Final Fight

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
Final Fight is a classic arcade game in the beat 'em up genre.

It is not terrible complicated story and, it certainly doesn't waste time with ethics or philosophy. It is just you (and a friend) wandering through several urban locations, circa 1989, in order to beat the you-know-what out a dangerous criminals.

Simple? Yes, but still a heck of a lot of fun to play, especially if you are old enough to remember when the premiered at your local video arcade.

Several efforts were made to port the arcade game to the home console systems throughout the 1990s. In some ways the Sega CD edition is the best of the bunch.

Final Fight CD features all of the arcade's playable characters, and allows up to two people to place at the same time. Other cartridge editions of Final Fight had to eliminate some of the playable characters and only allowed for one player.

Final Fight CD also features some cool music, as well as the all of the arcade levels and bonus rounds. It is nice to see such some of the Sega CD's hardware potential being used.

The Bad
Final Fight CD does take a noticeable hit in the graphics department, as the designers had to work with the Sega CD's embarrassingly weak on-screen color and pallet capacities.

Like the Sega Genesis, the "Next Level" Sega CD hardware was limited to 64 colors on screen out of a pallet of 512. This was at a time in the industry, when must computers and even most cartridge and CD-ROM based game systems had better capabilities.

What does this mean for this game?

Basically, Final Fight CD cannot be a perfect port in terms of the graphics, and, arguably, has trouble matching the SNES (capable of 256 colors on screen from a pallet of over 32,000) of Final Fight in this respect.

Sega allowed the Sega CD port of Final Fight to retain the female (technicaly, they are transsexuals) enemies from the original arcade games, albeit with less provocative clothing. Although certain character names (I.e. "Sodom") were still modified.

Frankly, the censorship seems a bit silly, although I can appreciate why such changes were made, especially when this was before the ERSB was created in to rate games (in the U.S. and Canada) for possibly offensive, objectionable or questionable content.

I suppose the biggest complaint, aside from the censorship or hardware limitations, is that the genre that Final Fight helped to build, had since moved on.

None of the playable characters have nearly as many possible offensive and defensive moves as, say Streets Of Rage 2.

The Bottom Line
Final Fight CD is a solid port of the arcade game, with all of the playable characters, bonus leaves and ability to play the game without th a friend. It shows its age, as well as the hardware foilables of the Sega CD, but fans of beat 'em ups will still want to give this one a spin.

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.