Sunday 5 February 2012

Curiosities vol. 1 - X68000 Space Harrier Hacks

This post is a little different than the usual reviews, since all these games ar just hacks of Space Harrier, and everyone loves Space Harrier anyway, it'd be pointless reviewing them. I'm just posting about them because I think they're interesting and I want to share them with the world. I don't know when these hacks were made, but judging by the contents, I would guess they didn't come out too long after the X68000 version of the game itself, in the late 1980s. This also isn't a comprehensive guide: there are three other known hacks, two of them themed around Sailor Moon and Gundam, and another one, called "Pretty Harrier", about which I know very little. Unfortunately, I couldn't get them to run in XM6g. If anyone has got those to run in an emulator, please tell me how and which emulator! Also, special thanks for this post go to Dark Age Iron Savior, who managed to find the disc images for me. I apologise in advance for the layout of this post. There's a lot of images, and I'll try my best to arrange them nicely, but I make no promises it won't be an ugly mess at the end of it.

Harrier Desse

As far as I can tell, this hack doesn't really have any unifying theme to it. It's just strange. The sound effects have all been replaced with strange voice samples, and the enemies include slimes from Dragon Quest, hattifatteners from Moomin and Gamera, among other unconnected things.

Rumic Harrier


This one is a bit more palatable, you play as Lum from Urusei Yatsura, and fly around shooting characters from the various works of Rumiko Takahashi, including UY as well as Maison Ikkoku and Ranma 1/2




Street HarrierThis one is the coolest of the three I'm posting about. You play as Ryu from Street Fighter, flying and shooting hadokens, and the enemies are characters from a ton of different arcade games! The bonus stage has Ryu doing a handstand on top of the plane from Afterburner! The last boss is the guy from Space Harrier, come to reclaim his game! The only problem is that there's something wrong with the game (or possibly the emulation of it) that means the lives counter never goes down. On the other hand though, that means I got to play it all the way to the end and take lots of screenshots!








3 comments:

  1. Where can I find these hacks, and what's a good Sharp X68k emulator to use?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Where can I find these hacks, and what's a good Sharp X68k emulator to use?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm not sure where you'd find these disk images nowadays, but the best x68000 emulator (as far as i know) is xm6g

      Delete