We arrive here by way of the Team17 Collection 1 cartridge for Evercade, released right at the end of May 2023 and featuring a diverse mix of ten of Team17’s 16-bit titles, first published on the Commodore Amiga in the early nineties and spanning fighting, various sports, platforming and, er, Alien Breed… Lots of Alien Breed! Not Worms though because that’s got it’s own cart. Anyway, it’s the fighting bit I’m particularly interested in for now though – represented here by Full Contact and Body Blows – because that’s how well eventually arrive at Fightin’ Spirit. I hope!

Full Contact is a one-on-one fighting game from 1991 where you battle against a ruthless Triad gang in the single-player mode, take on a friend in the versus challenge, or, if you’ve got loads of friends, set up a tournament for you and up to fifteen of them! You’ve got movement on the eight original joystick directions with the same again for different kicks and punches if you hold down fire, and to win each round you need to knock down your opponent’s health in as long as it takes. The first thing you’ll notice when you load this up is the gorgeous music, dwelling on some suitably oriental pan-flute ambience as a text scroll sets the scene before transitioning to the kind of very cool incidental music you’d get in Miami Vice – that episode where Castillo is running around with a samurai sword, maybe! Anyway, what you might also notice here is the silhouette of a bloke doing martial arts moves in front of a rising sun, especially if you’re familiar with the 1989 Van Damme classic Kickboxer – it’s straight out of the movie! And like the movie – and despite its own best efforts – I really like Full Contact! The thing is, this was up against Street Fighter II in 1991 but it’s bringing what could be a 16-bit version of Yie Ar Kung-Fu to the fight, so your mileage here is how much you like Yie Ar Kung-Fu because Street Fighter II this ain’t! Not everything needs to be though, and for all its dodgy animation and fighters that look like old men, there’s a really accessible and well-paced fighting game here! Mostly nice backgrounds too, good sound and the fighting itself feels fun.

If you thought Dead or Alive was the first fighting game to feature realistic big boob physics then think again because Body Blows was doing it all the way back in 1993! Where Full Contact went up against Street Fighter II by playing it old-school, this one just played it at its own game, with a total of eleven characters competing in best-of-three matches across various locations, and where each has its own move-set and specials. Once again, the Amiga’s single-button joystick required some simplified controls, so everything is mapped to a direction plus fire, then the special move needs you to stand still and hold down fire, while blocking is move away and fire. No throws or combos but there are three modes on offer, single player arcade, two-player versus and tournament play for up to eight players. I’d never even heard of Body Blows before this cartridge came along, and honestly first impressions were I hated it! Lacklustre environments, weird-looking characters, horrible animation, stiff controls and generally not very welcoming… There was something about Maria though, and her two-frame jiggle, so I wanted to give her a chance! Actually, it was more like looking for the original manual that kept me going because I felt like I was missing something then getting sidetracked by a couple of reviews that convinced me to stick it out a bit, and while it’s no Street Fighter whatever they said, there is a fluidity to it that comes with a bit of practice (meaning actually being able to land a hit without taking one), and eventually you start winning fights and having enough fun to ignore a lot of its negatives, most of which were later fixed in an enhanced AGA graphics chipset Amiga release.

The thing is, while getting to know both has been fun, and as much as the words“Street Fighter” inevitably loom large when looking at them (though in their defence, that’s true most fighting games) my mind kept coming back to Fightin’ Spirit, developed exclusively for the Amiga by Italian outfit Light Shock and published by neo Software in 1996. It was getting late in the day for the platform, so understandably it was built for the fancy Amiga 1200 and 4000 machines with an AGA chipset, and there was an identical version the Amiga CD32, but it did also get ported to the plain old Amiga 500 too, where, apart from having to drop from 256 to 32 colours on the screen at any given time, there wasn’t anything lost as far as gameplay was concerned. We’ll come back to that, of course, but given we’re talking 1996 rather than 1991, I thought it would be worth looking at a few of the other big-hitting Amiga fighters (to me at least) on the scene by now so we can see how it stacks up at the end. I’ve come up with a list of seven others, with the proviso that I played several of them elsewhere at the time so they may drop out if this version isn’t what I remember, but I reckon with Fightin’ Spirit and those and the other two above we can see if we can put together a top ten Amiga fighting games! In the meantime, a sentence or two, chronological order look at each in turn…

