Wednesday 27 March 2019

Super Adventures in Amiga Fighting Games

This week on Super Adventures I'm writing about fighting games on the Amiga! Lots of fighting games, a dozen in fact! Why? Because I'm taking a two month break from Super Adventures after this and I wanted to give you something that takes at least that long to read.

Plus the more of them I play, the less I have to write about each of them, which is good because I am the last person who should be writing anything about fighting games. The only technical terms I know are 'special move' and 'block' and I've had really limited success ever doing either. Though Amigas and I have something in common, as they suck at fighting games too! And not just because of the one-button joystick and floppy drive.

So far this sounds like a lot of reasons why I shouldn't be playing these games, but I think there must be some good screenshots hidden in them somewhere, maybe even some good gameplay. Plus it's given me an excuse to create that nightmare crossover between IK+ and Human Killing Machine's title screens up there.

Anyway, here are 12 fighting games in vaguely chronological order:



But hang on, what even is an Amiga anyway? A lot of people know, but a lot of people don't and I want everyone to get what I'm talking about, so here's a quick guide:

The Commodore Amiga is a computer from the mid 80s that looks like a beige hot-rodded PC keyboard and loads games like a console (except off floppy disks instead of cartridges). Actually it's a lot of computers, with different versions and possible upgrades, but really there's only three systems:
  • Top left - Original OCS/ECS chipset machines like the Amiga 500. 512K RAM, but typically upgraded to 1MB.
  • Bottom left - Next gen 2MB AGA chipset machines from the 90s like the Amiga 1200.
  • Right - The CD32, which is just an AGA console with a CD drive and a controller with actual buttons on it. 
Most games were made for OCS because the Amiga 500 is basically the Amiga, with a spec comparable to a Mega Drive (except with better sound). The AGA-based Amiga 1200 runs faster and can put more colours on screen, so it often got upgraded versions of games all for itself, but it can play a lot of those old A500 games as well. Plus you can go nuts with an AGA system; put the motherboard into a tower case, stick a hard drive into it and add accelerator cards and ram expansions until it can run Quake. All while wondering, "Why? Why did I do this when I could've spent the money on a PC?"

Anyway, the Amiga 500 and 1200 both had the power under the hood to take on arcades and 16-bit consoles in all kinds of genres, but fighting games really weren't their strong suit. Sure they let you plug two controllers in, and the standard Amiga controller was a joystick (often with proper microswitches), but most of the time you only got the one button, or two that did the same thing, and games rarely supported a second one anyway. Hard to pull off a combo with only one input. Plus having the fighter data scattered across 3 or 4 floppy disks meant a painful amount of disk swapping and loading between fights. Man, I should stop typing before I put myself off doing this.

I'm also kind of put off by how much my poor A1200 has yellowed. It used to be white! It's an actual tragedy.


GAME 1 of 12: IK+

Developer:System 3|Release Date:1988 (1987 on C64)|Systems:Lots

Game #1 is the sequel to International Karate, known as IK+... unless you're playing the US release of the C64 version, then it's called Chop N' Drop. Maybe because there's a button to drop the fighters' trousers? I dunno. The game was originally developed for 8-bit computers long before Street Fighter II existed and was pretty popular (in Europe anyway), so if there was ever a time that the Amiga could claim to have the best version of the best fighting game in the world, it would be here. It's not necessarily true, but you wouldn't laugh out loud if someone suggested it. It wasn't the most advanced system the game was released on though, as it eventually made it onto the Game Boy Advance and PlayStation.

There's a few things I noticed about this one fairly quickly: there are three fighters on screen at once who all look the same, you only ever get one backdrop, there's only one song, there's Pac-Man over there on the left, and it's about hitting the opponents rather than damaging them. You lose if you're the one who's got the fewest hits in during a fight, otherwise you carry on to the next round.

It's all about getting in the right position for your attacks to connect, so it's less about tactics and more about three idiots leaping around, doing backflips and punching at thin air. At least when I played it.

There's also a couple of bonus games to add variety, like a bomb kicking game, and this ball deflecting round with strange bouncing severed heads showing up occasionally. I guess I should've expected weird balls from a game by Archer MacLean after I caught them pulling tongues at me in Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker.

