Twenty years on and Final Fight still has some arresting ideas about video game form. Levels are divided into short, punchy vignettes, packed with enemy swamp incident. Currency and vitality pick-ups are situationally abstract treats that operate on attention grabbing shorthand. Bins and crates hide everything from gleaming jewellery to pineapples and roasted chicken dinners, turning the necessary power-up slog into a daffy treasure hunt.
Lightly building on the Double Dragon / Renegade template, player characters have a basic shock of button jabbers, as well as a deeper set of command moves. Muscle bomb Mayor Mike Haggar enjoys the most detailed game, his desperation lariat is complimented by a timing dependent piledriver, forming the bare model for Street Fighter II's grappler Zangief. Player sprites are large, and detailed with a full range of motion. Walking and action animations cycle nicely; each of the three controllable characters bristle with weight and charm. Enemy sprites have slighter motion ranges, but make up for it with a wild variety of colour and form. Thump targets range from lazy-zip knifers to WWF punkers and gymnastic transvestites.
Final Fight isn't perfect though, later stages betray coin guzzle arcade origins with players are stranded in danger tile industrial nightmares, and pitted against bosses with unclear vulnerability states. Even so, Final Fight is still obvious as a premium experience, complimented here by a superb presentation by Proper Games. 2010 players can toggle a wealth of display options, including adding CRT scanlines and monitor fluorescence, as well as a digitised cab reproduction to fill out the 16:9 frame. Equally fantastic is Simon Viklund's reworked soundtrack, Viklund turns in a suite of sweaty synthetic thwacks on a bedrock of juddering collision beats. Final Fight is also supplemented with an unlockables vault, and Magic Sword a complete death-trap dungeon CPS sidescroller. Tackled like a Criterion edition reissue, this should be the model for all vintage gaming re-releases.
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