Every now and then I strike gold: not another tile viewer or a meaningless data viewer, but something that is really interesting and unique. Riot City was such a gold mine: an English localization for a game that supposedly was onlty released in Japan, and an alternate, spicy ending! Oh, and I guess there’s some data viewers in there too…

The end of 2025 is upon us! Let’s see if we can squeak in one last quickie article before the end of the year. Let’s take a brief look at the disabled debug tools inside Rockman 2: The Power Fighters (or Megaman 2, I suppose, if you’re the kind of person who pronounces NES as “ness”).

We have something a bit special today: a prototype of a Mega CD game! (crowd cheers) Unfortunately, it’s one of, if not the worst game for the system: Heavy Nova. (crowd boos) But it does have something pretty interesting within it’s data which redeems its value a bit. (crowd cheers cautiously)

Let’s take a look.

We’re back on our CPS2 jam, and we’re looking at Alien vs Predator this time. Buried in its code are a bunch of debugging tools and an alternate staff roll. Compared to the mess that was Progear no Arashi, things were pretty straightforward this time, but there’s still a fair bit of technical complexity we need to cover, so let’s get into it.

Tōki Denshō may not be the most refined or serious fighting game in the world, but it’s quirky and has a unique place in Tecmo history. It’s also a miracle that the game even made it to release, suffering during development from an understaffed team, threats and bad ideas from upper management, bad location test results, and the spectre of Dead or Alive that was stealing away the few resources they had.

The details of Tōki Denshō’s development were compiled by the game’s main planner, Jun, as part of the Tōki Gentei dōjinshi. Now, more than six years after I initially promised it, here is a translation and commentary on that development diary.