The game is obviously a port of a basic 8-bit computer game (that was inspired by a 1984 arcade game), but there's a lot of charm in its simplicity. Plus it let me get all the way to level 13 and the water looks nice so I'm leaning towards liking it. But is it better than notorious CD32 fighter Dangerous Streets?

Dangerous Streets (CD32)
Well it doesn't have a dude that opens his entire torso to reveal a tiny version of himself which flies across the level, but I feel like IK+ is still the superior game here. I can't tell you if it's good, but I can at least say it's better than the worst Amiga fighter I've ever played. Plus other people seem to like it.





GAME 2 of 12: HUMAN KILLING MACHINE

Developer:Tiertex|Release Date:1989|Systems:Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, C64, ZX Spectrum

Second on the list is Human Killing Machine, another game originally developed for 8-bit computers and ported across to Amiga. It's apparently an unofficial successor to Tiertex's terrible home computer port of Street Fighter, though they couldn't get the license this time because Capcom had their own Street Fighter sequel in production... that they ended up calling Final Fight. So in some alternate universe this was the original Street Fighter II, though in all universes the game is a big pile of shite.

Like IK+ you're only given one fighter to choose from, in this case a dude with tiny feet called Kwon, but this doesn't really give you an AI opponent. I mean it's all single player, the game doesn't even have a versus mode, but your opponent doesn't have any intelligence. When I played it, Igor here spent the fight twitching on the spot. He's too dumb to even realise he's holding a gun and could win this in one move. Though he's still plenty dangerous, as when I got close to him I got absolutely shredded. It was like a hand taking on a blender, except without the on-screen blood. I did manage to get a few punches in, but he healed instantly thanks to his Wolverine-like regenerating health! How come I don't get regenerating health? I guess he must be that killing machine for humans mentioned in the title.

It's apparently possible to slowly chip his energy away by repeating the spin kick, but once he's down the fight just starts over! You have to knock him out again and again until he's out of lives before you get to experience the thrill of fighting the second opponent (Igor's dog). Fortunately Stuart Ashen made an excellent video review of the game a few years back (YouTube link), so I turned the game off and put that on instead to see what I was missing. Turns out Kwon continues to travel the world fighting waiters and prostitutes (plural), and also a bull. He eventually reaches Beirut and tracks down a pair of Arab terrorists, one of which has a missile on his back and is so big that they could only give him 6 frames of animation.

Though here's a fact you won't find in Ashen's video: the dude who wrote the game apparently went on to be the project leader on Shadows of the Empire and Rogue Squadron! He also worked on the Metroid Prime series. According to MobyGames.

So Human Killing Machine is bad, but is it worse than Dangerous Streets? Yes, yes it is.




GAME 3 of 12: ORIENTAL GAMES

Developer:Source|Release Date:1990|Systems:Atari ST, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC

Oriental Games is a port of an Atari ST game, so this one was designed as a 16-bit game to begin with. Doesn't seem to be any relation to California Games, though it is split up into different subgames in a similar way.

You choose either Kendo, Kungfy or Kyo Kushin Kai from these buildings, then you fight four matches to complete the tournament and move on to the next martial art. Oh hang on, it's supposed to be 'Kung Fu', they just put a line under the 'u' for no reason.

First though you have to walk into OG reception looking like a total martial arts badass and set up the options. It's probably not a good sign that the game only comes on one disk, and yet they still found space on it for this superfluous animation. Still, I ain't going to complain about no disk swapping.

They also found space for a joystick editor, which lets you choose a series of four moves to be carried out with one button press. Well, with the button held down and the joystick tapped in a direction anyway.

Save wear and tear on your joystick by punching four times with a single move! It's ultra efficient as long as your opponent stays exactly in the same place. You could probably come up with some effective combos with trial and error, but I'd rather just hit people the old fashioned way.

Well, the AI's a little better than Human Killing Machine I guess.

That's me in the grey by the way, just hanging around in front of him waiting to see if he finds a way to hit me. The combat's a lot like IK+ as it's all about getting into the exact right distance for your attacks to connect, and I actually started doing pretty well at it once I figured out that it was easier to let him walk into punching distance instead of trying to get myself in the right place. I made it all the way through Kung Fu and halfway through Kendo (which is just like Kung Fu, except with sticks) before quitting. I came first as well and got a shiny gold OG medal for my achievement!

