Body Blows

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Body Blows

Body Blows is a 1993 fighting video game by Team17 for the Amiga and MS-DOS. It was one of the early Street Fighter II-style games and spawned two follow-ups: Body Blows Galactic and Ultimate Body Blows.

Gameplay
- The game plays in best-of-three matches. Each fighter has a set of standard moves and one or more special moves.
- On the Amiga, most special moves are simplified due to a single fire button: some moves are performed by holding the button and not moving, others by moving in a direction and pressing the button.
- There are no combos or throws. Blocking is done by holding the fire button while moving away from the opponent.
- A distinctive feature: when an opponent is knocked down, the other player’s fire button is locked until the opponent gets up again (this was called “mercy” in later versions).

Modes
- One-player arcade mode: select a character and fight through the others to face the final boss, Max.
- Two-player mode: two players fight each other using any characters.
- Tournament mode: four- or eight-player tournament.

Characters
- There are 11 fighters in total. In one-player mode you can choose from four characters: Danny, Junior, Nik, and Lo Ray. In other modes, you can select from 10 characters.

Release and updates
- Original release: March 1993 for Amiga and MS-DOS.
- Amiga update (summer 1993): Team17 released a disk update that sped up in-game action, added shadows, made all non-boss characters selectable in story mode, and tweaked gameplay (including optional mercy and other changes). This upgrade was available for a fee to owners who mailed in their original disk.

Amiga AGA version
- In 1994, with Ultimate Body Blows, an updated Amiga version using the AGA chipset (for machines like the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000) was released. It could be installed to a hard drive and included features from Ultimate Body Blows, such as redraws of backgrounds, adjusted movesets, the ability to stun, and updated sprites for Dan and Junior.

Reception
- In the United Kingdom, Body Blows was the top-selling Amiga game in March 1993.
- Contemporary reviews praised it as a strong fighting game, with scores like 91% from CU Amiga, 87% from Amiga Format, 92% from The One Amiga, and 89% from Amiga Power.