Eight Way Third Degree Burns

It's almost fall. I've got one last chance to squeeze in a post before August comes to a close, so let's talk Hellfire.

Not that hellfire. By the way, who shouts "Dersh!" as a victory cry? That's the worst exclamation for a warrior since The Tick's "Spoon!"

Yeah, okay, that's the Hellfire I meant. Hellfire is an early Sega Genesis shooter tragically buried under an avalanche of early Sega Genesis shooters. Sure, it doesn't have the visual flair or the clever hook of Gaiares, or the blistering speed of Thunder Force II, or the depth and open level design of Granada. However, in keeping with Toaplan tradition, it's a hypercompetent shmup which makes its appeal obvious once you get used to the dull colors and questionable enemy designs. I still don't know what the hell this thing is supposed to be, other than deadly.

Unfortunately, Hellfire has one especially nasty fly stuck in its ointment. It takes a lot of inspiration from SNK and Tose's Vanguard, which puts emphasis on firing not just forward, but around your ship to take out dangerously close enemies. That's the good part. Hellfire is designed to force the player to frequently switch between bullet trajectories, to either concentrate fire on one target or to sink shots into cannons tucked between impenetrable walls.

Now comes the bad part. When you only have three buttons on a stock Genesis controller, you have to cycle through forward, back, vertical, and diagonal firing with button taps. In all fairness, the arcade game was like this too, but it's nevertheless awkward and counterintuitive, especially after forty years of twin stick shooters like Robotron: 2084 and Smash TV. Your mind is forced to find a perfect balance between dancing around the bullets Hellfire throws at you and hammering the bullet cycle button to find the right trajectory for the current situation. That inevitably leads to confusion, chaos, and ultimately, a fiery death from a collision your brain was too knotted up to notice.

What I'd like to see is a hack that removes the trajectory cycling button completely and replaces it with omni-directional firing, provided by the six button Sega Arcade Pad. Holding B fires forward, while holding X fires backward. Y or A fires vertically, while any combination of the two buttons lays down a spread of diagonal fire. Finally, Z or C fires the Hellfire cannon, a forward facing thermonuclear ray that scorches all enemies in its path. 

You could even adapt this control scheme to an older Genesis controller... it wouldn't be ideal, but it would certainly be an improvement over Toaplan's default setting. A fires backward, B fires vertically, and C fires forward. Any two buttons fire diagonally, and all three together unleashes hellfire on your enemies.

I'd like to see this happen, but I doubt there's enough interest in a crusty old shooter like Hellfire for anyone else to tackle this project, and I just don't have the mad hacking skills to make it a reality. Even making Peter Pan green in the Genesis version of Hook without everything else adopting the same hue was beyond my reach...

Green cherries. Mm, bitter and possibly toxic!

Kingly Guise

Yes, even the one who blotted himself out of existence two
games before. He's been blotted back in. Look, it's a
fighting game. It doesn't have to make sense.

After months of information being delivered on an agonizingly slow drip, the next King of Fighters game has finally revealed itself more fully, with both an extended trailer and a web site launching this morning. Here are some of the features we can expect from King of Fighters XV when it arrives in stores next February...

SHATTER STRIKE: This is a versatile counter that interrupts your opponent's attacks, either dropping them to the floor or launching them into the nearest wall, at the cost of one power gauge. Press down, down forward, forward, then hard punch and hard kick together, to perform the strike and put some much needed distance between you and an aggressive opponent.

MAX MODE: Pressing the two hard attack buttons together activates Max Mode, a staple of the King of Fighters series which gives your character an adrenaline boost and a temporary advantage in fights. One new wrinkle is that a watered down version of Max Mode can be used as a link in a combo chain... it still costs two power gauges, but it eliminates downtime for the move, making it safer to perform.

RUSH: Returning from KOF XIV is the Rush combo. Quickly tap light punch and your fighter performs an autocombo, ending with a super move if you've got the power gauge to spare. Personally, I'm not a fan... it's too easy to waste power gauges using the Rush combo, and takes the satisfaction out of performing super moves. Why bother with SNK's tricky pretzel motions when you can just hammer away at the X button?

