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 Atari ST conversion has fine graphics that look pretty much identical to the Amiga ('cause the latter less than 32 colors on screen and that's why the game even looks inferior compared to the original arcade and the Sharp X68000). The main details, like the huge characters and the backgrounds are also present on the ST conversion. The sprites animation and screen scrolling suffers a lot and this makes the game almost unplayable at times (even on the STE hardware, the game is not as smooth as it should be). The crappy background scrolling really makes you feel dizzy! Anything more than just your character and a couple of thugs will result in a frustrating slowdown and will make the game very jerky and more difficult to complete! The intro music is fine on the ST but the in-game sound is poor and gives you the option to only choose either sound effects or music only (which gets repetitive). Also, the ST sound effects are not sampled as on the other 16bit conversions.