Three player Final Fight will soon be a reality thanks to this new mod
That Haggar/Poison pile driver freeze frame is indeed representative of our core values
I was at our still semi-new local Cobra Arcade a week or two ago, and wound up playing Final Fight with my girlfriend. During the stage transition between level one and level two, I turned back to see an empty Simpson's arcade cab with its array of four joysticks and caught myself wondering, "Why is Final Fight only a two player game?"
Equally astounding is the question of why I'd never thought of this before. Perhaps it was because I grew up playing Final Fight not in the arcades, but on the two-pad maximum Super Nintendo?
Still, Final Fight has three characters to choose from, and plenty of other arcades from around the same time offer opportunities for up to four (six if we're talking the old fancy-pants X-Men arcade) friends to beat up some baddies.
Existential reflections aside, Grego Lewandowski and Rotwang have created a three player version of Final Fight via the modern wonders of video game modding.
"After a month of development and a ton of reverse engineering, Rotwang and I would like to announce Final Fight 30th Anniversary Edition!" says Grego. "So far most game systems have been modified to support three player, health bars, ai, weapons, scene transitions, hit detection, input, etc. The game is already fully playable from start to finish, however there is still some enemy ai/bug fixes/clean up to be done. We are working hard to make this modification a perfect enhancement to a classic game."
You can find more details over at Romhacking.net (the mod itself is not yet ready for download as of the writing of this article) and check out some stills in the gallery here. There's a teaser video showing off the gameplay after the jump below.
Click images for larger versions