We’re starting all the way back at the other end of the Amiga’s life with Barbarian in 1987, when the fun police didn’t know whether to be more shocked by its Page Three cover model or its gory decapitations! Bring back 1987’s fun police over today’s any time though… We didn’t know how good we had it! I had this on the Atari ST and despite both versions being a bit “8-bit” in places – as was often the case in this crossover period – it’s still a superb weapon fighter, with great sound effects, a really fun move-set and that timeless head-rolling action! Next is IK+ from 1988, which was also an ST game for me but I’ve been playing loads of the Amiga version more recently. Probably my favourite fighter of all-time too, with its unique three-person action, responsive controls and that gorgeous backdrop, with all those weird appearances by Pac-Man, submarine periscopes and so on to always keep an eye out for! Into the nineties next with Panza Kick Boxing from 1991, which I only came to after getting totally hooked on its sequel, Best of the Best: Championship Karate on the Game Boy not long after. Better late than never though, and this is a good-looking, deep and accessibly technical fighter with a really addictive league table hook.

Did I really just skip Budokan or Elfmania or even Spitting Image but choose to include 1993’s Dangerous Streets? Why yes! Okay, its animations are seriously lacking in frames and the environments are similarly lacking in polish but it more than makes up for that in ambitious move-sets, hammy speech and all-out sleaze! Slightly more traditional form now with Mortal Kombat II in 1994, which was a Mega Drive game for me but considering the missing buttons here, this port ain’t bad at all! Actually, you couldn’t ask for more of it, with the right looks, characters and violent move sets, and I reckon even better sound than the original, though the computer opponents are brutal! The same year we’ve also got Shadow Fighter, which is possibly the best version of Street Fighter the Amiga never got! Full of polish, full of life and full of characters with all the moves! I guess the only reason it might not be my number one later on is the cartoony, scaled-up Double Dragon-esque art style which just isn’t my thing, but otherwise it’s a very fluid, very fun Amiga fighter!

I’m really not the biggest Street Fighter II connoisseur – more of a Darkstalkers guy – but we’ll finish with the 1995 Amiga version of Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers because it is very good, particularly the AGA version, if you can get to run – the A500 Mini managed, hence the dodgy pic of my TV screen! Just about everything is there (including a million disk swaps if you’re playing for real) with speed, precision and some lovely music throughout. The regular A500 version plays fine too, albeit without the looks and sounds, but either way, you want this and not the juddering, headache (or worse) inducing Amiga port of Street Fighter II (pictured above after Body Blows)! We’ll round that lot up later because it’s time we jumped to Fightin’ Spirit! I’ll quickly mention that for our feature presentation here I’ve been playing the AGA version on the Amiga A500 Mini but grabbing screenshots from PC emulation to make my life easy and avoid subjecting you to any more of my dodgy TV screen photography!

There’s one other very important point of order to cover before we get into game modes and all that stuff… Totally ignore the instruction manual and don’t press the fire button or a key to begin the game because if you do you’ll be missing out on Into The Night, the greatest theme tune since Stallone’s Cobra movie in 1986! “You’ve got flames in your eyes, burning with rage. Into the night. Into the night.” And then there’s the guitar solo… Never press fire! Okay, eventually you can, but if you do you’ll also be missing out on what the instruction manual doesn’t tell you, which is the all-important backstory, presented here as a text scroll on a very fancy and mildly weird piece of Japanese naturalist art! Actually, it’s so all-important that I’d be doing it an injustice if I didn’t convey it to you in full and exactly (much to my spell-checker’s chagrin) as written! “Year 199X… Like every year, the misterious Hikawa organization, controlled by Jenshi Yamamoto, has set up a big illegal tournament which will turn around the world and will be the challenge between the greatest fighters… THE SUPREME WARRIORS TOURNAMENT! The reason is… to find new warriors for criminal purposes, to be enroled in the Hikawa… but Jenshi doesn’t know that this time he has to face…” And after a bit of a wait you then get two screens of background information for every one of the ten playable characters, ranging from a bloke whose hobby is destroying Japanese puppets to Sheila, the CIA agent working undercover as a dolphin instructor. “The spirit of the sea and the dolphin are into her.” You couldn’t make it up! And that’s before you get to the tiger or the dinosaur!

