Final Fight

The Good
Amiga Final Fight features some pretty great graphics for a beat 'em up on this system. The sprites are actually from the arcade machine and haven't been custom re-drawn like the SNES port. Even with the reduced colour palette it still looks monstrous and considering the viewport on screen is smaller this makes the sprites appear even bigger. The sound effects are from the arcade game too, albeit at a bit of a higher pitch and clicker due to the Amiga sound format and they appear to have had a boost at around 10kHz for clarity. All are very meaty and satisfying.

The game plays very smoothly too. There's no real jerkiness anywhere (bar some slowdown) like other Amiga titles and there are lovely touches like the way bodies will bounce or slide when they hit the ground or the player does a little hop when they get punched by an enemy. The programming is watertight as there are no glitches anywhere and there's also some really clever stuff going on in realtime in order to load, move and scroll those huge graphics around, which is working the poor little blitter chip like a hungry slave.

The intro is incredibly impressive, which is pretty much arcade perfect and features an astounding piece of music which was chosen by the programmer himself from the Amiga demo scene.

The Bad
It's all just spread far too thin. The game has all the features of the original which look good on paper (all the levels, all the characters and a 2 player mode) but it means everything has had to equally take a hit. As such most of the player moves are missing and the enemy AI has been reduced to a basic pattern for just about all the baddies. It's playable to a point but the lack of variety from only having about 4 moves means it becomes monotonous very quickly. The SNES port made a couple of huge sacrifices in specific areas and used the space to cram in the rest to its best level, but the Amiga conversion almost equally skims the top off of everything. (Different systems though, so it's an unfair comparison).

The absence of any in game music makes the play feel even more sterile and bare although this is 100% down to US Gold not bothering to hire a composer to do any music for the game.

The thing I dislike most about this game is the fact that it could have been so much better, as the foundation is solid but it was ruined by US Gold only hiring a one man development team and giving him a ridiculously tight deadline of around 5 months to complete it in. No resources were provided aside from a bare arcade PCB board (which the programmer himself ripped the sprites from with a homemade ROM reader) and everything had to be written from scratch in Assembler language by pretty much just looking at how the arcade game played and trying to guess how it worked rather than having a proper code reference.

The Bottom Line
If you had never played the arcade game then Amiga Final Fight is a decent enough time in short bursts. It's fun in two player mode and at the end of the day there are far worse beat 'em ups for the system.

In saying that, if you were a fan of the coin-op you just can't ignore the glaring omissions. The sad fact is that if the programmer had been furnished with a labeled printout of the arcade source code (apparently the Speccy programmer had this), some sprite sheets and a more relaxed deadline, this probably would have been one of the all time great conversions. As it was, most of the time was gobbled up ripping sprites and writing the game code from nothing, so what we got was just as much as could be done in the time given.

Being an Amiga, you were never going to get an arcade perfect conversion due to the vast differences in hardware power between the arcade game and the Commodore machine, but if you put your burning love for the coin-op to one side it's really not a bad game if taken on its own steam. As a conversion though, it's sorely lacking.

The Good
Final Fight cd is often praised for it's good music, extra introduction screens and being close to the arcade conversion. The introduction has spoken dialogues and extra animated screens that aren't in the arcade. The game has also a time attack mode where the object is to defeat as many baddies as you can. This mode has some new locations that fit the game very well.

The Bad
This "good" music are just plain audio tracks, and what is so special about that? Anyone can just record real music and put it on a disc. The audio tracks just fade out and start over and that can be real ugly to listen to especially in the real long levels like the bay area. The game is still heavily censored: there is no blood, roxy and poison's clothes are larger, the liquor is still absent, the thug that discovers his car in a bad condition still says: "oh my car" etc. Most of the stuff is still missing, from the beginning you can tell those barrels are deleted and so it happens many times during play. This is just an incomplete arcade version. The graphics may be close to the real final fight, it's colours are definitely not. Maybe the sega cd couldn't do any better, but I cannot bear to see these washed out colours any longer. There is something wrong with the animation and the hit detection. For some reason I can't explain it simply does not play the same as the arcade version. And finally my real complaint about this conversion: The introduction with spoken words is real nice but why didn't they hire real voice actors?? Haggar doesn't sound like a mighty wrestler but like a wimp! The voice of the villain also sounds like a goof. I am not very happy about that, it is a major disappointment as it just doesn't fit the gorgeous animated introduction.

The Bottom Line
If you want to enjoy the arcade game to it's full glory you still have to stick with the real arcade game. However, if you are a real final fight fan like me, I do recommend you to watch the enhanced intro and to try out the time attack mode.

The Good
The Sega CD version retains many of the features that were cut out from the Super Nintendo ports due to memory limitations. The CD edition has a 2-player mode, the option to play as any of the three urban heroes and includes all the original arcade game levels. Unique to the CD version is an original sound track, voice work during some of the intermission sequences and a special time attack mode.

It remains one of the few side-scrolling, brawler action games for the Sega CD with a 2-player mode. Their are also some nice options such as the ability to adjust the level of difficulty.

The Bad
The severe hardware limitations of the Sega CD, meant that the 1993 CD port can not perfectly recreate the quality of an older arcade game. It could not even match the graphic capabilities of the Super Nintendo.

Final Fight CD, even if it had been a perfect port, suffers from being an 1980's brawler game without many of the improvements seen in subsequent 1990s games in that particular genre. Sega's own Streets of Rage 2 offers playable characters with many more offensive and defense moves, which are much easier to execute them the limited, often more cumbersome controls found in Final Fight CD.

One of the more common problems with early brawler games was the nasty habit of the computer to pull some pretty dirty moves out of its programming. For example, when your character falls down, thugs or even bosses often gather around you, thus ensuring that you will take some serious damage.

Last, but not least, Sega apparently still felt the need to censor the game. The transgender-women thugs were allowed to stay, but with less revealing attire. Certain Mad Gear thugs, such as 'Sodom' were given different names and bits of profanity were also toned down.

The Bottom Line
Final Fight CD is a solid port of a 1980s, brawler arcade game. Of the 16-bit ports it is closer to the original arcade game in terms of the number of playable characters, levels, bonus rounds and overall basic game play, with a few nice little extras, such as a cool sound track and the ability to adjust the level of difficulty.

If you can get past the Sega CD hardware limitations and the petty censorship, then you are left with one of the best games released for the Sega CD and one of the few Sega CD games with a 2-player mode.