(It'd be more impressive if it hadn't been set to 'Novice' difficulty).

Trouble is that it takes 15 hits to win a match and you can guess how long that takes when you have to be in the right place for a hit to connect. Plus there's no music! The whole thing got very boring to me very quickly. Still better than Dangerous Streets though.





GAME 4 of 12: PIT-FIGHTER

Developer:Teque|Release Date:1991 (1990 in arcades)|Systems:Lots

Pit-Fighter is the first coin-op conversion in the list and also the first to feature more than one playable character!

It was a trailblazer back in the day as well, as it's apparently the first ever fighting game to use digitised actors for its sprites, beating Mortal Kombat by two years. 1988 arcade fighter Reikai Dōshi: Chinese Exorcist featured digitised claymation fighters doing the violence, and 1988 arcade run and gun Narc had a digitised human shooting crime, but Pit-Fighter was the first to have actual people virtually hitting each other. You can tell it's early as they hadn't yet figured out how to digitise their shirts.

The arcade board is presumably much better at pushing pixels around than your average Amiga 500 as the game's had a significant visual downgrade, but it looks... alright. I suppose.

I was expecting this to be a pretty typical fighter, but it actually has a lot in common with scrolling beat 'em ups, as you're able to walk up and down the screen and pick up items. Well, theoretically; I was never able to figure out how. I was mostly just pressing the fight button to do fighting while trying not to bleed too much. Still, I got up to the fifth opponent out of eight without knowing what I was doing, so I wasn't doing that badly!

The game also supports two player and you can have four fighters hitting each other on screen at once, with the crowd of creepy shadow people shoving them back into the pit if they stray too far.

At the end of the fight the winner gets to stand on a forklift as their totally studly fight purse is piled up beneath them and that alone makes this better than Dangerous Streets. I mean don't get me wrong, it seems pretty bad, but at least it's competently bad.

Though the Amiga version is apparently one of the better ports. A properly terrible version of Pit-Fighter is available for the Super Nintendo if you want to see how much worse it can get.





GAME 5 of 12: FULL CONTACT

Developer:Team17|Release Date:1991|Systems:Amiga

I love surprise martial arts silhouettes on my Amiga title screens! Even if this one was borrowed from the movie Kickboxer (YouTube link).

Full Contact is the debut game from Team17 after they were forged from the merger of British publisher 17-Bit Software and Swedish developer Team7. They've been 'the people who make the Worms games' for the last 24 years or so, but before then they were a well known Amiga developer, releasing a dozen games in all kinds of non-Worms genres, like Alien Breed, Superfrog, and the fighting game series Body Blows. But Full Contact was their first game, fighting or otherwise, and it's also the first game on this list to be developed purely for the Amiga.

Incidentally the title refers to the thing the hero has sworn never to do. Seems like it'll be a short game if I don't hit people though.

This is another game with just one playable character to pick from (that's me on the right), and another where the fighters left their shirts at home, but it's the first so far where everyone jumps like a ballet dancer. I'm spotting a bit of a pattern now, as every fighting game I've tried so far has you playing as a man with either a sleeveless gi or baggy pants.

The game's pretty fast, but fights can take a while because there's no timer and the combatants are built like tanks. It reminds me a bit of IK+ in how it's about getting into position so that a hit will connect, but I didn't realise how good I had it back then when I could finish a fight in just six hits.

I don't seem to have any special moves but I can level up my hero between fights, so that's different. I decided to go with stamina, because I want to be even more of an unstoppable tank.

There's also a bonus round, where you jump over or duck under the arms sticking out of a spinning post, and another where you wiggle the joystick to chop a stack of concrete slabs. How did wiggling the joystick ever become a thing in video games anyway? Was it introduced as desperate attempt to add 'gameplay' to sports games? Was it part of secret agreement with joystick manufacturers to wear them out quicker and increase sales? How many N64 controllers died because of this trend spreading to Mario Party?

Anyway, after the first few fights the game put me up against Thomas the Dog.

Hey isn't that the dog from Tom and Jerry? He definitely looks a bit out of place against the more realistic art they've been using everywhere else.

I hate you Thomas the Dog.

