So you wanna be a boxer? Well now Storm offer you the chance to be a contender. Start at the bottom of the world rankings, take on all corners and take a shot at the championship. The only element of the fighter's story missing is the appearance as the dame in a low-budget pantomime after everything's gone horribly wrong.

But that's just the fate of no-hopers. You, my budding hero, have a whole glistening career in front of you. There's no-one going to catch you in an oversize pinafore, false eyelashes and a pair of comedy breasts - you can do aftershave adverts instead.

There are two modes of play; knockout and league. Knockout merely pits you against a random selection of opponents - just keep on pummeling different fighters until sooner or later you get pummeled yourself. There's a certain amount of challenge to be found in seeing how many fights you can go without a loss, but basically this just prepares you for the real championship - the nie-week league.

There are ten fighters of differing shapes and sizes (actually that's a lie - they're all built like tower-blocks. But they do have different haircuts) and you can pick any one of them to be your young hopeful. It's now your unenviable job, in your newly acquired bulging body, to take on a new opponent once a week. Win, lose or draw - it's then on to week two (and so on) until by the ninth week you've fought all the other sluggers.

Earn three points for a victory, one point for a draw and leave empty handed if you end up as canvas fodder. The league table is updated each week and your stats are displayed for all to see. As time progresses, it quickly becomes apparent that some of the guys out there are better than others. Some weeks you take on nancies, some weeks you take on wimps - yes, they're all ridiculously easy to beat, but more of that later.

Either way, the bout unfolds the same way each fight. Click your joystick to tell Cecil (well, what do you call your Amiga?) that you've had enough of the statistics sheet thank you very much, and that yes - you're simply itching to get on with it. A whirr-clunk from your disk drive tells you that your next pixillated victim is entering the stadium, the fight-screen scrolls down, revealing two bulging fighters and the ref. Both ughly lumps of pulsating manhood punch the air, the ref stands back and it's seconds away...

Now the fun starts. There are two methods of fighting, and a survey of various people around the office came to the unanimous conclusion that one of these methods is distinctly more likely to prove successful than the other. But in true fight-night style, before announcing the winner let's introduce the contestants. Over to our ringside host, Larry:

In the red corner, Method One...
"Thank you, and good evening, fight-fans. Straight into the ring we have the 'Diligently learning and implementing all the moves, keeping your guard up when necessary and a lot of fancy footwork' method. With all of the five different punches mastered: the upper cut, the swing punch; low and high long punches and a lean-back jab at his disposal, this boy (who has become as 'Technical Excellence) has got to be the hot favourite.

He can raise his guard or lower it, he can duck and even jump - as well as shuffling backwards and forwards as professionally as I've ever seen it done. He can read his opponent's moves and react to them. When this opponent aims high, his guard can cover it. When his opponent slips up, then Technical Excellence has the weaponry to get in there and really hit him hard. Surely he can't fail."

In the blue corner, Method Two!
"Well, Technical Excellence would seem to have this match sewn up before his opponent's even entered the ring. But here his opponent comes - unconcerned and looking decidedly confident - and what a strange looking chap he is! He's going under the name of the 'Putting your joystick on auto-fire and making a cup of tea or reading a book of something' method. Quite remarkable."

And the winner?
OK, so no prizes for guessing the winner of this bout. Yes, your good old faithful auto-fire button will safely see you through all nine fights to collecting the World Championship crown. Yes, we're serious - but are Storm? How can such a simple game (there are no skill factors, training sessions, management decisions, choices of opponent or player development) afford to be so remarkably easy?

The answer is, it can't. Final Blow is fundamentally flawed from the outset. Any game that can be finished on the first attempt in such a ridiculous fashion (the cup of tea bit wasn't a joke) doesn't deserve to be put within 100 miles of your Amiga. OK, so you could try the "Technical Excellence" approach. But the animation is so haphazard and jerky any attempt to fight a skillful bout inevitably ends in failure, and soon degenerates back to a pummeling-the-fire-button-through-the-floor approach. There's no reward for thoughtful play, due largely to the fact that your opponent refuses to stand still long enough for you to hit him. The action is brawlish, frantic and ultimately frustrating.

