Ultimate Body Blows

The Good
Maybe perhaps one thing: knocking a character down gives off a nice satisfying "KER-THUNK!" when they hit the floor. I seriously can't think of anything else. Except that there's both much better and much worse.

The Bad
First I have to get one thing off my chest: I was born and raised on primarily Japanese designed games, and while there are a few decent European and American efforts in game design, this one is definitely not one of them!

First off, the game already gets one strike for its terrible, unforgiving control method. Come on...ONE BUTTON?? Just to perform ALL these moves? Oh wait...what moves? I forgot! Every time I attempt to press said button my characters do NOTHING!! They just stand there like morons looking at their opponent! That's nine times out of ten that this happens! Then just to pull off a move...JEEZ!! Good luck if you even see them! I guarantee you that you'll be beating the joystick to death before you even see one move!

The music and sounds...GOD!! First off, they wouldn't work on my computer at first, and when I finally did get them to work, I wish I hadn't. The music is that damn horrible Euro-rave crap which I so loathe, and it's always just ONE damn song playing through the WHOLE game practically! I felt like screaming out after hearing it looping constantly! The sounds? Well, other than horribly sampled voices, the smacks, slaps, thunks, boinks, and whatnot all sounded WAY too loud! In fact, they were several decibels louder than needed.

The graphics are simply...low grade. They're too cartoony and of course badly colored. Typical European game graphics. (Note: I'm not trying to put any European down with that comment, but I'm sorry! Have you TAKEN a look at your game graphics lately??) The animation...wait, what animation? There's hardly any in this game! Everyone moves like a bunch of non-articulate action figures! Plus, their designs are really ridiculous, and far too generic to be memorable. Dull, dull, dull...ECH!!

The Bottom Line
Ultimate Body Blows just goes to prove one thing: some regions of the world just shouldn't try their hands at certain genres. Leave it to the Japanese designers to code fighters, and leave it to the Europeans to code racing and football games and adventure games, or whatever it is the European code houses are best at. Team 17's fighting game attempt is just a shambles, and doesn't come close to half of the fighters from Japan. A real stinker if there ever was one.

The Good
The graphics in this version were slightly better than in the original crappy Body Blows.

The Bad
The animation is horrible, with only a few frames for each character, as are the character designs. The game as a whole seems like a beginner's effort, and pales in comparison to some of Team 17's other games. And the sound - it's ear grating

The Bottom Line
Tries to copy great fighters like Street Fighter 2 Turbo and Mortal Kombat 3, but fails miserably. Don't spend more than a buck on this.

The Good
I remember thinking how it was good that when you freezed someone with the ice-dude in mid-air he would fall to the ground as an ice block instead of floating in mid-air as when Sub-Zero froze someone in Mortal Kombat...

The original Body Blows lineup is here, so if you liked them then you get to play with them...

The Bad
Just about everything. The control scheme is awful, lacking the sufficient amount of buttons to give you enough variety to do just about everything. Graphics are horrible beyond belief, with just about 2 or 3 frames of animation for every action making for horribly amateurishly drawn sprites that move with a jerky and un-natural feel. All that over backgrounds that feel like they were ripped off from Street Fighter 1.

Gameplay is unbalanced and simplistic with sluggish response and frustrating fights that often consist of just figuring out what the heck is it that you are suppossed to do over and over again in order to defeat a certain character. Pretty much like the early crappy Street Fighter clones like the original Fatal Fury (heck, the main character is even a copy of a Terry Bogard) only 5 years later. And speaking of characters, geez what a crappy lineup there's in this game! Apparently this one is an amalgamation of the original Street Fighter clone Body Blows and the more fantasy oriented Body Blows Galactic which includes into the martial arts-oriented universe such offbeat bozos as an ice-made monstruosity, a dino-riding savage dude and other assorted freaks that not only give the game a corny and ridiculous feel but also throw the game into the crapper balance-wise.

Sound is somewhat difficult to get to run in the dos version but you'll be grateful if you DON'T get it to run as it is a collection of the most flat-sounding Thuds and Boinks ever to be assembled for a game of this type, besides the developers apparently decided to boost these sfx over everything else in the final mix making them even more infuriating... The voice samples are some of the worst I've ever heard for any game ever, sounding all like differently pitched "Hwaerrrargghh-Ugh", and as for the music I don't even remember it.

The Bottom Line
Just about the most pathetic example of a fighting game ever conceived, makes you wonder just what the heck was so hot in the Amiga, after all in what concerns fighting games they are in a worse situation than PC gamers... On the other hand there's the slight chance that the game was actually far better on the Amiga but got botched on the port to the PC, but I'm not betting on that. Ultimate Body Blows has the kind of crappyness that can't just be "added", avoid at all costs.