As surprises go, beat-em-ups don't come much more surprising than Shadow Fighter. Programmed and designed by an unknown, unheard group of Italian ex-conscripts, this beat-em-up rates as one of the best available on any 16-bit platform. It incorporates all of the features that make a computer combat simulation enjoyable.

Sixteen characters that are player-selectable. A control system that's easy to get to grips with. Special moves that make sense and can be pulled off 90 per cent of the time that the combatant demands them.

Backdrops that feel as if they're part of the game rather than just a bit of lushness tacked on for the sake of appearance (à la Elfmania). And finally, move combos that not only look good but also become intuitive and are repeatable by a skillful player.

Add to all of the above a manga-esque, cartoony-look to the characters and you're looking at a presentation that's not only going to delight you visually but will appeal to you atavistic primeval urges and keep you playing until you've mastered the special moves and intricacies of every character.

The special moves make more sense, because the actual combinations of joystick action required relate to the movement on screen and so feel natural. Unlike the more mechanical responses needed for Mortal Kombat II.

The icing to the cake, there's a training mode which, while helping the player to learn special moves and combinations, feels more like taking part in a horrific, hallucinatory cartoon. Hurrah for Pupazz the demonic vengeful spirit of all shop dummies!

While the training mode is hilarious, the two-player option is the most fun. It doesn't offer anything unusual in terms of structure, such as the fighter in IK+ or the tag teaming of Body Blows. But it's passable. The players choose a character each and fight a duel. Best out of three bouts wins, and that's it.

Meanwhile, the one-player tournament is pleasing while at the same time being a bit less predictable than normal.

To earn a bout from the Shadow Fighter himself, medium or hard must be selected and a certain number of bouts fought; 10 and 16 respectively. It's a good idea, because it discourages the temptation to play through and win all the bouts at easy level and then never play the game again.

So, to sum up, Shadow Fighter is one of the favourite contenders to take the Amiga Format beat-em-up crown.

Follow me on this one. Everyone in beat-'em-ups hates each other, right? If they're not the brother of another one who's chosen a path of the Dark Side, then they're a pupil gone off the rails and forever chased by their good and frustrating teacher. They've murdered each other's sisters, cheated on their wives and maybe, just maybe, stolen each other's winning lottery tickets. These are all good reasons to kick each others duodenums out, and on this level bat-'em-ups make sense.

JUDITH
But hang on a minute. These fights aren't swift, impromptu brawls fuelled by alcohol, macho task, and years of embittered hatred. They're organised, three round matches which involve at least one, and usually both combatants flying half way round the world to meet at a set place ina foreign country to fight each other.

It's Jeux Sans Frontiers, only without Eddy Waring and with the risk of serious injury elevated to an art form, and would take a massive amount of good will and cooperation for both fighters to book the tie off wor, buy their tickets and turn up at the same place at the same time. Hardly the actions of two individuals who have worn to beat each other into a bloody pulp, are they?

So that's the entire concept of story lines discredited and rubbished then. I don't care whether the Sorcerer didn't get enough attention from his mother as a boy, or if Liu Kang is the love child of Marilyn Monroe and Bruce Lee, and to be honest, until I played Shadow Fighter, I didn't really care if beat-'em-ups existed at all.

I'd always thought that they were limited exercises in reactions and button pushing, and pretty dull. I also thought (mainly because it's true) that most beat-'em-ups on the Amiga weren't as good as beat-'em-ups on other formats.

Times have changed though. Shadow Fighter's a great game by any standards, and everyone in the office (apart from Sue, who's far too busy to bother with games these days) has been playing it continuously since we got it. We've got the thumb blisters to prove it.

HALT!
It's great because Domenico and the two Fabios (three Milanese kids who, according to the Gremlin legend, simply sent the game in practically finished) have taken a look at the world around them and taken note.

Although I've only ever played it about twice, Super Street Fighter 2 in the arcades (apparently) the world's greatest beat-'em-up, combining short-term playability flawlessly with long-term appeal, and consequently sucking change out of pockets across the world faster and with greater ease than a giant vacuum mounted to a spy satellite in geosynchronous orbit.

