Hell Fighter (NES) Playthrough
310A playthrough of Sachen's 1992 unlicensed horror-themed action-platformer for the NES, Hell Fighter.
Hell Fighter is a horror-themed action game that was created by the fine folks at Sachen, a prolific Taiwanese developer of bootleg NES games that you may know from such releases as Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu, Tagin' Dragon, Street Heroes, and Rocman X.
In Hell Fighter, you assume the role of the Prince of Persia's Chinese doppleganger, a man named Lee Long. According to the intro text crawl:
"In the dark and cold Hades here live with an ambitious Satan who is anxious and intend to control the whole world of human being. He has no way to reach the horrible plan until the devil crystal ball fallen into his hands.
On the day the devil crystal ball fell, the world changes with the evil power of the crystal ball Satan made the world chaotic. In the critical moment the wise old man has found a man with Chinese kungfu. The old man trained him the uncanny power for saving the world. Finally, the young man is on his way to destroy Satan and the devils......"
That's quite a setup, wouldn't you say?
Lee Long battles his way through Hell over the course of six side-scrolling stages. Each of these horrorscapes is capped with a boss fight - you'll battle "Poison Crab" at "Landscape Pavilion," "Junior Dinosaur" on the "No Return Path," and more before coming face-to-face with "Evil Satan" for the final showdown at "Evil Propagation." (I'm not really sure how that's a place name, but whatever.)
Instead of using his martial arts on his enemy, Lee gets his pick of two weapons - he can throw homing "flying spears" in quick succession, or he can use 'breathing strength" to fire off slow-but-powerful fireballs - and he can also make use of circling "protection balloons" to shield himself from harm.
These items can be earned through collecting colored orbs that lie hidden in solid platforms and the ground, and the search gives rise to Hell Fighter's defining feature: nearly every surface that you can stand on can be destroyed with a swift kick or a headbutt, and this gives you a lot of flexibility in how to tackle each area. If you're being swarmed, you might tunnel through a hill to avoid incoming fire, or even create a pit trap for your enemies to fall into. You have to be careful not to get too carried away, though. If you destroy too much of the floor and fall to the bottom of the screen, you'll be docked a life and sent back to the last checkpoint.
The deformable terrain gimmick is an inspired touch that makes Hell Fighter feel quite different from anything else on the NES, and it's an impressive trick to see being pulled off on an 8-bit console that uses tile-based graphics. The rest of the game holds up fairly well, too. The graphics and sound are a cut above Sachen's norm, the jumping controls are smooth, and the challenge is fair (and sometimes even verges on being too easy with how often it hands out extra lives). Flicker and slowdown run rampant, but you quickly get used to it. I eventually came to welcome it through the chaos of the later stages.
Hell Fighter is remarkably solid and ambitious for an unlicensed NES game from the early 90s, and I had a lot of fun plowing my way through it. If you get a kick out of weird, morbid games filled to the brim with skeletons, explosions, and broken English, you'll probably enjoy this one as much as I did.
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