Obviously inspired by Final Fight, this game is very similar in setting and style. You have two characters, Paul and Bobby, but they are locked to controller inputs. Player 1, Paul, is your jeans and white T-shirt-clad standard Cody-esque pro wrestling-inspired protagonist. Player 2, Bobby, is African-American, has a great strut, and has a breakdancing move.
Image source: mobygames.com
Analysis
- The sprites are well done, but a bit uninspired. The backgrounds are nice, elevating the look a bit. The combat has a few improvements over Final Fight, but is also slightly simplified. The main simplification is the ability to pick up weapons, here you only pick up items, but Westone fixed an issue that has been bothering me in almost all brawlers: picking up items in this game has lower priority than punching enemies. Another tweak to the Final Fight formula is more subtle, but extremely welcome: when normal enemies do un-dodgeable attacks, they announce them for a full second with a special animation frame, enabling you to react correctly. However, the bosses are still horribly unfair. A final, very subtle thing I noticed, is that the collision range on the depth axis of the isometric gameplay seems larger than most brawlers. This means that you can easily hit and grab enemies that your sprite looks reasonably close to. This feels a bit better than Final Fight.
Log entries
- Completed the game with Paul on Normal, 4 lives difficulty. A bit too long, but decent combat mechanics for the genre.
2022-10-08
MiSTer Full Playthrough