Mere months in chart-time since we talked about how much Zool obviously owed to Sonic the Hedgehog, we need to talk about imitation again. Body Blows is a one-on-one fighting game fought in best-of-three battles in a variety of exotic locations, with a roster of eight fighters with exaggerated attributes, including one woman and a variety of origins from around the world. It would be difficult to talk about it without mentioning Street Fighter II.
It’s not a flattering comparison. The characters and settings of Body Blows lack the spark and invention of the source, taking not-very-interesting sketches and then stopping there. So a character is a boxer, or a fighting businessman in a suit… and? Nothing more is filled in. Worse, the visual style for the characters is like a low grade cartoon produced for an advert trying to lend attitude to a product. It it is difficult to imagine any world in which Body Blows’s Maria ever became iconic like Chun-Li in ours, because her sexy-aerobics-instructor role is as poorly executed as it is poorly conceived. Having a ninja character and giving them the ability to vanish into a flicker of twisted background is about as inspired as the character moveset design gets. And the inspired name of this latest in a long, long line? Ninja.
Body Blows is also where an Amiga gripe I haven’t mentioned so far comes to a head – disk-swapping. Amiga games, at least at this point, came on disks, of the type immortalised in document save icons. Frequently that plural, disks, applied to individual games, and Body Blows is not the first or last to come on FOUR of the things. Compared to the temperamental cassette players of the Commodore 64 days and their ten minute waits to maybe load a game if you were lucky, Amiga loading times were a blessing, admittedly. Nonetheless, having to run through all four disks merely to get through menu screens and begin an actual fight grates. When you put in a disk, get the fight intro screen, and then get asked to put in another disk, it feels like taking the piss, and makes the more lacking elements of Body Blows feel all the more underwhelming.
And yet… the Amiga version of Street Fighter II, as flawed as it was successful, puts Body Blows in an interesting position. Its design is derivative and inferior in almost every department, but it is much better at being an Amiga fighting game. Its control system makes sense for its more limited movesets, and it handles with a fluidity that makes the cut and thrust of fights work on a basic gameplay level which, it turns out, can’t be taken for granted. Body Blows may not bring much more than the joy of working out how to hit your opponent more than they hit you, but that is a powerful force in itself.
Body Blows may be a pale imitation of Street Fighter II (the arcade/console one) but it is a superior rival to Street Fighter II (the Amiga one). Seen so close together with the latter and with Zool, though, it presents an alarming picture of the state of popular British gaming at this point. The Amiga still had the most players, but to what end? If the most successful things our companies could do with that player base was to sell them inferior imitations of the games excelling on consoles and at the arcades, what was the point?
Gallup Amiga chart, Amiga Action, June 1993