If you've ever needed a blueprint for a perfect game, then it's out there in most arcades. It's consequently a bit baffling to see "combat simulations" such as that CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY Rise Of The Robots, which fail to take into account any of the lessons learned by other games, and are consequently about as playable as underwater tennis.

Shadow Fighter steals shamelessly from here, there and everywhere, snipping all the best bits from everywhere and squashing them all into one. There's a scary butch bloke who looks and moves a bit like Blanka, a scary thin bloke who's clearly a non-rubbery Dhalsim, and even a cute girl with lethal hair, not entirely unlike a character from the disappointing Elfmania.

HADDOCK
Then it grabs a few bits from Super Street Fighter 2 X and Mortal Kombat - whoever gets the first hit in gets a point bonus, and if you manage to land three different blows in succession, you get an "excellent" rating and momentarily stun your opponent, allowing you to get a few more punches in. These are admittedly small things, but they add considerably to the game and also break up all that tedious punching and kicking stuff.

With loads of locations and masses of characters to play, Shadow Fighter's good for at least a week of novelty value, with you and a friend trying out all the possible combinations of characters and locations.

Thankfully though, once you've lost the initial buzz of playing such a great-looking game (for even on the humble and increasingly neglected A500, you've got mock Mode 7 floors, parallaxing backgrounds and more colours on screen than are supposed to be possible) there;s still loads to see and do.

The control system's excellent, and makes us think that the programmers actually love beat-'em-ups, and didn't just simply try to cash in on the craze. We've not gone to the bother of counting them, but most character have over 20 easily-accessible moves, and that's with a bog-standard one-button joystick.

All the punches and kicks are dealt with using standard directions or directions-plus-fire, and the special moves tend to use simple swirls of the D-pad with a fire at the right moment rather than the fiddly UP, DOWN, RIGHT combos of MK2.

DYING GURU
Different moves work at slightly different distances, so rather than having close attacks and missile/fireball distant attacks, there's a number of grades in between. Fat Kraut Cop for instance, can perform all his punch attacks holding a truncheon, thus extending his reach, so his ranges of attack are punching, swinging a truncheon, kicking, jump kicking and using his gun.
I'm not into beat-'em-ups enough to know if other games have this kind of flexibility, but it's the first time I've seen it on an Amiga.

The characters have, well, character. Oh sure, there's a couple of fairly forgettable ones such as Boxing Gloves Fella and Beardy Bloke, but even they're quite fun to use once you get into them. Cute Tiger Girl's the one we'd all fancy if she were real, and even though she's a bit weak and puny, especially against Stout Blond Lass, the fact that she shouts "Judith!" and rolls around with her opponent more than makes up for it.

They're already planning a data disk with eight new characters (To be designed by YOU, the readers of AP. See page 69 - Ed), but these will keep you happy for ages, simply because they're NOT all evenly matched.

Oh sure, once you've mastered fireballs and burning kicks, 14 Year Old Boy proves to be rock hard, but in a stand up fist fight against the adults, he WILL get a righteous kicking.

There's a certain amount of suspension of disbelief necessary to fully enjoy the game. Why does Cute Tiger Girl's hair inflict as much damage as a punch? How come Fat Kraut Cop can carry a gun into the compo, and how come Hat Geezer's sword doesn't cleave some of the thinner contestants in two? Where does Basketball Player keep his basketball? And where does Obvious T1000 Rip-Off go when he turns into a blob of liquid and vanishes up his opponent's trouser leg? Who knows and who cares? It's all jolly good fun.

BILL ODDIE
If you can fault the game on anything, it's the one-player game, but then again, what kind of friendlies saddo buys beat-'em-ups to play them on their own? The computer player annoyingly accesses the special moves all the time, and on the easier levels it's possible to "Do a Rise Of The Robots" and get half way through the game using just two or three of the moves all the time, which is plainly silly and self defeating.

They really have thought of everything. Yes, it's hard disk installable (well, the A1200 version will be), yes it supports a second disk drive (which is just as well, as there's often a lot of disk swapping if you're playing against a friend. If you're playing a tournament against the computer the disks go in one at a time and stay there until you've beaten all the fighter's stored on them) and yes, you can replay a match with the same characters without going back to the menu screen, something that Mortal Kombat 2 won't do.