The game said that I need to "Find the right punch to defeat him," but none of the punches I tried worked out so well. I managed to hit him a few times as he ran across the screen and pounced at me, but I always came off worse.

My trainer was pretty disappointed afterwards, saying "You have lost against Thomas and I have no time for you." When I gave it a second try I got the message "Thomas barked when the word of this second challenge reached his ears. He's really going to beat up you this time." Then he beat me up and I lost the game.

Full Contact runs fast, looks fairly decent and I like the menu music (no music in fights, only punching sounds), but the pre-Street Fighter II combat is archaic and I didn't enjoy it much. It's way more polished than Dangerous Streets though.




GAME 6 of 12: BODY BLOWS

Developer:Team17|Release Date:1993|Systems:Amiga, DOS

I love that there's a whole scene going on there in this background, with the commentators being filmed for TV, the the dude standing in the doorway at the back, and the audience melting away into coloured blobs.

Team17's second fighting game, Body Blows, was released after Street Fighter II and man you can tell. The characters are bigger, more cartoony, and they don't all wear sleeveless gis, there's music during fights, and it plays like you'd expect a fighter to. There's even special moves accessed by holding the fire button down for a bit!

But to fit all those glowing neon trousers into an Amiga game required four disks, which means that fights are now preceded with disk swapping. (Though the first disk seems mostly filled with adverts for Superfrog and Overdrive). Plus even though I've finally reached a game that lets you choose from different looking fighters in single player, there's only four to pick from! In the original game anyway; the AGA release unlocks all the opponents which boosts it to a respectable ten characters.

Body Blows Galactic (AGA)
The sequel, Body Blows Galactic, is very much the same thing, except it takes the action away from Earth and out into the cosmos, featuring alien worlds like Feminion: the off-brand Themyscira.

The characters are way less generic in this one than in the first game. In fact you'll struggle to find another fighting game with a more varied fighters, as you can play as Iceman, the Human Torch, a dragon, an a tiny dinosaur riding a bigger dinosaur, an anime-looking robot, Cyclops wearing a green blanket like a cape, a golden puppet man made of balls and a ghost that's also made of balls!

Ultimate Body Blows (CD32)
Then there was the third game, Ultimate Body Blows which put all the characters and locations into one CD, giving you like twenty fighters to choose from! You can buy that on GOG for PC right now actually, but I wouldn't really recommend it.

I may not know the first thing about these fighting games, but even I can tell that Body Blows was merely good enough for a system that didn't really have the best selection of beat 'em ups (even the Amiga port of Street Fighter II was kind of crap). The Body Blows games look pretty decent, the AGA versions are fast, and the theme is a techno song that says "C'mon!" a lot, but put them next to a good version of Street Fighter II and they play like cheap knock-offs.

Plus all three of them kicked my ass! The AI is such a bastard that I couldn't even beat the first opponent. At least Full Contact gave me a couple of easier fights to get the hang of it before Thomas the Dog destroyed me. Less of an issue in two player though I imagine.

Plus they're so so much better than Dangerous Streets.





GAME 7 of 12: RISE OF THE ROBOTS

Developer:Instinct Design|Release Date:1994|Systems:Lots

If a marketing budget and hype was all it took to make a game good, then Rise of the Robots would be the best game on this page by a mile. It's not, it's bloody terrible, but that didn't stop a lot of magazines at the time giving it 90% scores, like they somehow didn't realise that when you print and distribute an obvious lie that serves your purposes in the short term it kind of damages your credibility going forward. Especially when other magazines call you on it.

Though it was only obvious after people went out and bought the bloody thing, so the game was actually a success. With flashy pre-rendered 3D visuals like this it's easy to see why, as it was basically the Donkey Kong Country of fighting games... except bad. It even has a soundtrack by Queen guitarist Brian May! Well it has a short clip of the track The Dark by Brian May anyway, which is fine if you want 20 seconds of moody guitar noise.

The game was ported to basically everything in an attempt to make it the next Street Fighter II, and to me it's always been the first example that jumps to mind of a developer taking a game that had no business being on a Amiga and mangling the thing until it fit. It came on a dozen disks (plus an install disk) despite only having seven characters and even then they didn't have room for flipped sprites so it's impossible to jump over your opponent! Oh plus you can only ever play as Pepsiman. I mean Cyborg. Even in two player someone has to play as Cyborg.

