Ah, Rod Land, the colorful and popular JALECO platformer from the 80's, mostly known for its home computer (especially Amiga) ports. The arcade version is the original, though, and has the most content and best graphics.

It's been more than two years since I first started taking the game apart. I was new to disassembling arcade code at that point and was making pretty slow progress on understanding what I was finding. Every few months I would pick it back up and chip away at it some more, but never formalized anything into an article.

Well, I decided to finally power through it about a month ago, and here we are. This is the most thorough disassembly I've done to date, and this article covers the interesting bits.

Don't feel like cheating your way through a Japanese text heavy quiz game to see some of the cute artwork in the game? I've got just what you need!

I cut my teeth on game hacking and research in the Sonic communities of the early 2000's - Area 51, SSRG, CulT - and the Sonic arcade games were always something of an enigma to us. It's been especially exciting to see that these rarities have been finally dumped, including Cosmo Fighter.

I opened the data not expecting to find much and, unfortunately, I was correct. But there are a couple interesting tidbits worth looking at...

Just a small article this time. I came across an intriguing line of text as I was taking apart Detana! Twin Bee (arcade version) recently. Though part of the message shows up normally at the end of the game, it turns out there's more to the story...

I've had this article half-researched and half-written for more than a year now, just sort of laying around. I've lacked the interest in finishing it because, frankly, the game is pretty awful. Well, after months of Donpachi and Dodonpachi, it's time to take a short break with something easy.

Enjoy, I guess?

And now for the article many people have been waiting for: Dodonpachi! Unfortunately, I didn't make it in time for the 20th anniversary of the game on February 5th, but oh well; better late than never right? This game seems to have a larger following than it's predecessor, so I'm sure shmup fans will enjoy the re-enabled debugging tools available to play around with. There's not much else to say, so here we go!