Final Fight

The plot goes like this. Gangs are all over Metro City ruining everything. Killing and being violent and illegally parking in handicapped spaces and so on. Now, in comes this new bad-ass Mayor, Mike Haggar. He used to be a Street Fighter you see. And he's still got it in him to kick some ass if need be. And he's on a mission to stop the gangs, but he wants to do it the legitimate way first.

Apparently it was an ingenious plan, because the people behind all the gangs, a group calling themeselves Mad Gear, decided to take action and kidnap the mayor's daughter, Jessica. So Mike decides to pass some more laws curtailing gangs even more...no, wait, that's not right...he calls up Cody. Cody, who was born without a last name, is Jessica's boyfriend. He also knows how to kick some ass. Before he leaves he lets his friend Guy, who was also born without a last name, know about the mission. And now Guy's whining about wanting to go test out his kung-fu. Because you know... he knows kung-fu.

Through the game they beat the hell out of assorted thugs in six different city areas. They fight Andre the Giant and his posse. They fight a guy named Damned who was censored in the home console versions. And at the end they fight a guy in a wheelchair. Sure he's got a gun. But it's still abuse of of the physically impaired! This insanity has to stop! I...oh wait, it's just a game. Never mind. And it's a lot of fun too. Simple. But fun.

I guess sometimes they weren't illegally parking in handicapped spaces.

Yes! Yes! Ooo! Me!

(Jumps up and down excitedly like a little kid)

Finally another chance to do an I did that! node! (like this and this)

Well, seeing as you asked (carries on without waiting to see if anyone did ask, which they clearly didn't), I did the conversions of CapCom's Final Fight for the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.

This being the bad old days of 1990, when times were hard and Japanese arcade game manufacturers were happy to take your license fee but wouldn't give you anything in return, I had to pull all the ROM chips off the board, read them all, and work out how all the background graphics and sprites were stored.
After a good bit of hacking and playing about I got the sprites displaying on my Amiga, and they looked great! ..And 100 pixels high each! ..And in 256 colours! ..And there were about 2000 animation frames! (ulp)

So, sadly I must say that despite my best programming efforts (and I put quite a lot of work into Amiga Final Fight), and plenty of fancy loading-baddies-while-you-played-and-decompressing-them-sharpish-before-they-came-onscreen-to-hit-you type stuff, all the beautiful sprite graphics got converted down to a shared pallette of 16 colours and about half the animation frames had to go. Doh. They were still huge, which was nice, but they were a bit washed out. Sorry.

Anyway, I did all the nice front-end stuff about Mike Haggar and the Mad Gear Gang, put in a very silly cheat mode (in the intro, when Mike Haggar's in his Mayor's office, and the guy on the phone says "Not so fast, turn on your TV!", press the HELP key five times), and generally programmed like a nutter until they dragged the master disks out of my hands.

Oh, and the guy in the wheelchair at the end? ..umm.. I don't know how to tell you this.. but due to the teeniest of bugs, you couldn't actually beat him unless you were cheating - Sorry! It was my last game for the Amiga, and I was sad to leave the machine behind - it was a lot of fun to program, although the lures of the Game Genie lay ahead.

Incidentally, it got quite good reviews, including 87% in defunct UK gamer magazine Zero, who couldn't resist the homo-erotic overtones of the game's graphics and printed the review overlaid on a picture of a gay dance troupe. Still, Andre The Giant (and his identically-pixelled-but-recoloured brothers) did look a little on the effeminate side..

Sorry, I'll shut up & sit back in my rocking chair now