Which is why my poor little mind was blown when I read that the Amiga was pretty much the lead platform! Not that the other versions were much better, it's a pretty crap game in general. On normal difficulty I was able to get through all the fights just holding the flying kick down, at which point it made me fight everyone again, except I was now unable to deal any damage and I got destroyed in the first round. No continues. Apparently it wanted me to hold the button down for a while to charge my power bar to maximum before every attack. Also the special moves include 'increasing attack damage', 'becoming invisible', 'becoming invincible' and 'reversing the other player's controls' and are accessed by tapping in a direction a few times.

To be fair, five of the disks it came on were for the animated intro, so there's not that much disk swapping between fights. It's about a minute's worth of CGI video padded out with loading and interludes where text is typed onto the screen, and all that happens in it is an aircraft flies across a sci-fi city. Insert disk B, still flying, insert disk C, still flying... it's not great.

There's also a few seconds of video to introduce each fighter before you take them on, which honestly wasn't worth the time and money spent on them, or the disk space they take up. You get text typed on screen after each of them as well, saying things like:
ANALYSING FORM...
ROBOT IDENTIFIED. LOADER CLASS 1.
COMPONENTS LOADING ROBOT.
WAIT...
Its all fascinating stuff, and the closest thing the game has to a narrative.

Like I said earlier, the game had some interesting reviews at the time, with magazines like Amiga Action giving it 92%, while Amiga Power gave it 5%. I think Amiga Power were being a little harsh actually, because despite the game being assembled from bad ideas by people who had about as much clue how to make a decent fighting game as I do, I'd give it extra percent just because the gorilla robot looks cool. Incidentally Amiga Power gave Dangerous Streets 3%, which seems fair.




GAME 8 of 12: MASTER AXE: THE GENESIS OF MYSTERX

Developer:Axe to Grind|Release Date:1997|Systems:Amiga

The next game is an Amiga exclusive called Master Axe: The Genesis of MysterX. I had to show the title screen in case you didn't believe me. It also shows off the game's four playable characters, including Master Axe himself.

This is a bit of a Shaq Fu situation as the game's based around a real person. Though in this case the person is a martial arts teacher, Neil Axe, which presumably means that the moves used by the fighters in the game are actually fairly realistic. Unless he sucks at it.

I know I said that this list was going to be chronological, meaning that a game released in 1997 should be dead last, but I decided to move it up to #8 because... I felt like it. There was an actual sensible reason for why it got released so ridiculously late though: no one wanted to publish it when it was finished in 1995.

Though looking at this menu screen you'd think we were back in 1988. It's not a great sign when a menu screen is indecipherable. Plus it's giving me a headache.

The single player game is based on the time Neil Axe took three students on a cycling trip from New York to Los Angeles, getting into 40 sparring bouts along the way and raising millions for charity.

So the game starts off with you fighting a corrupt secret service agent on the White House lawn. He's called D.D.T. by the way, presumably inspired by the famous banned pesticide, and my character's Gangsta, because... I don't know. Maybe one of Axe's students really was called Gangsta. It could be a common name where they're from (Buckinghamshire I think).

You might be thinking that Master Axe looks like a bit of a crap game, and if so your instincts are dead on right this time. And I'm not just saying that because D.D.T. kept knocking half my health off in one go with his 110,000v stun gun and I can't get past the first stage. My experience of the game was disk swapping, followed by humiliation, followed by more disk swapping. I did have more luck with the pointless one-fight Spiritual Warrior mode though, as I kicked my shadow-self's ass. Then I went back to lose a few more times in the actual game with the other characters.

Plus the game just feels unfinished, possibly because (according to the internet) the original programmer quit 90% of the way in because he hadn't been paid. But it's actually not terrible compared to Human Killing Machine or Dangerous Streets. I mean it's pretty bad, but it's not that bad. It's a functional video game with adequate graphics and plenty of fairly convincing moves. Some of them even have the range to actually connect with your opponent.





