Thoughts by Mr Creosote (18 00 2017) – Amiga (OCS)
Team 17, the least original developer ever, were fast to jump on another trend and try themselves at Street Fighter 2. Body Blows boasts big sprites and it plays fairly fast (compared to Amiga’s SFII port). And, probably most importantly, it was an original Amiga development, i.e. they may have found some better ways to handle such a game than the workarounds applied on computer ports of arcade hits.
Indeed, the special move trigger is promising in this respect: one is always triggered with a long push of the joystick button. It’s still special enough, because you will definitely need some time without being attacked for it to work successfully, i.e. you cannot use it all the time. Nevertheless, it does not depend on insane, unreliable joystick movements. Even better, this is universal among all fighters.
The bad news: the fighters are not just similar in that one way. Oh, visually, they all look quite distinct (ugly, though that’s a question of stylistic taste), but their general move set and their abilities are quite… samey. As stupid as the characterization and “plot” of genre games may be, one still misses it in this one, where the fighters remain (figuratively speaking) totally faceless and therefore exchangeable. It is only appropriate that of all fighters, the final boss is the least interesting one.
Now, this makes Body Blows not a particularly spectacular contender in the new SFII age. Lame speech samples and generally boring sounds don’t make things much better. Nevertheless, by the standards of the previous decade, the game is not so bad, as it is at least well playable. It’s not nearly as annoyingly hard as all too many fighting games of the time. Colourful, lightly animated backgrounds are nice to look at. By Team 17 standards, it’s not bad. Which may not be saying much, but it’s something at least.