EX SPECIAL MOVES AND SUPER SPECIAL MOVES: EX Special Moves are special moves, juiced up with added damage and other benefits. If you've played any fighting game since Darkstalkers, you're already familiar with them, but one plus is that they take only half of a power gauge to perform. You can also enhance Super Moves, but those take two power gauges. Climax Super Specials are drawn out signature attacks that gobble up most of your opponent's life, but they cost three power gauges. Better save these as a coup de grace for the end of the match.

ROLLBACK NETCODE: This is the biggie for competitive players. I don't fully understand how rollback works, but I understand that it predicts which moves you're about to make before you finish them. For instance, if you enter down, then down right on the controller, the CPU will fill in the blanks and have your character throw a fireball. If that's not what you meant to do, the computer "rolls back" its prediction and has your character perform the move you actually entered. 

It seems like it would be ripe for exploitation, giving the player an opportunity to leave both the computer and their opponent hopelessly confused, but I understand that it's remarkably accurate, and preferred to previous internet gaming technologies. The 2019 reboot of Samurai Shodown does not use rollback, and consequently has been abandoned by most online gamers despite offering everything else a Samurai Shodown fan could possibly want.

A TRIMMED DOWN CAST: Remember all those nutty newcomers from the previous game, like a scantly clad Terry Bogard fangirl, a butler who controls the forces of gravity, a Brazilian ninja, and a Chinese actress who swaps masks as she fights? I hope you weren't too attached, because they're not coming back for a rematch. SNK is going back to the basics with a streamlined cast of characters, some dating back to The King of Fighters' 1994 debut. (Before any Brian Battler fans ask, no, the Sports Team probably isn't coming back. Yes yes, there's still DLC left to be announced, but you'll save yourself a lot of heartache if you just let that dream die now.)

THE DJ STATION: Tearing a page from the Smash Bros. playbook, King of Fighters XV will not only let you listen to a massive assortment of songs from past games in the series, but assign them to specific stages. You could play the entire game just listening to remixes of Arashi no Saxophone, because heaven knows there have been plenty of them.

A WIDE SELECTION OF AVAILABLE FORMATS: But not wide enough, it would seem. KOF XV will be coming to the Playstation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X/S, along with the Steam and Epic digital distribution services. However, you won't find it on the Xbox One (unless you use the upcoming XCloud service as a workaround) or the Nintendo Switch. You know, the Switch, that silly little hybrid system that only sold eighty four million units. The console that recently dominated software sales charts in Japan for the first time in over thirty years. Yeah, that Switch. I don't know who makes the porting decisions over at SNK, but they can't be based on merit or common sense.

PiTrex: The Next Disorientation

Look, I don't wanna talk about the Activision thing. I'm pretty sure we all know what's going to happen anyway... strategically chosen heads will roll in an insincere gesture of accountability, but the man at the top of the trash heap will get to keep his, and the only lesson the industry will learn from this is "next time, don't get caught." (Yes, I've probably been watching too much JS Sterling. They're not wrong, though.)

I did want to talk about the PiTrex, though. It's an Australian peripheral that sticks into the side of your Vectrex, turning it into a vertical monitor for a Raspberry Pi. The single board computer, considerably more powerful than the Vectrex's internal processor, is capable of running vector arcade games, as well as original creations. Beyond that, it can play Vectrex games... on your Vectrex... using Vectrex emulation... which if I can be perfectly honest Veccin' freaks me out. It's distressingly like that movie Inception. Or possibly Human Centipede, I'm not sure.

It's a cartridge that emulates a game
system... ON that game system!
That's not what nature and Milton
Bradley intended!

Sure, it's not without precedent. There was an emulator for the Game Boy Advance that let you play classic black and white titles on the system, a boon for later machines like the Game Boy Micro without that legacy hardware included. But this... this is just next level weird. Games that ran perfectly well on the Vectrex from the day of its 1982 launch may not be compatible with this set up, depending on whether or not the Vectrex emulator included with the PiTrex can handle them.

On the plus side, it is very cheap at roughly twenty seven American dollars. Even with the added expense of the Raspberry Pi and a modestly sized SD card, it comes out to around forty bucks, and anyone who can afford a Vectrex can certainly afford that. Just try not to think too hard about whether you're playing the "real thing" when you fire up your system for a few games of Star Castle.