Articles with tag `taito`

A solid shooter from Taito with impressive scene transitions and even better music from Zuntata. And a handful of debug tools that took some wrangling to get working. But wrangled it has been!

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…

Just a quick article this time around after Zerochan, who is writing an exhaustive Raimais guide, asked me to take a look at the game and see if I could find any debug leftovers. Do level select and invulnerability count? Yes they do! I’ll even throw in a bonus (possibly-)never-before-seen game ending!

I was pretty unhappy that Land Maker, one of my favorite arcade puzzle games, was one of the few Taito F3 games that did not have the Taito code implemented. Despite that, I still had a hunch there may be some leftovers worth investigating. And I was right! I wouldn’t be making a post otherwise…

Around 1988, Taito began implementing a standard level select code into many of their arcade games. The code was not available to normal players, as it requires the use of the Service button, inside the cabinet. Considering the timing required to press Start and Service in quick succession, it may not have been for cabinet owners either, but instead for the developers who had direct access to the hardware and who may have had those special buttons mapped to something more accessible for testing.

Indeed, some games have more than just level selects, including basic map or object editors and viewers. Some menus allow you to select level numbers well beyond what actually exist in the game, loading non-existant game data when selected. Some menus are very plain, while others obviously had some work put into them. Besides the obvious bonus of easily exploring the game levels without so much work, the menus themselves are sometimes a fascinating look at the developer’s side of the game.

Well, that’s enough mahjong for now… Let’s try something a little more exciting! Like the title screen implies, Riding Fight is a FRONT VIEW SPEED ACTION GAME featuring a couple of hoverboard-mounted radical dudes from the future who punch everything in their path. And it turns out it has a level select screen!