Shadow Fighter

Overview

Shadow Fighter is a 2D fighting game developed and published by Gremlin (in conjunction with NA.P.S. Team) for the Amiga exclusively in Europe on late 1994. An enhanced version was released in early 1995 (also exclusively in Europe) both for Amiga systems running AGA chipsets (namely the A1200 and A4000) and for the Amiga CD32 (adding an arranged soundtrack).

Developed as a collaboration between a team of Italian developers and the British software house Gremlin, Shadow Fighter is a traditional fighting game similar to Street Fighter II. It is known for being one of the few fighting games for the Amiga that has smooth animation (for both character sprites and parallax-scrolling backgrounds) and gameplay mechanics accurate to other popular fighting games of the time.

The game features 16 playable fighters from the start, all fighting in a mysterious international tournament set up in an attempt to challenge the mysterious Shadow Fighter (revealed in the manual as an undead 17th-century samurai seeking peace from his curse).

Gameplay

Shadow Fighter plays like a traditional fighting game, similar to the Street Fighter II series. Players have only one attack button to work with (the "Fire" button, used for both punches and kicks), although each character has numerous special moves that utilize both the joystick/joypad/keyboard movement and the Fire button.

Along with the traditional one-player and two-player Versus modes, the game includes a one-player campaign mode (known as Championship Fight) and a training mode (known as Training Battle). Training Battle is unique as players fight a dedicated opponent (Pupazz the training dummy).

In Championship Fight, players have a limited amount of continues and must defeat each opponent to progress. Access to the game's character roster, as well as the game's length, is tied to the difficulty selected:

• Easy - 10 fighters cannot be chosen. Only 10 opponents.

• Normal - 4 fighters cannot be chosen. Only 14 opponents, with Shadow as the final boss.

• Hard - All fighters can be chosen. All 17 opponents, with Shadow as the final boss. Completing the game gives the character-specific ending.

While both OCS/ECS and AGA versions of the game are nearly identical, the AGA version features an enhanced color palette and alternate outfit colors for most characters.

The game also includes an optional setting for enabling blood splatters on the ground.

Characters

The game includes 16 playable characters from the start, with an additional two characters playable with cheat codes: the (literal) Training Mode dummy Pupazz and the final boss Shadow.

In the game's single-player campaign, access to most characters are difficulty-locked.

Tier 1

In Championship Mode, these characters are playable on any difficulty.

• Slamdunk (Danish basketball player)
• Electra (French street fighter)
• Soria (Belgian kickboxer)
• Yurgen (German police officer)
• Cody (American martial artist)
• Fakir (Pakistani mystic)

Tier 2

In Championship Mode, these characters are only playable on the Normal and Hard difficulties.

• Salvador (Spanish street fighter)
• Kury (Tibetan fighter)
• Toni (Italian street fighter)
• Lee Chen (Chinese martial artist)
• Manx (mysterious feral woman raised by animals)
• Top Knot (Thai kickboxer)

Tier 3

In Championship Mode, these characters are only playable on the Hard difficulty.

• Yarado (Mexican mystic)
• Okura (Japanese renegade samurai)
• Toshio (Japanese martial arts student)
• Krhome (mysterious android)

Other

These characters can only be played in any mode with cheat codes.

• Pupazz (Taiwanese training dummy, opponent in Training Mode)
• Shadow (undead warrior, final boss in Normal and Hard difficulties)