Human Killing Machine (aka HKM) is a spiritual sequel to the home computer version of Street Fighter, with excellent graphics but limited animation!
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Developing team Tiertex is known as the responsible team that converted the arcade version of Street Fighter to the PC. This time, Tiertex decided to create their very own fighting game, separately from the official Street Fighter license. To the game now, the player's character is Kwam, a fighter from Korea and (like all fighters of the game) he sets out to prove his superiority against all the other marital artists. He travels in different places of the World, like Russia, Amsterdam, Spain, Germany, and ultimately Beirut, to confront and defeat each and every challenger! Note that the range of the available-in-battle moves seems relatively limited, probably because much of the game's memory size is used to generate the stunning backgrounds! HKM is a really good and fun game to play and it's among the best fighting games ever appeared on the 8bit home computers!
GRAPHICS / SOUND HKM has impressive and nicely drawn backgrounds, especially on the CPC version which considered to be the best compared to the ZX and Commodore versions (the latter actually looks totally different!). The CPC version is colorful enough to impress although it is running in Mode 1 (320×200 pixels) with only 4 colors on screen!!! Each stage offers a specific landscape taken from each of the 5 countries visited, but possibly because of the memory used for these excellent background graphics, the animation suffers a lot sporting very few frames of animation and lacking any degree of background scrolling!. As far as the sound, the game offers an main-menu theme, while there only a few basic fighting sound FX during gameplay.
CPU: ZiLOG Z80 4MHZ MEMORY: 64 KB or 128 KB of RAM depending on the model (capable of being expanded to 512k using memory extension boards) GRAPHICS: Motorola 6845 address generator, Mode 0: 160x200 / 16 colors, Mode 1: 320x200 / 4 colors, Mode 2: 640x200 / 2 colors, A colour palette of 27 colors was supported SOUND: The CPC used the General Instrument AY-3-8912 sound chip, providing 3 channels Mono Sound (via internal speaker) but capable to offer Stereo Sound provided through a 3.5 mm headphones jack (with pretty impressive outcome!). Also, it is possible to play back digital sound samples at a resolution of approximately 5bit. This technique is very processor-intensive though.