This also scuppers what could have been the game's one saving grace - the two-player option. With so little skill involved and certain victory just an incy-wincy auto-fire switch away, there's no way that even the most ardent of boxing fans will enjoy this for long.

Final Blow seems doomed as a project. A while ago it was released for the Sega Mega Drive. It's only claim-to-fame then was as perhaps the worst-timed licensed product ever. The name James 'Buster' Douglas Boxing (presumably a licence signed after he somehow managed to beat Mike Tyson) was a whacking 200lb albatross by the time the game actually reached the shops. The Amiga version repairs none of this damage.

The graphics are big and colourful and the sound effects are particularly gruesome - but that's your lot. Jerky (hence reading your opponent's moves becomes impossible) animation, zero depth and flawed gameplay. It could have been a contender, but is stopped in the first round by a technical knockout. Anyone fancy some aftershave?

Hmm. We'll ignore for a moment the rather suspect taste of a game marketed with slogans like 'come face to face with a mean opponent ready to inflict serious damage' and 'destroy or be destroyed - it's all in your hands' when Michael Watson's still critically ill in hospital - good taste has, after all, never been one of the strong points of the computer game industry as a whole.

What's harder to forgive, or indeed understand, is why a proven and talented team like The Sales Curve should choose to make a sitting target of themselves by picking such a limited and outdated coin-op as Taito's dull and short-lived boxing bash to convert in the first place. That they've made a good job of it isn't in doubt - this game looks and plays almost identically to its arcade parent, except for the slightly puzzling loading between opponents and the rather tatty front end - but Final Blow was such a completely duff game in the first place that Storm never really stood a chance of turning it into an entertaining Amiga product.

The two-dimensional nature of the ring means that the only options available to the player are walk towards the opponent, walk away from him, or hit using one of a (slightly confusing to operate) array of punches. I managed to beat the first couple of opponents (there are nine in total) on my first try by putting the autofire on and waggling the joystick completely at random, and while I'm sure this tactic wouldn't work on the tougher ones near the end (I got crumped by the third guy), I'm equally sure it wouldn't take very long at all to discover a tactic that would, meaning Final Blow's lasting appeal has to rank in the 'hours' category (at best).

If you really must have a boxing game, why not buy the Codies'Pro Boxing Sim instead? It's £18 cheaper, and at least you get the option to fight dirty for a bit of added 'depth'.
At £26 from the same people that brought us the great SWIV and Rodland, this is nothing short of criminal - please Storm, what happened to your pride?

Up until now, the only semi-decent boxing sim has been the humble Spectrum version of Elite's Frank Bruno game. For some reason, whilst the martial arts aspect of facial rearranging is well catered for, binary pugilism Amiga-style has never taken off.

However, in converting Final Blow, Storm have taken the risk and, to an extent, pulled it off. I was never really a fan of the Final Blow coin-op as its large sprites disguised a very run-of-the-mill game. Somehow, though, Storm have managed to inject a modicum of playability into the Amiga game, creating a repetitive but playable conversion.

The original coin-op sported five boxers, each of whom had to be beaten before the title was yours. Storms\'s game, however, now sports a tournament, a two-player mode and an expanded gym of ten would-be champs.

The actual bouts against these guys takes place over two rounds within a horizontally-scrolling ring, with the player's on-screen persona represented by one of the largest sprites the Amiga has housed. The movement of these towering fighters is essential to the atmosphere and, whilst some of the animations are a little odd, the generally look works well.

There are a variety of punches available, ranging from uppercuts to head blows and blocks, and these are all easily accessed using the joystick and fire button. In addition, if you're coming off worse during scuffle, the ref will come in and break you up or you can leap out of the fray.

Actually, there's something very satisfactory about laying into your opponent and, as you both get steadily weaker, blood and gum shields fly until one of you goes down. Then, depending on the pounding your took, you may struggle up again for another bout - real edge of the seat stuff!

The trouble is that, as with the real thing, this is all there is to it. What's there is well done, with large boxers behaving realistically and offering slightly different tactics, but it still boils down to a slugging match with the fastest fighter winning.

However, somehow I get the feeling that, even if Storm had added more moves to the existing ones, the game would still boil down to the same thing. Entertaining enough in the short-term, and undoubtedly better than the coin-op, Final Blow is the best of its kind but a feather-weight in the lasting appeal department.