a fine arcade racer, but i've had my fill.

It seems the Saturn version of Fighting Vipers held at least one more secret. Three days after publishing a patch to enable a previously unknown Pai-like costume for Honey and Backup Debugger screen, Saturn hobbyist hacker Bo Bayles posted on X about an unused stage hiding in the game.

“There’s an unused stage (index 09) that looks unfinished,” Bayles said today. “Its file name indicates that it’s a ‘farm’ stage.”

He published two screenshots of the farm stage showing ground that looks like a tilled field surrounded by a ring made of rope and grass stretching into the distance under a cloudy blue sky. But the sky has a disjointed tile problem and there are no other stage elements outside the ring like other Fighting Vipers stages have.

It’s possible that this stage was intended to be the Training Mode stage instead of the one that’s playable in the final game. “The training stage is index 09 — which is the farm stage — but there’s logic to overwrite it just before it starts,” Bayles said on the SHIRO! Discord server.

The training stage’s iconic music plays when the farm stage is forced to appear through hacking. Bayles found that out after hacking the farm stage to appear after the final stage of Arcade Mode, but finishing a match on it resulted in a crash rather than rolling credits.

In Versus Mode, index 09 is used for the “random” option rather than a specific stage. It may be possible to redirect that to the farm stage with a patch, but Bayles didn’t mention whether he’d publish a new version of his Fighting Vipers patch to make the farm playable.

The stage seemingly has been hiding under the noses of anyone who would have looked at the disc’s files — a file named FARMSTG.BIN is sitting there right after TRASTG.BIN, the training stage’s file. It follows a list of BIN files named after characters’ names with STG at the end, like GRASTG.BIN for Grace’s stage or RAXSTG.BIN for Raxel’s stage. Sadly, there are no more stage files on the disc after the farm’s.

This story originally appeared on Sega Saturn SHIRO!

This is, off the bat, not as good as Vanilla Vampire Survivors. But it's fun, it's addictive and it has some really nice ideas on this budding genre compared to Vampire Survivor.

20 Minutes Till Dawn has you Select both a character (with a unique playstyle and 3 upgrades) and a starting weapon (with unique stats and quirks AND an upgrade choice). A good choice was to give fewer guns than characters, thus making sure no character has a "canon" weapon.

Then you select a mode (though only the standard mode got any use from me) and a map (three options but the Forest is painfully obvious as being the "default" "normal" map) then select the difficulty (from 0 to 15, unlocked be beating the prior one)

You also have access to runes. You have 4 tiers of 2 categories, each giving you 3 options having 5 ranks. You can select an Attack and Defense rune from each tier. I didn't play quite enough to engage with every single rune but they have some interesting options. Some are simple attribute buffs but others feel like actual in-game upgrades that were not included in the level up screen. it's pretty cool and not as.... boring as the meta-upgrades in Vampire Survivors.

In-game unlike Vampire Survivors, you default attack doesn't fire automatically. instead it works like twin-stick shooter. Aim and shoot your default gun to kill a few enemies as they spawn. Thankfully, you can toggle auto-aim. Sadly, you cannot toggle auto-shoot. Since this is essentially an autoshooter, you tend to spend the full 20 minutes of a run holding the mouse button and automatically shooting at anything that gets close to you.

The pool of upgrades has a few interesting options. They all fall within one of 3 categories to me. gun upgrades, summon upgrades and attribute upgrades. summons vary from a dragon egg that takes 3 gameplay minutes to hatch, then does a lot of damage firing fireballs to a scythe that just flies around you. Gun upgrades varie from procs to getting more bullets out of each bullet to stuff happening whenever you reload. Attribute upgrades affect stuff like max HP or movement speed. Additionally, each upgrade is either a basic one,which fork into two advanced and and converge back into one final one.

Enemy variety is a bit lower than in Vampire Survivors but the boss variety is greater and they are quite interesting!

Overall, though it falls a bit short in terms of variety and satisfaction. It's absolutely a fun game though! I'm curious about the sequel.

Tier 24, Ranked 203/518

Recommended: If you want a chill zone out game.