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%% Body Blows AGA Review                             Jason Compton     %%
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Team 17's beat-em-up classic, Body Blows, has seen several sequels and
been received very differently in all incarnations.  Always, the obvious
comparison was between this game and arcade Street Fighter 2, and it
didn't always measure up in reviewers' opinions.

Oh, did I mention that this game is a budget re-release?

Anyway...Team 17 is a pretty well known developer in the Amiga game world,
and they've recently come under fire on Usenet over the bane of the Amiga
user: Hard drive installability.  It seems that a lot of games are made
intended for what must be interpreted as the archtypical Amiga user...the
A500/1 meg owner.

Now, I don't know about everyone else, but I was an A500/1 meg owner for
about 2 months and I decided I couldn't take it anymore, so I got more
memory, then a HD, then a more powerful computer, and so on...

But back to the story: Martyn Brown has been doing a lot of defending
Team 17's classics like Alien Breed for their hard drive unfriendliness.
Apparently, as a concurrent sign of good faith, Body Blows AGA is fully
hard drive installable!

And not just measly hard drive installability.  It's so compliant and
nice that it plays off of a ParNetted hard drive partition.  Now that's
hard drive installability.

Want another bonus?  It plays in NTSC (well, pretty much, anyway) as well
as PAL (play it in PAL at all costs: I'll explain why later...)

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?  Yeah, it is.

I'm not a huge huge fan of the beat-em-up genre...after all, there's only
so much depth to it...and it often breeds bad feelings between friends.
So, if you're going to hurt interpersonal relations, you'd better do it
with a good game.

Body Blows AGA is a good game.  The backdrops are rather nice (not
exquisitely beautiful, but good enough), and the characters look cartoony
yet deadly.  All the trappings of SF 2.

PAL/NTSC it is...but you lose a few pixel lines at the bottom of the
screen in NTSC, and the game runs faster.  And the game runs plenty fast
enough...the computer often beats the hell out of you easy enough in PAL,
so only go NTSC if you think you're the Body Blows king.

I'm a bit disappointed in the lack of CD32 joypad support in this game.
While most of the moves are decent enough with a joystick..."Smoke if you
got 'em", as the phrase goes, and I hope the rest of my SX-1 compatriots
get mad as well.  But, a joystick works fairly well, even if you do whip
it around a bit more than you might like.  It's a game about desperate
acts, after all.

T17 brought over a few goodies from later Body Blows games, particularly
Tag Team mode, which prolongs the agony for much, much longer...

The manual could do with a bit of work, if just to make it look a bit less
harsh (black lettering on white glossy paper), but for UKP 14, BBAGA is
nothing to pass up, if you enjoy electric sadism.