What did I tell you? I Said don't buy Streetfighter 2 unless you are really desperate for a beat-'em-up. Well all I can say is there must be a lot of desperate gamers out there. I don't like saying it, but I told you so. Believed all the hype, that's what you did. Taken in and spat out. Well, do you want to put wrongs to rights? All you have to do is buy Body Blows and maybe I'll forgive you.

Streetfighter 2 was the number one game over Christmas and that was all down to mass marketing, hype, and advertising. It didn't matter if the game was good or bad - Streetfighter 2 was destined to be number one because believe you me there are a lot of silly people out there who don't listen. I could see it coming a long time ago, in fact I said in the news pages when Gamer first heard about SF2 that it would go to number one.

Back then I didn't know what the game was going to be like, but I had terrible feeling the back of my mind that it wouldn't be much good. Don't get me wrong here, I like Streetfighter 2. I've played it more times than I can remember on my little-brother's SNES. How any Amiga gamer could expect the Amiga version to be as good as the SNES version is beyond me (careful! - Ed). OK, so it had fairly good graphics, but there wasn't much in the way of playability.

Team 17 haven't released as many games as US Gold, but they go for quality not quantity. So far they've managed Alien Breed, a classic gauntlet runaround shoot-'em-up, Project X, the Amiga's best scrolling shoot-'em-up by far, and Assassin, a really amazing platform game which was knocked by many. Now there's Body Blows which Team 17 promises will be the definitive beat-'em-up on the Amiga.

Also on the way is Super Frog, a cutesy platformer which could well be one of the biggest games on the Amiga since Zool. The future is looking bright for Team 17. While other companies continue pumping out their bog standard games, Team 17 keep on producing top quality arcade titles for the Amiga. This lot are smart and anyone who disagrees can step outside right now.

Beat-'em-ups are not the easiest thing to write about. When you've seen one you've seen them all. It's rather like trying to explain what a 'tree' is. What do you mean a tree? It's a tree-thing with leaves on and sticks out of the ground. It's a tree.
The same goes for a beat-'em-up. A beat-'em-up? It's a game where your opponents kick and punch the crap out of each other until someone wins. There isn't a lot more you can say, really. Well, there probably is, but I'd only be waffling on for no reason whatsoever.

Body Blows is incredibly fast and smooth and when I first saw it my jaw dropped open and I did a bad impression of a guppy. The game has a full 32 colour overscan display and contains loads of sound and speech that is guaranteed to impress anyone who plays it. You couldn't really ask for more in the playability department, but that's Team 17 for you.

There are three different ways you can play Body Blows. The first is one-player mode for people with no friends. In this mode you get a choice from Dan, Nik, Lo-Ray and Junior, the four "hero" characters. You then have to take your character and do battle against ever tougher opponents in an attempt to beat the evil Max and discover his terrible secret. You want to know what his secret is? Well, let's just say he likes women's clothes. Nah, only kidding I haven't got a clue what his secret is, not having got that far yet.

The two-player option is definitely for people who have a good buddy. You have a choice of ten fighters, and as well as the aforementioned fighters you can now choose Kossak, Mike, Maria, Dug, Yit-U and Ninja. The fight can be set up to your own options, so for instance you can change the time limit, decide how many rounds you want and fight character against character.

Another option is the tournament and it's only for people with loads and loads of friends. This mode allows four or eight human players to take part ina massive Body Blows knock-out tournament to compete for the prize of the champion's belt. This will definitely cause actual fights if you don't get the fighter you want.

In Streetfighter 2 there were quite a few moves, but not as many as there are in Body Blows. Each fighter can perform 21 moves, including the ever-so-important special moves, but these depend on which fighter you want to be. You might have five special moves if you play the part of Dug, but you'll only get two if you choose to be Yit-U.
There are a lot of moves, so common sense would say that the game would be incredibly hard to control. Well, forget common sense because playing Body Blows is so easy that even those who don't know what computer are could play it.
However, though it is easy to play, Body Blows will take a fair amount of time to master. Players will ultimately gain a lot more satisfaction from the game if they can work out all a character's moves, allowing you to totally destroy any beginners who come round to your house for a quick go. Ha ha sneaky, but worth it all the same.

There you have it. I'm not going to tell you any more about the game because there isn't anything to tell. It's a beat-'em-up, remember? Time to give overall opinions, even though you know what I'm going to say.

Body Blows is the best Amiga beat-'em-up since IK+. The game just oozes class and quality, graphics are amazing, the animation of the characters is really good and there is no possible way I could fault them. Will take you a couple of seconds to play, but a lot longer to master.
The control method is fluid and very easy to use and it doesn't require gamers to use a combination of joystick moves to set off the special moves. All you have to do is hold the Fire button down and release. This is a very addictive game, especially in two-player mode because you just have to beat your mate's head to the floor once more. Of course you could always use the joystick instead. Like most beat-'em-ups Body Blows is much better when you have a few friends around and doesn't have that same air of excitement when you're sat down playing it on your own.

