New PCB Arrival - Hyper Duel – Technosoft - 1993

One of my big PCB collecting regrets was selling Hyper Duel.  I picked up the board about twenty years ago from Mak Japan PCB shop in Akihabara for around ¥10,000, which was about fifty pounds back then.  The game also received a home port on the Japanese Sega Saturn and was considered a bit of a hidden gem, and I bought it as well around the same time.

Hyper Duel is a cool horizontal space shooter developed by Technosoft, best known for the Thunder Force series.  The game has great pixel art and features the ability to switch between spaceship “Fighter” mode and humanoid mecha “Armor” mode, really setting the game apart.  The ship has greater speed and manoeuvrability, and is the ideal mode for dodging tight bullet patterns.  The mecha is slightly more powerful, and the gun can be aimed up to forty five degrees above or below you.  On the downside, it’s larger and thus a bigger target. 

Hyper Duel for the Saturn was released in 1996 and features a faithful port of the arcade game, as well as a reworked version with updated graphics and a revised soundtrack.  The Saturn Mode has much more detailed sprites and backgrounds, with some sprites being redrawn completely.  It also implements some gameplay tweaks and changes.  Most notably a third button is added to lock the robots aim in place.

My collecting mentality has changed over the years.  Back then I just wanted to own the best version of a game.  I preferred the Saturn Mode over the arcade original and decided to sell the PCB.  Nowadays if I like a game, I tend to look out for it on different formats.  I enjoy seeing the gameplay, artwork and packaging differences and finding out what makes each version unique.

This leads me back to Hyper Duel.  I missed having it on the original arcade PCB format and really wanted to play it on an arcade cab.  When I had the board previously, I played my arcade boards via a Supergun and console games on the same TV.

Prices for the game have increased dramatically over the years and it’s become quite a difficult game to track down.  Matt, a Ukvac member recently done me a great deal on the game and there is a cool story behind it.  The game was picked up from a local arcade in Torquay.  Matt had known the manager who runs it for about twenty five years and at one point actually worked for him.  The board had been in his possession for approximately twenty years.  It was acquired by him when a previous Operator vacated the premises and left several Jamma PCB’s hanging up by nails on the wall in the storeroom, along with a comedy face mask hanging up in the prize shop!  Since Jamma games had passed by that time, he had no way of testing them, and he simply assumed the boards were deliberately left behind because they were probably faulty.  The boards were put on a shelf and then eventually all in a box for the next twenty years!  Last year Matt bought himself a Jamma cabinet and was looking for some boards.  He knew the manager had these boards all this time and contacted him to see if he would sell them.  A deal was made, but Matt had to test them before a price was agreed.  All of them apart from one were either dead or faulty.  Hyper Duel was one of the faulty boards, but has since been repaired by VectorGlow.

I know from my own experiences that sometimes it’s very surprising what games you come across on Raids and in Op storerooms, games you never remember seeing back in the day and would never expect to find.  Hyper Duel is one of those games and I’m really happy to have it back in the collection.