I was looking for videos of Street Fighter II for Atari when I stumbled upon this review for SF1 on Atari and its “mutant child” Human Killing Machine, by Tiertex. Funny shit.
There was an extremely cheap way to win the game, which would be to get the opponent in the corner and then just crouch kick them to death over and over. Your crouch kick would have greater range than anything the computer opponents had, and there’s no pushback when you connect a hit, so you could just do it over and over.
On the fanboy tip however, I gotta admit that HKM featured the hottest sprite on the ZX Spectrum, Maria. They actually gave her pixel-nips! Although her namesake Maria from Body Blows (Team17 fighter), who came along later on the Amiga, was a lot hotter. But I digress.
Pixel-nipped prostitute aside, HKM sucked major balls and on the ZX Spectrum version you actually had to load each stage separately, which took about 2 mins a stage. This just meant that more of your life than neccesary was stolen from you by this shitty game.