I can't fault Body Blows unless of course you're not fond of violence in which case you definitely won't want it. Body Blows has everything that you would expect from Team 17. You didn't listen when I told you not to buy Streetfighter 2, perhaps you'll listen when I tell you to buy Body Blows. It's body brilliant.

OK, let's cut the crap. I know what most of you want from this review, and this is whether or not Body Blows is better than Streetfighter 2. Well, to quickly put you out of your misery, you can be assured that it's, erm, steets ahead of the Amiga version of that game, so if you're a beat-em-up fan it's money well spent.

Unfortunately it still falls slightly short of the console version, but then SF2 is the best game by far on the SNES so you have to ask yourself, "Is it worth shelling out the money for a console to play one beat-em-up, when I can buy Body Blows for my Amiga for under ß168;?" - and, of course, the answer to that is a resounding "No".

It's worth pointing out that I'm not a big fan of the Amiga SF2 at all, and I considered in AF43 to be much too high a score - 70 or 75 per cent would be more like it - so bear that in mind when you read on.

What's Streetfighter 2?
If you've been sharing a bedsit with Salman Rushdie for the last year, you may not have heard about the console boom. The game Streetfighter 2 is probably responsible for more console sales than any other game, with multi-million pound advertising campaigns stuck firmly behind it.

This hype carried over to the Amiga version of the game released just before Christmas, and reports in January suggested that sales of the Amiga game had reached 120,000 and still rising. That's an enormous amount, considering it was only an average conversion of the game.

Now, though, Amiga owners have got something to bark about, and it's all because of Team 17, the Yorkshire-based softies responsible for such classics as Alien Breed and Project X. Their game is similar in style to SF2, with the characteristic large sprites, animated backgrounds, and sampled effects.

Maim that 'toon
For those of you not familiar, the plot of the game goes something like this: man fights man, man wins. Man fights another man, man wins. Man fights woman, man wins - and continues in this way until man loses. The details aren't important, except to say you can play one of four characters, and you must fight another nine opponents in separate contests so that you may be crowned winner. Each of the characters are completely different in terms of agility and abilities, so during the course of the tournament you face plenty of different challenges.

The players' distinctive characteristics are accentuated by their heavily caricatured features, such as Dug, with his huge beer-gut and shovel hands, or Ninja with his huge sword and black balaclava helmet. It's very realistic in a cartoony sort of way.
The sound is mostly good quality too, with a tune to match each of the seven different fight settings and lots of sampled speech, which give the game a good atmosphere.

Control is via a normal one-button joystick (which is one-up on the console counterparts), and different combinations of directions and the fire-button will enable you to perform different moves.
As well as the normal punch/kick moves, each character has between two and five special abilities, such as energy bolts and whirlwind kicks. To get an idea of the different players' abilities, see below.

Fighting takes place in seven different areas, including the Shaolin Temple and Inja Cavern, along with some additional scenes such as a Russian Laboratory and a building site. As with SF2, there is no interaction between the scenery and the characters, but it's pretty and includes the odd bit of animation.

Feel the power
So, we've established that it looks good and it sounds good, so where does it lose out? Although it's extremely playable, and offers an excellent challenge, it does have its problems - however nit-picky they may be.

For the most part, the collision detection between characters generally works well, but when Dan tries an upper cut, he can miss his opponent by half an inch or so and yet still magically make contact (like I said, nit-picky but noticeable). All the characters have something good for them apart from Maria, who is stupidly thin, and doesn't so much yell as squawk as she kicks you in the face.

Finally, there isn't as much 'feel' as we expected from the game. The 'feel' factor of a game isn't easily defined, but there is something lacking - it just seems a little too clinical and robotic.

Still, this is far and away the best Amiga beat-em-up ever. It's technically excellent, polished, and it brings up-to-date an area of the Amiga which has been sadly lacking recently. If you already have Streetfighter 2, sell it and buy Body Blows.

There's no way we're going to get through this review without mentioning Street Fighter II, so let's get over with it. It's obvious that this is influenced rather heavily by its mighty predecessor. The way you can vary locations, the special moves the characters have, and even some of the poses they strike. Now we've said it, just bear in mind through the rest of the review that, er, it's like Street Fighter II okay?

In the one-player game you can only choose from four of the characters available. You've got Nik (who you'll be familiar with if you tried our demo of the game on last month's coverdisk), Dan (his brother), Junior or Lo Ray. You fight each of the other characters one by one, until you finally reach the hardest character, Max, a real tough cookie who only exists under CPU control.

