Poli Díaz

Poli Díaz is a boxing game published in 1990 by the Spanish studio Opera Soft. The licence belonged to a real fighter: Policarpo Díaz, nicknamed El Potro de Vallecas, was then Spain's lightweight star and European champion. The game therefore belongs to the golden age of Spanish software, when Opera Soft, Dinamic and Topo Soft made titles that barely sold in Britain but were enormous at home.

The main mode puts you first against a sparring partner and then against the best lightweights in the world. In the menu you set round length and the number of rounds, and you can rename any boxer in the game, a nice touch for 1990.

The combat system is the interesting part. You move around the ring in all four directions, but attack and defence are two separate modes: you switch between them by pressing fire without a direction, and an icon beside your boxer shows which one you are in. In attack mode, distance decides everything — close, medium and effective range each produce different punches, from simple straights through hooks to the chin to uppercuts. That means button-mashing gets you nowhere; you have to think about where you are standing and whether you should currently be attacking at all.

The weaknesses are standard Spectrum ones: animation is frugal, the palette is restricted, and attribute clash shows up in motion. Opponent AI is predictable, and once you have read its pattern the rest of the tournament goes down.

The ZXDB user score sits at around seven out of ten. If you have any interest in the Spanish 8-bit scene, this is a good sample of what it could do — and the boxing system is more considered than you would expect.