GAME 9 of 12: ELFMANIA

Developer:Terramarque|Release Date:1994|Systems:Amiga

The next game's less harsh on the eyes, though the title screen's got more people staring at me with anime eyes and gigantic grins than I'm comfortable with. Plus the name Elfmania seems like it should be a strike against the game as well. Hey I just realised that all of the letters have the katakana for the title written in them! Though at this resolution it looks like they ended it with it with フ instead of ア so it's actually called Elfmanifu.

Elfmania actually created about 4700 miles from Japan as it was made by the very first commerical game developer in Finland, Terramarque. But Amiga owners wished they were getting those slick Japanese console games and European developers wished they were making them, so sometimes they did.

This was Terramarque's first and only game, though they're still going today, kind of. They merged with the other very first game developer in Finland (Bloodhouse) the following year to form Housemarque, and have been busy releasing arcade-style shoot 'em ups on PlayStation consoles for the last decade or so.

Man, these pastel colours are a nice change after the other games in the list so far. It's not so great that there's just six characters pals and it's only letting me pick from three of them though. Plus Janika had an eyepatch on the box, what happened to her eyepatch!

This map system is pretty unique, as it's apparently based on Tic-Tac-Toe, with the player having to string together a row of six victories to win. Some of the fights on the board are harder than others though, marked by the stars under the name, and there are no continues.

By the way, I should mention that despite coming out in 1994 this is just a regular Amiga 500 game, it's not using the more powerful hardware of an AGA machine. All it needs is a typical half-megabyte RAM expansion and they've been around for as long as the A500 itself.

So any of the games on this list so far could've looked this good.

Also, you can't tell from a still screenshot, but the floor has line-scrolling effect to look like a 3D object. The game even has music and sound effects at the same time, during fights!

Taiki kicked a bunch of shiny beautiful golden coins out of me, and now they've spilled all over the screen, but that's fine as it turns out I can kick them at him for a minor amount of damage! Otherwise this seems to be a fairly typical fighting game, with nothing unusual to report. Though there seems to be a shortage of moves, ones that are any good I mean, and Janika's special move is just her repeating her kick really quickly. Plus the animation is kind of weird, like they didn't have the room in memory for the sprites to move their arms away from their body too much.

I still can't get over how 3D that floor looks in action. Plus they must have used some magic to get that many colours on screen, because the Amiga's not supposed to be able to do that. They've somehow found enough shades to make the characters distinct from the backgrounds without making them glow... too much.

It's a real technical showcase for what the Amiga 500 could do when it was being programmed by wizards from Finland instead of whoever was doing the ports of games like Street Fighter II. Though that's also a nice way of saying 'nice visuals, shame about the game', because it's probably not the ultimate fantasy beat 'em up of the nineties like the title screen claims.

To be honest this whole post was just a clever excuse for me to show pictures of Elfmania without having to give it its own article, because the gameplay's kind of bad, and I'm really bad at it. Though out of all the games so far, this is the one I'd come closest to recommending playing on Amiga; mostly because it was never ported to anything else. But it only comes on two disks and supports a second drive so it's not a disk-swapping nightmare like a lot of fighting games, and it's worth putting it on for a couple of minutes to listen to the 90s Amiga music and just because of how great and weird the artwork is. It looks a lot better than Dangerous Streets, that's for sure.





GAME 10 of 12: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

Developer:clickBOOM|Release Date:1996|Systems:Amiga

My experience of Capital Punishment was mostly what you're seeing in this screenshot. I got to admire the pretty lighting effects for a moment, watching the shadows swaying in time with a swinging light source, then this alien guy came at me like a truck and a couple of seconds later I was impaled on a wall. Game over.

It looks fairly nice though. The game came out in 1996, when Amiga owners had left the sinking ship for PCs and PlayStations, and the ones left behind were encouraged to upgrade to keep up. So this requires an AGA machine with a hard drive at minimum to run, and even then you need to use a boot disk to free up enough RAM. But in exchange for this investment you get one of the finest sewers ever seen on an Amiga. Plus there's no disk swapping and it supports CD32 pads.

Though playing with a controller doesn't feel so great if you're expecting it to play like a proper arcade fighter, as it just remaps the moves you'd normally access by pulling in a direction on the joystick. So instead of separate buttons for hard kick, medium kick and light kick, you're getting high kick, low kick and block.

Man, even on 'Training' difficulty I get impaled on a hook before I know what hit me.