The sound's fun, with heavy crunching blows and people shouting "Judith!" all the time, the graphics are superbly animated and everything zips along at a sizzling pace. It's a superb game, and when the CD32 version emerges, eliminating all that tiresome disk swapping it'll rank alongside Guardian (the game of champions) as a powerful reason to buy one.

Ignore the hype, pour scorn on MK2's bland set of characters and limited moves, and buy the best beat-'em-up on the Amiga.

It's really heating up down here in the battle of the beat 'em ups. The best looking contender 'Pretty Boy' Rise Of The Robots was knocked out in the first round with duff playability, but the remaining two combatants, the son of last year's champion Mortal 'No Hype... honestly' Kombat 2 and Shadow 'Italian Stallion' Fifhter, a relatively unknown outsider from the land of pasta and parma ham are still in the running.

Blood is everywhere, joysticks have been broken and the referee has been beaten up by a German cop and had his spine ripped out by a man with a mask. Oh it's terrible...

A month or so ago Gremlin Interactive announced that they had signed up the fighting game of the year, and few believed them. Come on, how can you have the fighting game of the year and not tell anyone about it until it's almost on the shelves?

If it's that good they'd want to hype it up a little. But the reason for this lack of hype is simple: Gremlin didn't know they were going to release it themselves until roughly November of last year. And they weren't telling fibs either - it is good.

The game has been designed and programmed by an Italian team consisting of programmer Domenico Barba, graphic artist Fabio Capone and Fabio Cicciarello, the man responsible for its music and sound effects. They started work on it at the beginning of 1994, and it was some feat getting it all ready for release by Christmas - by the time you read this Shadow Figther should have been on the shelves for two or three weeks - less than a year later.

Playability
Looking at the screenshots you could be forgiven for thinking that this was an update of Body Blows, the scaling of the sprites and graphic backgrounds are similar, but the game itself is different, in as much as any beat 'em up could be 'different'.

Not for Shadow Fighter the beautiful rendered graphics of Rise or the realistic sprites of Mortal Kombat, these are pure cartoon fighters, but the level of animation is good and the separately scrolling backgrounds are smooth, if a tad colourless. That said, you can fight in 16 different countries, so you're never short of variety in the background stakes. There are three options available in the main menu as far as fighting is concerned: single player vs computer in championship mode, training which involves a single player Vs the practice dummy Pupazz, one player single battle against the computer or human vs human.

In the championship fight you can select one of six lower level characters and then battle your way past the other 15, while in any of the other three modes you can pick whichever character you like and fight against any other - except for the Shadow Fighter himself, who is reserved only for those who deserve to fight him.

Variety
The first thing you'll notice on Shadow Fighter's box is the 2000AD inspired artwork, the second is the flash in the corner which claims there's 'an amazing 17 different fighters'. Jolly good, no fibs here either: there are 17 fighters and they are all amazingly different.

The range of characters goes far beyond the standard Streetfighter-inspired Ken and Ryu to include a fighting basketball player, a cop, a magic carpet riding Pakistani guru and a shape altering blob of T1000 type metal, not dissimilar in idea (but visually nothing like) the Supervisor in Rise Of The Robots.

Each character has a wide variety of standard blocking and hitting moves and up to five special moves. These range from the form morphing antics of Khrome, the flowing metal man to the rather Blanka like moves of Kury, the Tibetan monster.

Special moves are carried out in the traditional joystick back-forward-fire style combination of sequential movements and it is essential that they are learned. Each fighter will have one or two which are really easy to carry off and some of these enable long range attacks. None of the moves will take all of your opponent's power away but a well timed combination will finish him or her off pronto.

Although the manual claims are up to five special moves it doesn't tell you how to do all of them, and in the process of finding out you may find some other moves which look pretty special. Suffice to say that trying all possible joystick combinations will reap plentiful rewards.

