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…

This is a great little collection of classic Namco games - Pac-Man, Rally X, Dig Dug, Mappy, Galaga and Xevious. Not only are the original games faithfully recreated, there’s an ‘arranged’ mode for each with new graphics, music and gameplay. Oh, and there are bunches of debug tools leftover…

Platformer arcade games are a bit rare, so it’s a shame that Recalhorn (that’s ree-cal-horn, according to the katakana) never got past the location test stage. The graphics are quite nice, even beautiful in some backgrounds, and while the gameplay isn’t ground-breaking, it’s classic and solid. But other people have written better reviews than I ever could, so let’s just jump into what I found…

Phantasm is a creative take on platform shooters, where as a ghost you can posess the bodies of enemies on screen as your person avatar. It’s a well-made game, definitely ‘hidden gem’ status. It also has a very nice selection of debugging tools!