There's only four playable characters (plus a secret Ninja), but I decided not to show a screenshot of the sole female fighter, as this is the only game on the list where she gets to put her nipples out on display along with the guys. Unless Dangerous Streets has some special moves I don't know about.

Speaking of special moves, the game actually has some, though they're accessed in a unique way. You have to tap the fire button three times without moving, then press in a direction to choose the move. Then the AI character dodges it effortlessly, assuming it didn't already interrupt you while you were standing still like an idiot.

Is the gameplay any good? Well it's hard to say as I didn't really get to participate in the fights, but I'm going to say no. Even in two player I can't see this bringing anyone much joy. It got good reviews at the time, but that time was 1996, when most developers had moved on and Amiga gamers were grateful to get anything new to play.

The game over screen is very nice though. Looks like something out of Perihelion.

But is the game better than Dangerous Streets? I dunno, is getting mauled to death by a bear more fun than being in a train wreck?





GAME 11 of 12: SHADOW FIGHTER

Developer:Na.p.s. Team|Release Date:1995|Systems:Amiga

Now that's a damn fine title screen. Looks like Raiden from Mortal Kombat is making a cameo as one of the shadowy fighters.

Shadow Fighter is another Amiga exclusive, this time by Italian developer Na.p.s. Team. It was their first game but they're still around, making games I've never heard of like Maria the Witch and Iron Wings.

The game features sixteen characters, but because the game defaulted to easy difficulty it's only letting me play six of them! Makes no damn sense. Though on the plus side one of them is apparently Axe Cop. Or maybe Officer Downe. I guess the archetype of a cop with sunglasses, moustache and a chin is fairly common.

But how many games let you play as Ryu with a goatee, huh?

More games need a spinning VS in my opinion. Listing the moves for each fighter on the loading screen is also good, though it would've been more helpful if it also said how to use them.

Characters in this have got a fair amount of special moves and they're pulled off with a lot of very Street Fighter II quarter circle rotation and back/forward joystick actions. There's only 10 different inputs to remember in total so if you learn the moves for one character you're halfway to learning them for all of them.

I've always been crap at pulling off Street Fighter II moves though, which is kind of a problem in this as the AI will use them all the damn time. I'd be standing there wobbling from side to side and bouncing up and down while the other guy's effortlessly turning into a panther and pouncing on me. The person who spams the better special moves wins.

On a more positive note, this looks great for an Amiga game! Maybe not as pretty in screenshots as Elfmania, especially on an A500 (these screenshots are all from the AGA version), but the characters have some nice cel-shading going on and it's got the magic 3D floor! Plus I was actually making some progress in the single player, until Bruce Lee wannabe Lee Chen showed up and wiped the floor with me, confiscating the last of my credits. Lee Chen is a being of pure bullshit, and also a git.

I figured I could use some practice, so I went onto practice mode to beat up a training dummy for a bit.

But the dummy beat me. In my defence, training dummies shouldn't have spinning blades and bombs! There's apparently a cheat that lets you be this guy, plus another that lets you play the last boss, so there's another two playable characters for you.

Shadow Fighter is an actual proper fighting game. There's probably been a million better ones since, especially on systems which have more than one button on their controller, but as an Amiga beat 'em up you don't get much better than this. It's fast, responsive, it looks great, the characters have actual special moves, and there's no better version of it to play elsewhere as it's an Amiga exclusive.

Amiga Power ranked it as the 20th best game of all time. I don't know if I'd go that far, but I would rank it as being better than Dangerous Streets.

And the final game is...





GAME 12 of 12: FIGHTIN' SPIRIT

Developer:Light Shock|Release Date:1996|Systems:Amiga

Oh man, this one's got it's own cheesy theme tune, with vocals, on floppy disk! Plus that title screen is amazing. I'm starting to feel like my site's new logo doesn't have nearly enough lightning or tigers on it.

Fightin' Spirit is another Amiga exclusive by another Italian developer, though Light Shock didn't last so long. They've only got three games credited to them, all released in 1996, including DOS beat 'em up Pray for Death which looks like they were aiming for Killer Instinct's flashy CGI look and ended up with the next best thing to Xenophage: Alien BloodSport.

This game's all 2D though, and it lets you play as a tiger. Or Wesker from the Resident Evil games apparently.

