Truly one of the best arcade beat 'em up games ever. For months now PC users have enjoyed playing capcom's top titles such as this on Callus, an assembly coded emulator from the infamous bloodlust, and I have to admit these screenshots were taken from callus, since my PC is too slow to run FF at any reasonable speed under MAME. Now with the advent of MAME v0.31 we can play final fight on our Acorns under emulation (albeit a little slowly).
For those of you who haven't heard of this before, it's a standard walk along beat 'em up, similar to sega's Streets of Rage, or Grievous bodily 'arm on the acorn. The town mayor's (haggar's) daughter has been kidnapped by the evil gang who rule the city streets, and you need to vanquish them and rescue the beautiful Jessica. Cody and Guy two friends of jessica's also come along for the trip. The screen scrolls from left to right as you move, encountering new bad guys at every step to be beaten to a pulp by your merciless fists, and whatever else you can find along the way. FF contains all the elements of a superb arcade game, the attention to detail and parrallax backgrounds are beautiful, interactive as you can smash up phone boxes, barrels, signs, oil drums and doors on your way through the levels. The action is varied as you travel throughout the city from one area to another defeating all manner of enemies, and the obligatory end of level baddies.
The game success story is a simple one, there is no big gimic, other than desperately violent gameplay, lots of small and varied levels, lots of large and varied enemies, oh, and sound and graphics to die for. I've completed this game several times now, and still come back for more, venting my rage on the fiends of the underworld.
You can pick up knives, swords, even pipes to help crunch your enemies, and the gameplay can get truly frantic when you're surrounded by hordes of gang members. It's great fun to start picking up a sword and slashing away at your charging foes, or even better picking up a knife and punching with it as fast as you can to inflict large amounts of pain and bleeding. If the enemy is too far away, simply throw the knife at them instead, if you don't, you can guarantee they'll throw it at you! Failing this, you have a fairly wide variety of moves available to you, accessible very easily through only 2 buttons (keeping it much simpler than other games of this genre). These moves include round house kicks, knees, flying kicks, jumping kicks, throwing over the shoulder, throwing forward, jumping back, heading, all sorts, mainly determine by how close you are to the enemy and how wildly you're thrashing the keyboard. This game can get you very worked up, so much so that it's probably a good idea to leave yourself a few minutes after playing to try and calm down before you return to the rest of your peaceful life!
Choose your fighter to start the game with, but don't worry you can always change when you use a new credit.
Guy throws one baddy into another knocking them both for six, and holds that sexy pose, all at once on the down town streets.
Guy kicks a fat bloke right where it hurts in the cellars under the city and understandably the fat bloke passes out.
It's a shame you can't see the screen vibrating, or hear the authentic rattle of the train as it passes behind the gymnastic street hooker who's about to kick Guy in the chops.
If it all goes wrong you're left with 10 seconds to continue (possibly as another character) before the dynamite goes off. Remember, it's an emulated arcade game - you can 'insert coins' all day long.
Having been resurrected as Cody, I take on the massive skull-crunching Andore inside the underground train. Again it's a shame you can't here the rattle of the train on the tracks, see the tunnel lights flashing past the window, or the passenger grips swinging with the trains motion that make the game so enchanting.
Haggar is about to give the samurai warrior a taste of his own sword in the underworld fighting arena.
Clever bonus rounds where in this one you get to inflict serious damage on a gang member's pride and joy - don't bother picking up the pipe, use your bare fists instead.