Articles with tag `unused content`

We’ve looked at secrets of the game’s data in part 1. Now let’s look at what didn’t even make it past the planning stage, at what could have been…

Let’s take a look at a fighting game with a troubled development history, questionable aesthetic choices, cut characters and hidden debug tools. No, we’re not talking about Tōki Denshō this time. It’s Psikyo’s 1998 fighting game, Daraku Tenshi: The Fallen Angels! In part 1, we’ll look at the game’s hidden development tools and other code mysteries, then in Part 2 we’ll discuss the game’s unfortunately wasted storyline.

Sometimes you begin disassembling some code thinking, “well, there’s not much here, this won’t take long to research and write about,” and then it spirals out of control and takes up all your free time for multiple weeks.

Anyway, here’s more than you ever wanted to know about what’s hidden away inside Magical Crystals!

The game responsible for bringing Mighty and Ray into the world also has a bunch of debugging tools, a ton of cut content, and an interesting development history tucked away.

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!

Just a quickie article so this isn’t lost to the sands of Twitter.

Today we look at Magical Speed, a simple but surprisingly fun Allumer game based on the card game Speed. Turns out there’s a hidden debug menu in the code that’s super simple to re-enable, and lots (LOTS) of unused graphics.

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

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…

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’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!

Rezon is a fun little shooter with a couple interesting leftovers (maybe one is an easter egg?). Sadly, neither finds are as amazing as the game’s ending.

I’m pretty burnt out on tackling Super Gem Fighter / Pocket Fighter right now. I took a little break and did some more research on something quite interesting I had found a while back: English text in Koutetsu Yousai Strahl, a horizontal shooter and a favorite among shmup fans.

EDIT 2018-11-28: As of MAME 0.203, there is a world region dump of Strahl. It contains the English text that was found in the Japanese version, making this article relatively useless. Oh well.

The MAME hacking continues! Momoko 120% is a platform shooter with an interesting history. I’ve always enjoyed it and have begun a full disassembly of the code, partially to learn Z80 assembly and also, as always, to look for any bits of leftover or unused data. And find something I did!