Ultimate Body Blows

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.