I loved Shadow Fighter from the moment I first played it. The players' moves are fluid and the special moves aren't too difficult to discover and master. The game doesn't have as much hype surrounding it as Mortal Kombat 2 and it looks more old fashioned in terms of graphics, but it comes well on playability and on the number of fighters you get to play.

If MK2 hadn't been such a stunning conversion then Shadow Fighter would have walked all over it. As it stands we're divided over the two. In terms of the Amiga, Shadow Fighter is without doubt the best indigenous beat 'em up on it, but Ed Laurence who reviewed MK2 for us is a console fanatic too and has got caught up in the sense of excitement that has generated - so there's no doubt that beat 'em up purists will agree with him.

For my money though, and hype aside, if you were a Body Blows fan then Shadow Fighter has got enough characters and impact to keep you playing for a long time - and Gremlin have promised an expansion that will include eight more fighters early next year.

A quite simply fabulous selection of characters," says Gerald Hoppington of Ashford in Kent.
"The Shadow Fighter AGA combatants look like they've just jumped out of a cartoon from the telly," according to Terry Simplins from Horbury, West Yorks.

"I can't believe the amount of special moves your man can make. It's absolutely phenomenal. As beat-em-ups go, this is really smashing," enthuses Victoria O'Malley of Wexford, Republic of Ireland.

"One can simply indulge in awfully large number of special manoeuvres. I found the whole game frightfully amusing too," writes Jasper Whittam-Bunter, Moss Side, Manchester.
"Oh ja, clinker von fumpeta fumpeta fumpeta, Shadow Fighter ja ja," exclaims Johan Johanson of Sweden.

These are just some of the statements I've recently made up.

Shadow Fighter is one of the Amiga's best beat-em-ups - indeed, it is one of the finest on any platform. And now the graphics are even prettier and the game hard disk installable. Good work programmers.

Pupazz the demonic dummy is the games' finest protagonist and is surely deserving of a platform run-out in the future. You can practice your manoeuvres on the evil little punch bag or type in the secret word and play him in the game.

Pupazz is backed by a huge range of protagonists - some carry basketballs, other wear bandanas similar to the little chap who appears on all the video games programmes. Details - 16 characters, one and two-player options, 25 moves and more per character, difficulty options and the squeamish can turn off the blood.

Even the people who cross the street to avoid beat-em-ups will enjoy this game.

The Mortal Kombat 2 hype machine was definitely in full flow at Christmas. The second coming of Kitana and Co outsold Gremlin's Shadow Fighter in the shops. Despite the fact that it didn't really deserve to.

OK, if you read our February issue you'll ntoce that MK2 scored an incredible 95% while Shadow Fighter scored 93%, but this reviewer still thinks that it's better. The difference in scores does not reflect the true long-term playability of Shadow Fighter.

If I had reviewed MK2 instead of the console obsessed crusty who did so it would have scored less. Shadow Fighter would have been top of the pile!

Rant over, the reason for this review is that a shiny new A1200 version of the game has arrived in the office. It's basically the same game, with 17 fighters, of which you can choose from six in single player mode or 15 in two player.

The only two non-selectable characters are Pupazz the practice dummy and the Shadow Fighter himself. There are tournament, single fight, practice and Vs (two player modes), three difficulty levels, 'stun' and 'blood' options.

Upon loading up Shadow Fighter A1200 I was hard pressed to immediately tell the difference between it and the older version. The concept is identical, the copy protection is, the music is and the amount of disks (four) is too. It plays exactly the same as well, so I had to get out my old A500 Shadow Fighter to make a genuine comparison.

Although there were a few noticeable differences at first it was only when identical matches with identical characters and backgrounds were compared side by side on screen that they were easily identifiable. The backdrops have been improved by the additional colours, though not as much as you'd expect, while the sprite outlines have been smoothed out and their colours enriched. The fluidity of their movement has also been improved, though it's still not quite up to arcade standard.

In the final analysis Shadow Fighter is still top of my list of Amiga beat 'em ups. If you've got an A1200 and you've already bought the non AGA version then for God's sake don't buy this one - the differences are not really worth it. If on the other hand, you don't actually have Shadow Fighter then I would advise you to get it. It's excellent.