There's a game options screen where you can set difficulty levels, timing (which can be off if you feel like thrashing it out until one of you is down), and location. The locations can be chosen from a list including the Shaolin Temple, the Building Site, the Ninja's Cavern, Inside the Office, the Russian Lab, the Costa Brava or the Wrestling Arena.
These look all impressive, and feature background animations too, which apparently really matters to a lot of people. Why? Surely in the midst of a heated combat you can't be thinking "Oh, that bloke waving his had is really good." I dunno, people demand the strangest things. Anyway, the feature's there if you feel the need to concentrate on it, but I reckon that after a while the backgrounds only get less important, and you spend more time concentrating on how to break some noses.

There's a proble with one-player beat-'em-ups, though - they're not normally that much fun. This, however, is so much better than your standard one-player fighting game. It's intelligent and tough, and reacts to moves you make very quickly. It'll last you a while in one-player mode alone, and even when you've got through all the other characters in the game, you've got the ultra-tough Max to contend with at the end - plus a special surprise if you get that far.

But where the game really takes off, as you may well imagine, is in two-player mode. This gives you all the characters to choose from (see left), and all the locations are available to you too. What's most impressive about Body Blows, in either one- or two-player mode, is that you can get to grips with the controls right away. There are 21 moves for each character, but control is so instinctive that it doesn't take long to sort them out, and they really do feel like controls rather than pointless joystick exercises which have a tenuous relation to the action. However, there's a great deal of perfecting moves, combinations and counters that you can work out, so the game has a lot of lasting interest in it too.

The special moves are accessed really easily, which is a godsend. Instead of having to go through some tortuous wrist bending manoeuvres to elicit a useful manoeuvre, it's simply a case of holding down the fire button until the level is reached in your special move box. Anyway, the game's so fast that you hardly get the time to launch into special moves, so using them is very satisfying.

The programmers have ironed out a few things which playtesting revealed as frustrating in beat-em-ups. For instance, a few overly sensible (i.e. boring) people play an excessively defensive game, just standing back with their guard up to protect themselves and letting loose the odd attack. Now, for those of you who are this obsessed with winning, you should be told that it is BORING BORING BORING. Body Blows makes this technique unusable because, after the first block you make, the blows start counting and taking off your energy. So you're gonna have to fight, you wimps. Hurrah.

There's also the problem with beat-em-ups that when someone gets cornered and floored, they're often finished. Their opponent stands over them and kicks them just as they're recovering. Not in Body Blows. If any character is knocked down, he or she can't be attacked for a short period while recovering. It's a great feature which reduces frustration and makes the game more fun to play.

Two-player Body Blows is, quite simply, endless fun. The backgrounds are not varied by the game - if you want a new location you have to choose one from the options menu, which is brill because it stops all that needless disk swapping when you just want to get on and fight. (In one-player mode the locations are varied by the game).

You can continue with the same characters or choose a new pair, and there's a menu option which allows you to play Character vs Character, so, for example, you can both play the Ninja character (and both of you can laugh at each other's silly-looking crab walk). No more argument along the lines of "Yeah, but your character's stronger than mine".

Taking the multi-player aspect of the game even further, there's a Tournament mode. Here four or eight of you fight it out in a series of rounds until there's only one left. Well smart, and you can even all choose the same characters if you want.

We've already said that it's like Street Fighter II, but there's a lot of originality in the game too. You won't have seen characters like Mike before, and you have to experience Yit-U's Speed of Light move to believe it - it's awesome, I can tell you. The characters all seem to be evenly matched, if one is stronger than another then his speed is significantly reduced and so on. There are plenty of candidates for 'favourite characters' anyway.

I can't recommend this game enough. Graphics aside, it plays absolutely brilliantly, just as a beat-em-up should. It's so much better than Street Fighter II in nearly every aspect that its similarities can be forgiven. Just try this game once and I don't believe you'll put it down. Highly recommended.

opinions on the Amiga version of Street Fighter 2 seem to be divided. While some maintain that it's a brilliant conversion of the best beat 'em up ever, others say it's a slow, barely playable game that's only got by on the strength of its illustrious coin-op cousin.

If you are of the former opinion, then fine, but I can't honestly say that I am. It could have been a lot faster, and the increase in speed would have resulted in smoother graphics, more responsive controls, and generally far superior gameplay. But it wasn't, and I'm still on the lookout for an Amiga beat 'em up to rival the console offerings. At least, I was, until Body Blows arrived.

YOU SPILL MY PINT?
So it's better than the legendary Street Fighter 2 then? In a word, yes, but of course it doesn't have the 'coin-op in your bedroom' appeal of the latter. If you've fallen for the charms of SF2 to such a degree that you can now be found prancing around the house in a pair of red underpants, pretending to be Zangief, then I'd say you need to see a doctor.

Okay, I don't want a show of hands, but if that sounds like you, then it's time you took off your Street Fighter blinkers (and put your trousers back on), and introduced yourself to the super speedy world of Body Blows.

