Final Fight

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The game is set in an American fictional place called Metro City and the story revolves around the kidnapping of the newly-elected Mayor's daughter, Jessica, by a dominant street gang named "Mad Gear"! The gang's members want to take control of the city, so they kidnap the girl to blackmail the Mayor. Mike Haggar (the Mayor), is a former pro wrestler and he refuses without any question to give in to the gang's demands! So he decides to set out to rescue his daughter with the help of her boyfriend, a black belt martial artist named Cody and his friend, a modern-day Bushin Ninja named Guy. At the game's main menu, you can choose one among those three different characters, each with his own pros and cons. Also, the game can be played in two-players mode (like Golden Axe and Double Dragon), which adds more fun! Your main goal is to beat the hell out of every enemy character that appears on screen aiming to stop you, until you finally reach the end of the stage and confront a stronger (and much bigger) boss fighter! Once that boss is knocked out, you will automatically move on to the next stage. Final Fight is a nice beat 'em up game, until the moment you realize that nothing new is going to happen (pretty usual for almost all games of its genre). The fighting moves are rather limited and each major villain can be beaten by using a specific technique! The gameplay is getting gradually tougher, much like the Double Dragon series, but sometimes it might get in your nerves and make you quit! After all, this is a beat 'em up game, so it shouldn't be a "piece of cake" for any player!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics on the Amiga version are decent without any other special feature. The backgrounds illustration is pretty monotonous. Note that the Amiga conversion offers less than 32 colors on screen (!) and looks almost identical to the Atari ST (so maybe we have another ST port here)! The only difference between the Amiga and the ST is that the Amiga conversion has a few more details here and there and smoother scrolling and sprite animation. One of Final Fight's appeals is the use of really large characters! But, it's quite odd for the Amiga's (very capable) hardware that the frame-rate occasionally drops when more thugs occupy the screen and this looks like a "lazy" programming considering the powerful Amiga graphics hardware. I will not refer to the huge differences between the Amiga and the Sharp X68000 conversion. All I'll point out is that the latter is the only almost arcade perfect conversion among the 16bit computers. The intro music is nicely done but the in-game sound is extremely poor since the absence of a background music makes the game particularly...silent and sparse; the sampled sound effects save the day though!