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.