Can't argue with 10 fighters and all of them unlocked from the start, especially as I have this installed to hard drive and I don't have to swap any disks. I've also got it set to CD32 pad so I can use more than one button to attack! It's only given me fast punch, slow punch, fast kick, slow kick, but that's a big upgrade.

The game has a bit of a story to it as well, which is surprisingly rare for Amiga fighters, at least the ones I've played. Also I chose this guy because he had a monocle and yet he's not wearing it in this image, what the hell?

Whoa, the colours on this. The characters are a bit hard to see against the background, so Elfmania and Shadow Fighter have it beat there, but the animation is pretty great. Plus it plays like an actual fighting game and features a shark eating a hot dog.

I'm not fighting a translucent dolphin woman by the way, that's just her special move. I'm sure I could transform into a puma or something if I could pull it off, but I've never been all that great at special moves. Still, I'm actually winning somehow, which works for me.

I lost.

But now I'm playing with a palette-swapped Terry Bogard against blue Ryu, and I can see us both way clearer against this background on this stage. The art seems a little inconsistent but it always looks better than 90% of other Amiga fighters so I can't complain. I think the biggest problem with the visuals is that they come off as being borrowed from other, better, Neo Geo games because they're so unusually good for an Amiga fighter.

Also I like the little animations that come up while the game's loading. A Neo Geo game wouldn't have these; it wouldn't have any loading!

These screenshots are from the AGA version, but the A500 version doesn't look all that different to me:

Amiga 500 Version
If only they'd figured out how to do this in 1988, then I could've started the list with this! I doubt many people would've had the trapdoor RAM expansion needed to play it back then, but they'd have definitely considered buying it after seeing this running in a shop window.

But is Fightin' Spirit better than Dangerous Streets? Well the only things Dangerous Streets had over those other games is its CD32 pad support and lack of disk swapping, so... yes Fightin' Spirit is better. I wouldn't have a clue how it compares to Street Fighter II though and it certainly wouldn't make anyone's 'Top 10 Fighting Games' list in 2019... unless it was a 'Top 10 Amiga Exclusive Beat 'em Ups' list, in which case it just might take first place. It's between this and Shadow Fighter.

Okay that's the end of the list. I'm done now.



Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers Amiga loading screen
Though there are a lot more than 12 fighting games on the Amiga, so here's a shout out to some of the ones I missed: Mortal Kombat I+II (those always got the most play in my house), the terrible Street Fighter II conversions, the Super Street Fighter II port that doesn't suck, the ports of Brutal: Paws of Fury, Primal Rage and Shaq Fu that apparently exist, Master Ninja: Shadow Warrior of Death (never played it, I just like the name) and Dangerous Streets.

Also I should repeat one more time that I have no business writing about fighting games as I'm terrible at them, and all my opinions should be ignored.


Thanks for reading! Sadly that's it for the time being, as I'm taking a break from video games for a couple of months so I can recharge my interest and focus on my Sci-Fi Adventures site for a while. It seems like it'd be a bit cruel to put a 'next game' clue up and then make you wait eight weeks to read about it, so I'm not doing that, but I assure you that Super Adventures WILL return! Unless I'm too busy with other stuff, then it won't.

PS. leave a comment.

2 comments:

  1. There is a way to de-yellow your A1200 -- and other whiteish machines, like the SNES -- but it involves soaking the thing in chemicals and I've never summoned the courage to try it.

    Um... the Terramarque logo. Is that a camel and a giraffe engaging in cross-species lovemaking?

    Crikey, I had completely forgotten about Shadow Fighter; I remembered Pupazz, and how much Amiga Power loved the character, but for some reason I thought he was in Body Blows.

    Enjoy your break; it was good to have you back! My guess for the next game is Deadly Premonition.

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    1. I'd be tempted to use some Retr0bright on it if I thought it'd last, but apparently even wrapping the thing up, hiding it in a box, then putting it in the dark isn't going to stop it from going yellow again.

      I'm not even going to speculate what those animals are up to behind the building in the Terramarque logo... though I will point out that there's a leopard and an elephant back there as well.

      And there's no point guessing what the next game's going to be because I don't even know yet. It could be anything! Probably not a fighting game though.

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