Now here is an odd fellow. My pugnacious foe is somewhat stand-offish. I move forward, ready to kick the blighter in the midriff. Still he refuses to move. 'I am in here', I bravely suggest to myself, inching forward, ready for the kill until, blow me, if I am not on the end of a one-hit combination, losing the match in the process. 'Oh fiddlesticks', I cry in anguish as my ribs cave into my chest.

Eight groups of fighters here, split into teams of four - 32 battlers in all. Each member of the team has the same set of manoeuvres, the idea presumably being that you get to learn a team's characteristics and then take on other teams. Or something. Thais, Jets, Bouncers, Greasers, Ninjas, Mercs, Hunters, Minions of Death - thems are your gangs a-la Guys And Dolls, only I do not remember Marlon Brando having a machete. So basically you get eight different fighters.

The recent resurgence of the Amiga beat-em-you has seen the cart conversion of Mortal Kombat II and Gremlin's quirky Shadow Fighter take centre stage while Rise of the Robots fell dismally at the first hurdle.

Scantily clad
X-Fighter positions itself between the camps, a Street Fighter clone without the slick graphics, a flickery-screened, yet reasonably playable number. The backdrops are extremely dull and very poorly animated. You are scrapping on a pavement by the docks, barrels littering the background, though as you would expect, a scantily-clad woman sits atop the bonnet of a red Ferrari. At least I think it was a Ferrari.

Or perhaps you are in a good yard with an HGV- perched calmy behind. Whatever, they are well below the standard of say, Elfmania, as the jerky scrolling, which for a CD32 game is unforgivable. Do not show this game to your mates with SSFII on a SNES. They will rip you to shreds.

And the plainsome visuals lead the pad basher to feel less empathy with the characters than with the more rounded Mortal Kombat II and colourful Shadow Fighter. Each team has super combo moves which can involve up to six directional taps before boshing the fire button - not particularly easy to pull off in the heat of battle, but then this complaint can be levelled at most beat-em-ups. The standard manoeuvres are easy to learn with practice - a tap, tap and a tap.

Swords, cables, chains, enormous fists, flashing bolts. All the ususal gadgets are included and in some bouts you can simply bash a long chain into your hapless opponent from a safe distance, winning the bout at a canter.

But despite X-Fighter's shoddy appearance, the gameplay is just about good enough to overcome presentation. If only it was not against the far slicker Shadow Fighter, if only it was smoother and had parallax scrolling.

I am unsure how to approach this review of X-Fighter. So, instead: hospital dramas on television. Casualty is a deservedly popular programme. At its heart are the staff of Holby General: overworked, underpaid, government-oppressed characters whom we have come to love. Then there's blood. Did you manage to keep your eyes on the screen during that tracheotomy? Or were you compelled to look away? If you were looking for a way to divide the world into two groups of people, this would be the one.

But Casualty is only shown during the colder seasons. For the rest of the year American substitutes must suffice. Let us examine these:

BIFF
ER: A feeble programme. Every week identical-looking doctors and nurses rush around identical-looking corridors performing identical-looking procedures on identical-looking patients while exciting music plays. For an hour.

Chicago Hope: A fantastic programme. Within minutes of the first episode starting we were intimately involved with a group of carefully-defined characters who've continued to evolve as the series has progressed. Only one or two 'incidents' occur each week, but each is thoroughly pursued and not let go of until all avenues have been explored.

When it says "Previously in Chicago Hope..." at the beginning, you're shown things you need to know. When ER does it, it's just trying to sound like LA Law.

But wait. What ER so sorely lacks, and Chicago Hope could probably do with a few of, is accidents. You don't watch Casualty for the doctors and nurses, or for the blood. You watch it so see how long it'll take before the joyriders crash, or the girl gets her leg caught in the threshing machine, or the animal rights activist gets bitten by the virus-carrying monkey. The best episodes throw you off the scent by showing an adulterous husband having his way with his mistress in a car parked on the edge of a cliff with his foot bashing repeatedly against the handbrake, and then having his wife half beaten to death by an intruder attack back at his house.

Why haven't Americans realised this? Why do they insist on fobbing us off with the aftermath, showing everything through the eyes of the doctors? Why have an ambulance man saying "He's a biker who drove into the side of a car and broke his neck", when they could actually show the motorcyclist cartwheeling through the air? The basic ingredients are in place in ER and Chicago Hope; but they're not taken to their logical conclusion. Its heart is there, but...

Hang on. Basic ingredients in place... identical-looking doctors and nurses... sorely lacks... nothing interesting...

KAPOW
Got it. Netted it and popped it into a jam jar while its guard was down. X-Fighter is a game that decides it's going to be a beat-'em-up and spends ages researching exactly what makes beat-'em-ups tick. It realises the importance of balance - balance between the various characters, and balance between close-up and range attacks.

It's got reasonably-easy-to-access special moves, heaps of different characters, well-engineered artificial intelligence for the computer players making it a challenging one-player game, and characters a bit like the ones in Street Fighter 2. You could write all these things in a list and say: "Yes, that's what makes a good beat-'em-up." But X-Fighter isn't any fun at all.

It looks terrible, as you'll already have noticed. Normally, this wouldn't worry us at AMIGA POWER, the magazine whose two favourite games are Sensible Soccer and Gravity Force 2. But good graphics are absolutely essential in a beat-'em-up, if only so you can tell the difference between characters.

There's another thing - being able to tell the difference between characters in X-Fighter, but THEY ALL LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME. They're all your generic raised-on-the-streets-of-Detroit tough guys and ninjas, and I can't remember any of their names.

They all perform a selection of moves from a general pool of fireballs, flying kicks, throws and beatings-with-sticks, and they nearly all use an identical list of joystick waggles to access these.

There's no point in trying to get proficient with one particular character, because when you return to the game after lunch you'll have completely forgotten which one he was. (Was it the one with the headband? Of the one with the headband?)

There's no music, which is okay by us, but in its absence are only the most basic sound effects - embarrassing, awful ones. The collision detection is shoddy. The animation is rudimentary. It won't pause. There's no scoring system, even though combos perform a central role. The backgrounds are the most tedious, generic junk yards, street corners and oriental-looking places.

But, mysteriously deep underneath grotty graphics, while you're playing it, X-Fighter feels oddly like a 'proper' beat-'em-up to play, evidence that's it's been written by someone who knows a thing or two about Street Fighter 2. To win, you have to do things that you'd do in a 'proper' beat-'em-up. If you're good at 'proper' beat-'em-up, you'll be good at X-Fighter.

In a way, X-Fighter is the bit that was missing from Elfmania and Rise of the Robots. It's the beating heart of a beat-'em-up, crudely removed with a contaminated scalpel, tossed into a bin liner and left for Holby Refuse Department to collect on Wednesday morning.