CONSOLE YOURSELF
It's a strange state of affairs, isn't it? We're all singing the praises of the Amiga, saying how much better it is than consoles, but one of the highest compliments paid to the best Amiga games is that they're just like their console variants. Body Blows fits into that category, thanks to the slick programming and flashy graphics that have made Team 17 one of the most respected developers on the scene.

Originality doesn't come into it. We just want a decent arcade beat 'em up, and that's just what Body Blows is. It's not enough to just have a couple of characters these days, so this game offers a hefty 11 fighters. In one-player mode, you can choose to play as Nik, Junior, Dan or Lo Ray. Your first four opponents are roughly equal. To keep you interested in the early stages, you're pitted against them in a random order, so even if you're completely useless, you shouldn't find yourself getting pummelled by the same opponent all the time. There are two skill levels for the one-player mode, but you can only complete the game if you play it on the harder level - the easier mode stops the game just before you get get to Max, the final big champ.

Two-player mode lets you take control of any character except Max. Player two can choose the same character, which should settle all those 'it's not fair, I've got a weaker character!' arguments. There's also a tournament mode - not a simultaneous multi-player free-for-all unfortunately, but a kind of round robin competition with up to eight human players randomly drawn against each other.

TODAY'S SPECIAL
Apart from a wide variety of characters, the other essential ingredient for a good beat' em up is special moves. Each character has his or her own special moves, generally two each, but some have a third. The trouble is, standard joysticks just have a single button, so some of the moves aren't as accessible as they might be. Even so, whoever you're controlling, you've always got a repertoire of high and low kicks and punches, available from the usual fire-button/joystick combinations.

Depending on the current character, you've usually got at least one hot move that's accessible from the normal joystick positions, but for the real super-special 'stitch that mate' moves, you've got to hold down the fire button and store up a bit of 'Chi'. Once your inner strength reaches a climax, you automatically let rip with your trump card (fortunately, minus that irritating 'Hiujit!' grunt that emanates from SF2).

MR SMOOTHIE
So the screenshots look good, it's got loads of tasty features, and best of all, it lives up to all this when it comes to gameplay! If you've played any of Team 17's games in the past, such as Project X or Alien Breed, you'll know the kind of technical standards to expect. The game runs at 50 frames per second, so the scrolling and sprite animation are really smooth. The other advantage of the fast pace is the good joystick response - there's none of that horrible squishy feel you get from certain other beat 'em ups.

Some of the backdrops aren't as ornate as SF2, but they're all pretty big, with little incidental animations of bongo-playing Buddhist monks and excited onlookers. It's unlikely that you'll notice much of the background activity though, because the action is so fast you can't take your eyes off the players for a split second. As far as I can tell, there's no 'safe' move.

Even so, the computer-controlled characters could do with a bit more intelligence. The lower-ranked fighters seem to give a more varied performance, drawing on the whole range of moves. As you progress, the fights get a little more predictable: a few blows are exchanged, then the computer player decides he should be winning and launches into a massive attack of special moves, before setting down again, then repeating the process.

The game is at its best in two player mode. The option to pit any two characters against each other, gives a lot of scope. Whether your sparring partner is completely inept or a video wizard, you can always set up a reasonably matched fight, and best of all, you can both play the same character. Street Fighter 2 was declared the best ever beat 'em up on the Amiga, but its reign was a short one - Body Blows has just taken the title with a knockout in the first round. Slick graphics, decent soundtrack, and palm-sweatingly frantic gameplay make this one a must for anyone with a penchant for mindless violence. Don't miss this one.

Body Blows is without doubt one of the star performers so far this year, knocking most other games for six. As if it was not good enough already, Team 17 have produced an upgrade disk to further extend its packed list of features.

This is to Body Blows what the Turbo Edition is to Street Fighter. Speed is the major factor in the enhanced game. It is much faster than the original, running at almost twice the speed of the A600 version.

The immense difference this makes to the challenge is almost reason enough to buy the disk, but it does not stop there.

You can now control all 10 characters in one player mode, which is excellent fun. And just in case you are having difficulty with the increased speed you are also given extra credits to extend the playing time.

The strengths of the players have also been altered so some are not as strong as they used to be, while others are a lot tougher. Finally there have been a few minor changes, the most notable of which is the addition of shadows under the fighters.

All you are required to do to take advantage of this offer is send back your boot disk with a check for £2.99 which is a paltry sum for the extra features on offer.

This is an exceptional offer and let us hope that more software houses follow suit. Not only does it nobble the pirates, it also extends the longevity of the game. If you have Body Blows and like it, you would be out of your tree to miss this offer.

The address to send your disk to is: Body Blows Upgrade Offer, Team 17, Marwood House, Garden Street, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, WF1 1DX.