Getting back to our roots of hacking on obscure Japanese quiz/mahjong games that no one else cares about, we’re taking apart Athena no Hatena today!

A fun color-matching puzzle game with colorful graphics and cute animations… and bunches of disabled dev functions and unused data!

Lucky & Wild is a crossover between arcade racing and lightgun shooting genres with a buddy-cop twist. As always, Hardcore Gaming 101 has a great description of it. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen it in an arcade, but it seems like a lot of fun. The game code has a few disabled test menus as well as a round select that has what appear to be test levels! There are also a small truckload of debug tools that were more than a little bit difficult to get working…

In the beginning, there was Virtua Fighter 2. And Suzuki Yu looked upon the game and saw that it was good. Thus were Fighting Vipers and Sonic the Fighters developed upon its game engine. And, lo, there dwelt within the code of each a bounty of debug tools!

Tōki Denshō - Angel Eyes is an enigmatic fighting game  from Tecmo and the second (and last) game on their proprietary Tecmo Motherboard System hardware. It was quickly overshadowed by Dead or Alive and sunk into relative obscurity. It would be a stretch to call the game good, but some of its aspects, like the jarring mix of 2D and pre-rendered 3D sprites, make it oddly fascinating. While I don’t normally stray too far from the code, I branched out quite a bit to research this article and it’s been an interesting journey…