Final Fight review - Super Nintendo
Jessica had it all. She was the daughter of former wrestling star and mayor of Metro City Mike Haggar and girlfriend to Cody Travers, one of the coolest and toughest boys around. But now she has been mysteriously kidnapped! What the Mean Machines staff thought
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Final Fight must rank as one of the most popular arcade games ever, and is used as a yard-stick to judge all scrolling beat 'em ups. So how does the SNES version compare to the original? Well, it's missing the two-player mode and one entire level, but apart from that it's pretty much the same. All the moves are there, all the enemies are there (apart from the two girls who've been censored and replaced by Sid and Billy) and all the action is there. Although Final Fight demands fast reflexes and a degree of skill, strategy plays an important part too, so the game is challenging on all levels. The controls are responsive, there's no slowdown, which is surprising considering the size of the sprites, and the game plays fluidly. There is a real compulsion to see what's next and it's real "just one more go" material, keeping you glued to your screen for ages. Final Fight is a definite classic and a game which should be in every SNES owners collection.
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Retrospective comments
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Final Fight is one of those coin-ops that defines a generation. It was simply the ONLY the arcade game to be seen playing in the late 80's/early 90's. When the SNES conversion was confirmed, I was heartbroken - being a Megadrive owner, I had hoped that the (false) rumours of a Sega port were true (Sega fans had to wait until the Mega CD before they got this classic brawler) but with Capcom jumping into bed with Nintendo, it seemed impossible. All I could do was pray to the big console God in the sky that he, in his infinite wisdom, would deliver unto me a shiny new SNES when Christmas came around. |
Have your say about Final Fight
Richy Girth - 03 Dec 2008, 15:54 GMT
Wow this game stole so many of my hours in life its untrue...
Loved it at the arcades like I did Double Dragon before it and when I saw screen shots of the Snes version I nearly gave birth through me back bum.
Needless to say that this was in my first couple of Snes buys..
I still played the coin-op at my local arcades after buying it to reappraise differences etc, and after I had gotten a phillips monitor, stretched out the screen, eliminating the borders in the process, it looked pretty close to the coin-op. I was a happy man back then.
(Looking back now, I can see resolution differences, less blood, colour differences and a the game is a bit slower than the coin-op, and thats without the missing level and lack of two player option in the SNES one.... )
A great conversion for its time, but I'd like to have seen how much better it could have been if it were programmed later on in the SNES' lifespan back then. It could've been nigh on perfect, I'd bet.
emuholic - 09 Mar 2009, 20:59 GMT
At the time this was released on the 16 bit Super Nintendo console, every arcade-to-console conversion on any system of the late 80s and early 90s era was always shell of its former self, with only the gameplay remaining intact most of the time (on the best ports). With this in mind, the SNES conversation of this coin-op classic by comparison is nowhere near as good, lacking end of level animations being one of the things that stuck in my mind as a kid, but the graphics were still stunning to me at the time.
Looking at it again today about 15 years on, and comparing to the coin-op, I noticed the music and sound effects (Haggar's grunts and moans) are disappointing on the SNES, and the characters aren't as big either.
The SNES was a much more capable machine than Capcom would have you believe, as they later produced Final Fight 2 and 3 which are both graphically superior and much larger games with 3 to 4 selectable characters and a 2 player mode. With Final Fight, Capcom were trying to save money by squeezing it onto one of the tiniest cart sizes available (hence the missing level, 3rd character, 2 player mode, etc), and in consequence, giving the consumer an inferior product than it had the potential to be. With that said, the PAL market got an even rougher deal, with even bigger screen borders and 17.5% slower speeds, due to Capcom's laziness in general.
These days arcade ports are the same or superior, and thankfully sloppy PAL conversions are a thing of the past with the new TV standards of today. It's just a damn shame the games themselves can't hold a candle to the magic and wonder of the late 80s to mid 90s 16-bit console and arcade era.
Those days will be missed.
Matt Taylor - 04 Aug 2009, 23:36 GMT
What can you say...Its Final Fight, and if you were a young teenager in the early nineties, that name alone coming to a home console could have the same effect as an overactive imagination on a bus seat too close to the engine. I remember my first glimpse of Final Fight on SNES being a single, tiny screenshot in a magazine (most likely C&VG) and I couldn't believe my eyes. I scrutinized that tiny photo which couldn't have been more than a square inch, and imagined what it would be like to own the most exciting arcade conversion around whilst simultaneously being the most revered kid at school. But it wasn't to be until some years later that I owned not only the machine capable of running the game, but the cartridge itself. By that time Final Fight had lost its sheen to Street Fighter II, and the lack lustre conversion was barely enough to invoke the nostalgia of the arcade machine. If your looking for the best home console conversion of Capcom's awe inspiring brawler then I'd plum for the Mega CD version, despite the slightly duller colour pallette, there is little to fault Sega's disc version. Of course, if you're a real purist, you'll plum for the Sharp X68000 version, and let me be the first to wish you luck with finding that.
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