I’ll come back to the bonkers cast in a sec, but first, having finally pressed fire, we should look at the various ways to play. First up is that Story Mode, where you select a character to play through the Supreme Warriors Tournament before a showdown with Jenshi Yamamoto. Next up is Vs Battle, which is where you need to go if “some of your friends say that they are stronger than you” for a bit of multiplayer resolution. Then I’ve got to start quoting the instructions again for the last two modes because they’re as priceless as they can be unfathomable! First up, Tournament… “We though to give you the chance to organize a tournament with some of your friends, to find out which one of you is the strongest. We also thought that it is improbable that you can invite more than seven persons at the same time (for reasonable space problems), so we opted for eight partecipants with a maximum number of eight human players. This means that if you will play with five human players, the computer will control the other three characters. By the way, if you will have a birthday party and you want to play with a lot of friends you can divide them into two combats sessions and organize a final match between the two winners, using the Vs Battle mode.”

Wow, where to even begin with all those “partecipants” and “combats”? Well, fortunately I’m playing solo so I don’t care, but all the same, this obsession with who’s the strongest out of your friends is a bit weird. I can’t ever remember discussing that, though we were a bunch of nerds so probably not the sort of thing that was ever likely to come up! Then there’s the assumption that you either don’t have more than seven friends or the space to house them, although again, I do appreciate the very clever the solution they offer should you happen to have double that number! And if you thought any of what we’ve seen so far is strange, then hold on to your knickers because even the developer is acknowledging the final mode, Team Match, is nuts! “This is a little bit strange game mode. You can choose to fight against the computer or your friend, the number of characters of your team (you can select the same character three times at the maximum) and of your enemy’s team, if the computer control it.”

Sounds great, but if it’s okay with you’ll I’ll quickly cover some of the other game options before we jump into some fighting! There’s actually a really cool set of tweaks to all-sorts here, with four difficulty levels, different numbers of rounds per bout, number of continues, time per round, an option not to fight the shadow version of your character (which should be in all fighting games), game speed, normal or death match rules (where you share one energy bar), blood on or off, turn off stun moves and specials, random or manual selection of computer opponents and finally full button mapping options. I know I’ve had some fun at the expense of the set-up, but there’s some really forward-thinking stuff here, and it really reflects the love that’s gone into the game itself. As already said, before you start your chosen mode, you’ve got your choice of ten characters on offer here, although there are ways and means to get at some extras! Actually, it’s just “VIDEO GIRL” in the high score table to unlock the boss and a guy called Shiro Asuka. Anyway, the whole lot of them have some kind of personal agenda for being in the big fight, for example Burke Mortlocke is a mercenary contracted to kill Jenshi Yamamoto, who in turn killed Kento Sazaki’s master so he’s there for revenge; Rhajang was Yamamoto’s right-hand man until his DNA got mixed up with a tiger’s, while he captured Yadon the dinosaur on a trip to the Amazon! The rest are spurned lovers, spurned crime lords, folk who’d had their sacred sticks stolen, that CIA agent who trains dolphins and so on!

As well as their own motivation, each character also has their own fighting style, such as kickboxing, kendo, street fighting, impact fighting, kung-fu and more, and while those are very successfully conveyed in their movements, there are obviously limitations when it comes to single fire button joysticks, so they’re all a similar mix of high kick, flying kick, sweep kick, lunge punch and the like but in-game a Shaolin monk’s high kick might be a dinosaur’s high tail whip, for example. That said, on the CD32 version you can configure for two fire buttons, so you could choose to put block on one or maybe separate punches and kicks. And whatever the version, every character has their own fighting (or fightin’) spirit, which are animal-based traits that influence their four unique special moves, so if we take Eric Windsor, he “embodies the free spirit of the eagle” while Shuzar “controls the spirit of the cobra,” then if we look then look at his specials, he’s got Cobra Fire, Rings Fire, Body Attack and, er, Monkey Attack. Which I’m sure has something to do with a cobra… Should have gone with CIA dolphin girl Shelia and her Dolphin Spirit and Sea Storm Kick instead! One benefit of hardware-constrained controls is that they’re pretty easy to get to grips with. Movement is left and right, up and its diagonals for jumps, and down for crouch, then you throw in the fire button for each of your moves on the directions, as well as without direction, so if you’re mid-jump you can flying punch rather than flying kick by releasing diagonal-up. Blocking is by pushing back under attack, throwing happens when you’re close enough to press fire for it, and there’s also some primitive countering possible… This might be a good time to state that as well as not being a huge Street Fighter connoisseur, the same applies for the fighting genre in general, although I have been playing around in it for forty years so maybe that counts for something, but my knowledge of advanced techniques is as limited as my descriptive powers are, where I just made things sound way more complicated than they really are! There is some genuine complexity in the special moves though! I haven’t mentioned Tong Lee yet, so I’ll use his specials as an example…

