Dangerous Streets

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Dangerous Streets uses almost the same formula as the other martial arts games. You pick up one out of the eight fighters and aim to either fight on a one-on-one beating against a friend or an AI opponent or go for the tournament, where you must fight your way through a whole bunch of rednecks. The fighters are somewhat funny; there is a truck driver, a palmist, a disc jockey and more! Each character has a range of special moves, some of which are quite weird and also include the transformation into a moat monster! Each fight has a time limit so in case of a no knock-out, the winner will be the one with more energy left. Dangerous Streets has a few unique for its genre features, such as the controls that are different (i.e. you push the joystick up and one character will jump and another will kick). You can also move completely off the screen which is a bit poor in execution, but the special moves are quite imaginative and the whole game has a light-hearted feel to it. To hit your opponent you need to be at the right distance, so you tend to spend a lot of time trying to get the impact point of a blow over the opponent's head! Although there's no visible or audible differences between any successful or unsuccessful hit, eventually your opponent will buckle and fall on the floor! The game cannot compare to other fighting masterpieces like Body Blows and Mortal Kombat, due to its wacky and weird gameplay and controls. Especially the Amiga OCS/ECS version is a rather poor game in terms of gameplay, while the AGA version (A1200 and CD32) is more playable and has fewer flaws (though it still contains many glitches). Just for the record, the game received poor ratings from several Amiga magazines that criticized the amateurish graphics, the woeful sound and the slightly childish-looking characters!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics on the OCS Amiga are mediocre, but the sprites are of an adequate size and they have a cartoonish look, although they do seem a little "childish". There are a few good fighting moves, but (strangely enough) there are not many frames of animation to support them, making the gameplay pretty jerky! The backgrounds are lush with some snappy parallax scrolling and loads of colors (up to 80 for the OCS and up to 256 colors for the AGA and PC versions). The sound effects is another negative for this the game, since they are a bit wimpy, so it's a better idea to go for the music option. Of note, the CD32 version offers a much better CD-Audio soundtrack and nicely executed sound effects.