KoolFiller isn’t kooling down anytime soon when it comes to his Saturn hacking, releasing yet another English translation yesterday morning to download on SegaXtreme. Having just released the first volume of the Arcade Gears series Pu·Li·Ru·La, he’s now moved on to the second volume, Gun Frontier!
Gun Frontier was released by Taito in the arcades in 1991, then ported exclusively to the Saturn about six years later, produced by Xing Entertainment and developed by Goo! It’s a beautiful vertical scrolling western-style shmup where you pilot a gun-shaped airplane. The Saturn version includes tate mode, flipping the game on its side for vertical screens.
KoolFiller said this “uses the official English arcade translation, except for two small spelling corrections. The intro is now in English, as well as both the good and the bad endings.” He’s also translated the few song titles in sound test that weren’t already in English.
The hacking didn’t stop with just translating the game however. KoolFiller cleaned up some graphical issues, fixed the hud in horizonal mode to fit the screen, and even added a save feature for high scores and settings, which he said “could be handy, say, if you wanted the game to boot up in the ‘Arcade’ display mode automatically.”
The hidden “CREDIT” and “STAGE” options have been permanently unlocked as well, which Bo Bayles discovered could be activated by shooting your screen with a lightgun in the second player controller port.
One last thing KoolFiller pointed out is that this game actually supports the Saturn shuttle mouse! Confirmed working on real hardware (by yours truly), you use the left click for regular fire, middle for bombs, and right click for rapid fire. The movement speed doesn’t change, so be prepared to have lots of room for your mouse to move! “I’m not saying this is the best way to play the game, but i think it’s cool,” Kool said.
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This is one of my favorites on the Saturn! The fact that they added saving for high scores alone is fantastic for me. That’s always been a glaring issue for me personally with any STG that doesn’t at least keep your scores in the memory. Extremely cool stuff!