Tong Lee mixes Thai boxing and kickboxing, with the fighting (fightin’) spirit of The Sacred Takuma Tiger. By the way, do we assume that “Fighting Spirit” was already taken when they came up with this game, so they avoided any copyright problems by replacing a “g” with an apostrophe? I know there’s a manga thing about a Japanese boxing school that was around at the time called Hajime no Ippo, which means Fighting Spirit, and there was a later TV show, but I’m really not sure! Anyway, back to specials, Tong Lee has Dread Tiger, which is down, diagonal-left-down, left and fire; Flying Blast is jump, down, diagonal-left-down, left and fire; Burning Blade is down, diagonal-right-down, down and fire; and Burning Uppercut is left, wait one second, right and fire. I think those are fairly typical, with a mix of two, three, four or sometimes five moves (mainly rotations) to get your fingers around, and I’ve also just discovered they’re a pain to type out so that’s your lot! Sheila’s Sea Star is an interesting one though because after the left, diagonal-left-down, down and fire, you can then control it with fire for forwards, up and fire for up and down and fire for down, and I think that’s the only one that does that.

While I can’t say I’ve perfected many of these across the different characters, I did find those with a time delay element, such as my preferred character Sheila’s Sea Wave, did take the most practice, but apart from that you go from nailing them maybe one in five times to them becoming pretty much second nature fairly quickly once you put your mind to learning each one. In fact, for a couple of characters they can easily become a bit of a crutch too, and while the AI challenge certainly ramps up as you go through the story mode, this was the only place I really felt things were a bit unbalanced, with certain specials just wiping out all-comers way too easily. Apart from that though, there’s a wonderful fluidity to combat (at least when you’re not trying to throw new specials into the mix!), and as you get to know your character, their timing and their move distance you’ll start to elegantly chain moves, avoid or defend then resume – reminds me, I have come across a bug a few times where my character has been knocked down but stays down as the timer continues to count down and the opponent just does their stationary “bouncy” waiting animation, then the clock hits zero, the music keeps playing but nothing ever happens so you need to restart! While it can’t compete with the multiplayer, and the superb tournament mode in particular, which unfortunately I could only play with two humans versus six computer opponents but could still admire all the same, I think you’d be really happy getting this to play solo; the challenge is just right in the story mode, with opponents being mixed up for each round so you’re exposed to all of them as you play a few games, as well as being able to play as all of them. There’s also a high score table, where speed of victory and energy left is rewarded by points between rounds, so there’s loads to keep coming back for. Which I do!

I love the environments you fight in almost as much as the fighting itself – no rhyme or reason to some of them, particularly my favourite, the cool Miami beachfront Killer Burger mobile burger van, which its Jaws eating a giant hot-dog decoration on the top! The colour choices here are incredible, with vibrant sky (and sea) blues, tropical greens in the palm trees, the authentic graffiti on the road and textured sand, and that burger van is just so full of character and fantastic detail, and while the shark is the star of the show, there’s the bored-looking server, the fluttering international flags, the exterior styling with its flashing neon signage, the cooking stuff… And the people casually watching on, all muscular, bikini-clad and so nineties! Some of the more oriental backdrops are absolutely exquisite too, with gorgeous, richly filled and vibrantly coloured temples and pagodas, or lifelike, idyllic waterfalls. Then you’ve got an iconic Manhattan sunset, Mount Rushmore with its biker gangs and families of tourists, India with its dramatic fiery sky, exotically dressed onlookers and some elephants, a tranquil (apart from the tigers) giant statue of Buddha, a Thai temple, and I guess the only one I always thought was a bit lacklustre, an Arizona military base with a helicopter gunship and some women who really don’t seem dressed for the occasion! Overall though, the backdrops are stunning, and they’re totally brought to life by the little environmental movements or just spectators throwing a fist or some twinkling lights on a distant building.

