fighting games are meant to be played 1 vs 1 against human opponents. The real ---uvulas--- of the game is really the Computer, because their AI can flip the switch and make it extremely difficult for you to do anything. In fact, human opponents have more Patterns in the way they play than the CPU.
Once you can recognize how your opponent plays, you can anticipate or wait for them to open themselves up for an opportunity for you to attack.
3. "Games these days are too complicated". Nope, they really aren't. Sure there's more moves, but you can still be a successful fighting game player by only using the basics of every fighting game: Spacing, Normal Attacks (footsies), Anti-air, blocking and capitalizing on your opponents mistakes... these are all fundamental to playing these games. But the second point is, all of these games have the baseline same game mechanics between all characters. Sure the inputs are going to be different for special moves, but you know that each character will share the same "high/low" attacks, or ranged attacks, or grab attacks, etc. It's mainly how that player is going to use these attacks is what you should look for. It's called "reading", or "reads". Play against the player, not against the character they play.
In the case of a button masher, patience is more key here, but spacing and footsies can really disrupt someone trying to just mash their way to a victory.
Bottom line is, if you already knew all these points and still dislikes fighting games, then yes fighting games are not for you. But you should be aware that the genre is more than just special moves and combos. The fundamentals are extremely important -- there is a good post on the Shoryuken forums that talks about this,
http://forums.shoryuken.com/discussion/162157/what-are-the-fundamentals And just to point out, Karate Champ utilizes a lot of the same fundamentals I've talked about here. A person can definitely mash at that game, but the best KC players I've seen use the same core techniques as you would in any modern fighting game.
I also wanted to mention that Candy Cabinets are not an era thing, but more of a Region thing. In North America and Europe stand-up cabs were the norm for a long time, but in Japan the Candy Cabinet were derived from cocktail units a long time before Shmups and Fighting games became popular here in the west.
Also, on the note of Shmups, you can say the same things above about that genre as well. It comes down to the fundamentals of how you play those games that you can utilize for every title you go forward with. There is a helpful guide to getting acquainted with the Shmup fundamentals called
The Full Extent of the Jam - written by PROMETHEUS over at the shmups forum.
https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=34497He uses Dodonpachi as the example game, but goes into some of the basic techniques into playing these games. It's a really great guide that I suggest people who want to understand the modern Shmup or Bullet hell genre gameplay.
Fighting games and Shmups are my two loves. I'm not great at the bullethell Cave titles, but I enjoy learning them. 1942 will forever be my jam though, but I do love Gyruss, Galaga and the Raiden series.