Full Contact is aν impressive fighting game released exclusively for the Amiga, with great visuals and awesome sound. Team7's intention was to create a game that could use the Amiga's unique capabilities.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Full Contact is a martial arts fighting game in which you play the role of a lone fighter who must avenge his family's honor by eliminating anything or everything that poses a challenge. But the case is not only to fight since you have the chance to upgrade your skills along the way. This will enable you to inflict more damage or kick and punch a bit faster. There is a variety of moves available but, at the same time, each opponent moves, attacks or defends differently so you need to progress further in the game and upgrade your skills. Some of the opponents may carry deadly weapons like katana swords, spikes etc. If you defeat a Triad thug, you'll be invited to attend bonus challenges where you can improve a variety of skills. Eliminate all eight of them and your family's honor will be avenged. The gameplay is getting gradually tough and the enemy fighters (from people to dogs!) may prove stronger or faster than you, so it's very important to focus on your stamina, punch, kick and speed upgrades.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The graphics are impressive and Full Contact starts with an awesome (demo-scene style) introduction sequence where you watch a Chinese landscape at sunrise while a full-motion animated fighter makes some Kung-Fu style techniques. This is actually an animation sample taken directly from the 1989 blockbuster movie "The Kickboxer" starring Jean Claude Van Damme. During gameplay, the backgrounds (although static) feature some cool medieval Chinese settings with a wide color palette. The sprites are fairly large (120 x 90 pixels each) and also reasonably detailed but, due to the sparse animation, they move a bit "clumsy". The game's sound is awesome and features a fantastic, music score at the intro and another (different this time) at the game's main menu. Those two scores are among the best we've ever listened to the Amiga system. The in-game sound consists of a variety of sampled sound effects, from ambient sounds to even samples takes from Bruce Lee's movies of the mid 70s.
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Hardware information
Amiga 500/500+
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs