Pit Fighter
Review Version - Amstrad CPC
Now before I start, I would like to stress that I bought this game before I read the review in Amstrad Action. This was a small oversight that has haunted me for years. I really wish I hadn’t done it but sometimes we make stupid mistakes like buying a game before reading the review or getting married, things happen, we just have to move on.
I am telling you this so you don’t think I was some kind of sadomasochist who enjoys pain, because this game is painful.
Arcade Wonder
Pit Fighter was a hit in the arcades when it was released in 1990. I know this because I just read it on Wikipedia. I can honestly say I have been into an arcade three times in my life and it was always to play the 2p sliders. Man, those things are awesome.
Anyway, apparently Pit Fighter was a big enough hit to make it worthwhile porting the game to every system under the sun. The funny thing is, as we will discover, the main selling point of the game was graphics and they didn’t port very well at all.
Graphics
Pit Fighter uses digitised graphics. The ones where they film real people and then digitise the footage. Some people claim Pit Fighter was the first game to do this, but it was in fact an obscure Japanese arcade fighting game called Reikai Dōshi: Chinese Exorcist which holds that title. Although you could argue the fact it used claymation to produce the animation means it wasn't the first. Frankly, I don’t want to give Pit Fighter any credit for anything, so Reikai Dōshi: Chinese Exorcist is the first.
Pit Fighter
These graphics will no doubt have helped it stand out in the arcades, making it a hit, but it was these very graphics that didn’t help it on the home console market.
Now I have played two versions of this game (I know, why? I’m still not sure). The Mega Drive and the Amstrad version. Both are dull, but only the Amstrad version actually made me cry. So, for the sake of this review, we are looking at the Amstrad CPC version. I am fully hydrated and ready to go.
The Game
Pit Fighter starts by getting you to pick one of three generic fighters.
Pit Fighter
First we have Buzz, who is described in the manual as:
“An All-American big and strong ex-professional wrestler.”
Now I actually love pro-wrestling, but I always find it weird how, in the computer game world, pro-wrestling is treated as totally real. I’m not saying that a pro-wrestler couldn’t defend themselves (Brock Lesnar, for example), but are they really capable of being the fighters games seem to portray them as?
Next we have Ty, who is:
“An Afro-Asian-American agile kickboxing champion.”
Jesus, save a nationality for everyone else, Ty.
Ty is the mid-range fighter of the game. He isn’t strong or fast; he is just Ty. Being an agile kickboxer, he does of course have a huge range of attack options, such as punch and kick.
Last we have Kato:
“A Japanese-American quick 3rd degree black belt.”
I am not sure what martial art the belt was awarded in; it doesn’t say. But clearly he is good at it, he has a 3rd degree. I have no idea what that means, but hey, he is clearly proud.
Once you have picked your fighter, you are sent to the local pit-fighting arena, which I assume is a random bar or a barn or something. It’s hard to tell, to be fair.
You fight one-on-one against a series of fighters with awesome names like Bone Crusher and Rip Sword (I imagine anyway; I can’t remember the real names).
In the end you face the Executioner, who is a big dude who always reminded me of the dude in Mad Max, Lord Humungus.
I am being honest here: the game is actually so bad I can’t play it, and I have played awful games and still found some kind of enjoyment. This game is so, so bad that it would be outlawed by an international law court if it was used to torture people.
Why is it so bad, you ask?
Pixelated Pain
The graphics are awful. I don’t mean bad; it’s an Amstrad game, everything looked bad. I mean awful for the Amstrad. Hell, the graphics would be awful on a calculator!
Pit Fighter
Why are the graphics just so bad?
Firstly, it appears they were trying to make the characters look as close to the digitised graphics of the arcade game as possible. This was never going to work particularly well on the Amstrad. She is a game old bird of a machine, but this was never the right way to go.
The arcade version’s digitised fighters were one of the things that made the game stand out, but the CPC doesn’t have the same hardware to throw around. So instead of nice big, detailed digitised people, we get something that looks like someone has taken a photograph, reduced it to a handful of colours and then repeatedly hit it with a hammer.
Second, in order to look like Pit Fighter, they retained the vertical movement that was in the arcade game. This causes a huge issue because you are not always certain which vertical row your character actually is in.
It’s not helped by the sprite scaling. As you move up and down the vertical, the character gets bigger and smaller, which would be awesome if it wasn’t already pushing the old CPC harder than normal.
The animation is just laughable. Nothing moves in a fluid way. Instead, it jumps from one pose to the other.
It’s like one of those Game & Watch handhelds where everything is pre-drawn and just lights up the bit of graphic when needed.
These terrible graphics would be a problem, but the game moves at about two frames per minute.
I am not even joking. It is slowwwww.
Want to move across the whole screen? You better invest the time needed. Clear your calendar.
The weird thing is, and again I am being honest, the programmers did the best they could.
I don’t think they actually thought this was a good idea and were no doubt told to get it done rather than question whether it would actually work.
And this is probably the most frustrating thing about Pit Fighter. The arcade version had been successful, the digitised fighters were one of the things that made it stand out, and the CPC programmers were trying to reproduce those ideas on a machine that simply wasn't well suited to doing it.
Because I was young and didn’t have a lot of money, I actually played this game. A lot.
I actually managed to complete it a few times.
Today I don’t have the time to invest in playing this thing for more than about 30 minutes, and it feels like it takes that long just to get to the main menu.
The Verdict
Looking back, I can only assume childhood gave me some kind of immunity to terrible games. I completed Pit Fighter several times, which is more than I can say for my adult self. These days, I’d rather spend half an hour watching paint dry. At least the paint moves at a reasonable frame rate.
Pit Fighter
An arcade hit that tries to bring digitised fighters to the CPC and ends up moving at the speed of continental drift.
So slow it makes watching paint dry seem like an extreme sport. Childhood memories are the only thing that kept me playing.