The 1993 fighting game Eternal Champions for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis has a bit of a reputation in the fighting game community for its incredible difficulty.
Search online and you'll find no shortage of threads where players are asking if it's supposed to be this hard or whether anyone has ever beaten it due to the extremely challenging CPU-controlled characters. As such, it's not exactly considered the most inviting of games from Sega's 16-bit library.
Recently, however, we were made aware on Twitter of a BillyTime!Games hack reaching version 3.0, which appears to rebalance things to be a bit more forgiving.
The first version of the hack was released in June 2020 and rebalanced the Inner Strength System (a gauge used to perform special attacks), in addition to lowering the difficulty for Contest mode.
Since then, its primary hacker BillyTime!Games has also added easier overkills on all stages (essentially finishers that incorporate the background environment), a revamped hit-stun to allow for more stylish combos, and a few character tweaks to better balance the roster.
According to the RDHN page, the latest update (v3.0) changes the following:
- Taunts drain a small amount of Inner Strength as opposed to none at all.
- Rax’s lock and load now uses 1/2 Inner Strength as opposed to 1/4.
- Rax’s Overload now uses 1/4 inner strength as opposed to none at all.
- Further tweaks made to Inner Strength system to ensure most moves require Inner Strength
- Timer speed has been adjusted to count down slightly slower.
It also introduces the character Eternal Champion as playable in VS mode and reintroduces a Hard Mode Contest Difficulty. You can activate the latter on the character select in contest mode, by holding B and pressing and holding start until your match begins. That will up the difficulty from level 2 all the way up to level 7.
In order to apply the hack, you'll need a copy of the original's game ROM, an IPS patcher, and the patch itself.