Zogging Hell!!!

Fight for Life

Note: The Jaguar emulator we used to grab these is not fully finished and so there are a number of glitches not present in the real game (and there's only one screenshot!)

3D Beat em up in the style of Virtua Fighter, can once again can be finished by jumping in the air and kicking as you seem to be invunerable while your off the ground. Quite nice though and probably one of the best beat'em-ups I've played on the Jag. It's nowhere near as good looking as Tekken 2 or 3 or Virtua Fighter 2, but it is slightly better looking than the original versions of these games (if not as good gameplay wise). Fight for Life also comes on a cartridge that's only as big as Super Street Fighter on the SNES, so the fact that they managed to squeeze nine/ten texture mapped characters into it is quite amazing! The camera angle in Fight for Life does its best to show off the game and whizzes about all over the place while your playing, something it also does during the excellent intro sequence. Many Jag fans have criticised Fight for Life for being a bit slow, both in terms of graphics, and in terms of gameplay. I personally don't find the game to slow graphically on my pal system, but I didn't find Supercross too slow graphically either so I suspect if your used to 60hz screen updates you'll notice the lag, but if you've grown up with 50hz you'll probably find it ok. In gameplay terms the game is more of a marathon slog than any of it's contemporaries. Rounds seem to last a long time with normal attacks barely stripping any energy. Unless you master the difficult to pull off combos of course which do whack down your opponents energy much faster, but are seemingly impossible to pull off with the jag-pad. There is a beta of an earlier version of Fight for Life doing the rounds, which if you like this game is definitely worth picking up. It's not fully finished and lacks some of the polish of this version (most notably less texture mapping), but it zips around a lot faster and the rounds last half the time. Allegedly the released version of Fight for Life is not even the final version, but a buggy unfinished version given to Atari when the cheapskate Tramiels didn't coff up the development money. Rumours abound of a lost final version within which most of the games major problems have been fixed. We can only hope one day it surfaces...

Cheats

At passwords screen:

Demo Mode: JAGUARTIME
All special and signature moves: IWANTPOWER Kara: GIVEMETIME
Kara: GIVEMEMOVE
Mr G.: GIVEMEPOWR Pog: GIVEMEXXXX (dear oh dear that's a bit naughty)
Lun: IWANTDRUGS (oh this is an awful example to the kids)
Pog: IWANTPINKY (um)
To play as Junior: GIVEMEPOWn Morph as Junior: C + (U, L, D)
Jenny: cWANTREFER
Mr G.: VWANTSPEED (I'm going to have to write to my MP)

Contrary to general belief it is possible to escape hell in the game at least if you play as Pog (I'm not entirely sure this will work with other characters). Normally what happens if you finish is the ending sequence has the devil telling you he was only pulling your leg about letting you go. However if your good and manage to get through the game (with Pog at least) without loosing a round and manage to keep most of your energy intact in each one then you get a different ending, which has your character appearing on a world which is kind of like a weird earth. I'm not sure entirely why you need to keep yourself from loosing to much energy in each round, but I would suggest it's something to do with the only partially implemented score system. So I would suggest the higher your score would have been (if you could see it) the more likely you are to escape. The Jag must be keeping count somewhere in the code, but not telling you... It does make me wonder that if you could get through the game winning every round with a perfect, then maybe another ending is in there (the real earth perhaps). This would be possible to do if you've got the patience, by using the jumping in with a flying kick bug (where the enemy can't defend against it).