(Originally posted on the defunct Blistered Thumbs community blog.)
All of the Hadokens with none of the Ryu.
Every so often a game developer realizes a platform is lacking titles in certain genres. Then decides to do something about it. The year was 1993. The developer was Team 17.
PROS: Huge cast. Decent visuals. Nice chiptunes.
CONS: Nearly everything cribbed from other fighting games. Asinine 90′s DRM.
WTF?: The final boss is a T-1000
Body Blows was both a reviled clone, and timeless classic at the same time. Originally released on the Commodore Amiga, then ported to MS-DOS shortly thereafter, the game filled a need for fighters on home computer platforms. Up until Body Blows, computer gamers had the odd port of Street Fighter, Street Fighter II (Which were both poorly coded, and terrible), and Acclaim’s port of Mortal Kombat. (One of the first good ports of an arcade fighting game to the PC.). Outside of those one had to go farther back to 8-bit computer platforms to find stuff like World Karate Championship. Another game Body Blows oddly enough cribs from.
Only a paragraph in, and it already seems like I’m harping on just how much BB lifts from other games but it’s true. Many of the characters have the styles, and moves you’ve seen in countless fighters. Street Fighter II is probably the biggest one. But you will also see elements of Fatal Fury, World Heroes, Mortal Kombat, and a few others under the hood. The story is pretty much non-existent, as you play through nobody really gets dialogue or much in the way of exposition. It’s your typical tournament fighter, with typical short bios during the intro, and little else in the way of narrative.
Characters in Body Blows are hugely influenced by Capcom, and SNK, and it shows.
Dan is a streetwise Ken Masters.
Nik is the game’s Ryu in clothes that remind players of Terry Bogard..
Kossack is this game’s Zangief.
Maria is our Chun-Li stand in. (Though to be fair is surprisingly different)
Ninja is a strange cross between Blanka, and Mortal Kombat II’s Reptile.
Dug is a power character who is an awful lot like certain Final Fight enemies.
Mike is a suit who turns into a whirlwind. (Okay, one more different character)
Junior is Boxer powered with E. Honda’s Hundred Hand Slap.
Lo Ray is a Monk character who does cartwheels, and mind projectiles. (Another original.)
Yit-U is a Ryu clone with Mortal Kombat teleport moves, and specials.
Max is the final boss, playable via a cheat code. He also turns into a Terminator.
Out of eleven characters over half are derivative of those from much more widely known games. The fighting system is also mostly taken from World Karate Championship. This is largely due to the fact, that at the time most PCs had one button joysticks, assuming players had a controller at all. That said, it actually does work in the game’s favor.
Moving the joystick (Or movement keys if you mapped them to your keyboard) will move your character about the screen. Holding the fire button when you do will perform your regular moves, blocks, and specials. You can perform Shoryukens, and Hadokens with ease. The game also does allow for players to get a few two in one combos, and even a cross up or two. Considering the time period that is actually a pretty good thing. Body Blows isn’t the most balanced game either. Some characters simply cannot compete against the rest of the cast when playing in capable hands. Compounding this are the supers everyone has by simply holding down the fire button.
Visually, the sprite work is actually really nice. Especially the backgrounds. The environments in this game can hang with many of the fighter games of the time period. From the invading submarine on the Kossak stage, to Maria’s town, to a construction site, to an office. Body Blows is a pretty game.
Sounds are mostly pretty good, from the midi soundtrack, to the sound effects. They don’t set the world on fire with iconic music but Team 17 gets it’s job done. If I had any major problems besides the general sameness to it all, it would have to be the DRM built into the game. This was just before the time of CD-Key protection, and so like many other games of the time they went with manual protection. Manual protection requires players to have the actual game manual on hand to type in information to log in. Body Blows WOULD have been one of the nicer manual protections as it doesn’t make you go through insane hoops like finding word one in sentence four, paragraph 4 on page 45. Instead, the game simply tells you to punch in a three digit code out of a chart in the back of the booklet that goes on around six pages. This would be much easier except that like a thesis in a comic book by the Ultimate Warrior, it prints the grid in a yellow color on an all white page. While it isn’t impossible in a dimly lit room, it’s difficult to read in a few situations, and you may find yourself crashing to the DOS prompt several times before finally getting it right.
Despite all of the cloning within it, Body Blows does succeed in being a fun fighting game.
I remember originally finding it in a game bundle at a KB Toys shortly after our family had gotten our first Windows 95 box. While it certainly didn’t stop me from playing my SNES ports, it did manage to keep me enthralled enough to finish it. In the context of it’s heyday, players who only had an Amiga or MS-DOS computer were really getting something special as GOOD Street Fighter ports didn’t happen until Super Street Fighter II would see a proper release on computers. So for anyone who didn’t have a Super NES or a Genesis, Body Blows made for a nice ad hoc fighter. In fact, the Amiga would see two sequels, Body Blows Ultimate, and Body Blows Galactic.
To go back to it now is really an act of either nostalgia or collector curiosity. It’s still certainly not a bad game, but there’s no way you’re going to want to play it instead of the games it stole from, or the games that have vastly leaped it since. I’d still recommend checking it out at least once should you ever get the chance. The MS-DOS version runs under DOSBOX with little to no trouble, and it’s just one of those things you have to see to believe. Especially when you realize the guys behind the successfully long running WORMS series can do a fighting game when they feel like it. For it’s time, Body Blows proved that tournament fighters could, and should exist for computer platforms. It won all sorts of praise from the Amiga gaming community when it came out, and even managed to give DOS users a decent fighter.
It also sent the message to other publishers to put some effort into their porting duties.
Final Score 6.5 out of 10 (Not bad, but not great either.)
Comma Eight Comma One 