Wild Fang/Tecmo Knight

One more game for the JTGAIDEN core, which in the previous beta only covered Shadow Warriors (Ninja Gaiden). Wild Fang operates on very similar hardware but adds a small microcontroller (MCU). This MCU serves as a kind of memory for the main program. This was presumably a copy-protection mechanism as the MCU firmware could not be dumped and replicated easily.

The core is quite solid at the moment except for a 2-pixel wide column at the left part of the screen that can sometimes be out of sync with the rest of the video. That is a known problem we are working on.

History

Released in 1989, just five months after Ninja Gaiden. This belt-scrolling action game was created by the same team as Ninja Gaiden. An interesting aspect of the game is that the protagonist fights on a ‘servant’. There are three types of servants: a giant, a tiger and a flying dragon. Players can change freely back and forth from the giant to the tiger but the dragon requires a special item.

Having several characters to choose from become popular in 1989. Capcom's ‘Dynasty Wars’ had four main characters, Sega's ‘Golden Axe’ had three. For Wild Fang, Tecmo introduced a system that was rather uncommon at the time: you could change the character during game play, whenever you wanted, not just at the beginning of the game.

The game has quite a personality art-wise, with all enemies barbaric in appearance, and heads coming off rather easily. After the head, blood sprays out, with a rather grotesque effect. A gameplay oddity, attacks can only hit one enemy at a time. As soon as you get two enemies in front of you, one of them is bound to hit you. Scrolling the screen little by little to make enemies appear one by one works well. Or simply run away from a group of enemies, get a good distance and then beat them one by one. Finally, you can protect yourself by transforming repeatedly, as you become invincible for a short while after changing characters.

Wooden barrel bug

Most stages have wooden barrel bugs, which can be exploited to get massive scores. If you keep attacking a wooden barrel with it hitting a stone pillar or a golden statue, you will get more and more points. Always start by hitting the wooden barrels at the location where you hit them in a row, and keep hitting them until time runs out to score a large amount of points.

Other Updates

• Time Scanner set 3 now boots up and works correctly