It’s easy to be critical of the Amiga’s animation capabilities, and even at its best it’s going to want a few more frames ideally, but in that context you couldn’t ask for much more of how things move here. It’s never going to be a Darkstalkers, but movement is fast and perfectly smooth, and while some kicks and especially throws are a bit awkward if you look too closely, you don’t really need to look too closely, and your eyes very quickly adjust to the not at all binary but certainly truncated motion! You couldn’t ask for more of how the fighters look either – expression-filled faces, beautifully dressed and equally well finished, with frayed denim edges and realistic contours in silky boxing shorts or loose-fitting martial arts gear, and the extraordinary muscle tone, the light and shadow, albeit less so in the two creature-based characters. It’s all finished off with regular motion effects, some very elemental projectiles and subsequent damage animation that wouldn’t look out of place in Darkstalkers, and spectacular transitions to animal forms in special moves. There’s the smartly-attired, rotund referee at the start of the round with his flags too! I think the only place I wasn’t very impressed with the graphics was in the story mode bonus round, where you’re in an aircraft hangar with a helicopter inside that you need to smash up, one door or window at a time, and while there’s smoke and smashing glass and shouts of “Oh no, my god!” I just found it visually underwhelming in comparison to everything else.

That AGA chipset certainly has the looks, but Fightin’ Spirit has got the sounds too! Okay, I’d be happy if the soundtrack began and ended with that Into The Night eighties action movie masterpiece, but its offshoots just keep coming in every round, offering up different moods and flavours of what mostly sounds like sampled rather than chiptune synth-rock, although it could be a bit of both. You’ll be dragged from all-out stadium bombast to jazzy snare-backed piano leads to more reflective Eastern instrumentation, although it rarely stays very reflective for long and at the very least you’ll usually end up with what sounds like a chase scene out of a Rush Hour movie! Sound effects are suitably crunchy but regular fighting game fayre, and are elevated by the relentless grunts, shrieks and nonsensical, often unintelligible sampled speech that seems to announce special moves like “Dread Tiger” or “Dragon Breath” but it’s really hard to be certain if individual moves are getting their own speech or if it’s just a generic, muffled “Dragon mmpphh” instead! Doesn’t matter, it’s great, and the density of sound is more than a match for the density of detail and colour and action going on behind it!

I realise this is a terrible thing to do at this stage but we’re running so long here I’m going to do that Amiga top ten fighter thing another time! I think they deserve a bit more attention than they got here so far anyway so I hope that’s okay. Also gives me a chance to properly consider the painstaking decisions I’ll need to make around its business end! I think it’s safe to say that Fightin’ Spirit is going to be up there though! Whether you’re playing really old-school, exclusively on directions plus fire like IK+, somewhere in-between like this, or the mind-bending combos and counters and stuff that evolved since, or even full-circle with the latest Street Fighter’s “Modern Controls” (that halve the basic inputs of previous game and put specials on dedicated buttons for more casual players) there are fundamentals that go beyond skill-ceilings… positioning, awareness, observation, timing, developing strategy, remembering to block, being able to do your stuff under pressure… I think most of all you’ve got to learn to “feel” it though, which I realise is a cop-out thing to say, but that’s why I came up with that list of games above rather than some of the ones people will tell me are way better, because they’re the ones I wanted to learn to feel, versus something I instantly thought felt a bit stuffy like Budokan or floaty like Elfmania or wacky like Spitting Image. Thinking about it, that also applies to your character, which might also account for why I always pick the big-boobed, scantily-clad Amazon-type as my first choice! There are few fighting games I’ve “felt” like Fightin’ Spirit though, which is why I’d also put it in my top ten fighting games overall on any system too. It’s got the works, from the cheesiest eighties soundtrack (way after the fact too!) and some of the best-looking graphics on the system to a bonkers cast of characters in an even more bonkers setup, but most of all it’s the accessible and fluid combat, and I reckon if you mix that lot together in any fighting game it’s in with a shout of being my favourite!