Why usually it is impossible to choose two Hotheads? The reason - in the limited quantity of sprites?
(But, as is known, two Hotheads can be chosen so: in the beginning 1 player - somebody, and a computer - Hothead. Fight has passed. Then 1 player - Hothead and the computer - Hothead! It's interesting, that on the Dendy Hotheads are blinked, and on the emulator it is appreciable a little or not appreciable.)
Hothead is so large (wide) that he easily exceeds the 8 sprite per scanline limit of the hardware. It was probably a producer's decision to disallow 2 Hotheads, as some players might think there is something wrong with their system with so much flicking going on. Excessive flickering does get distracting. Flickering doesn't slow down gameplay though.
Thanks!
On the other hand, this other Hothead would use exactly half of the sprite limit:
Grown-up Hothead from Super Mario WorldThey have the same attack pattern as the
spark creatures from
Super Mario Bros. 2, which got them from
Donkey Kong Jr., which got them from
Qix.
Ryukenden wrote:
Why usually it is impossible to choose two Hotheads? The reason - in the limited quantity of sprites?
That's what
tcrf thinks. (It also lists GG codes to circumvent.)
From debugging this game a bit, I can say that it's definitely an intended limitation they set, though we can only speculate about the real reasons. The most obvious one was already mentioned.
In case someone is curious what I reversed, I was looking for a reason to a bug when if Don throws a ball at a certain hight while doing a special, he becomes invincible. And I found out that almost every character has its own logic in nearly everything, and Don was certainly given this ability - to throw a ball from any state. They just failed to create this condition while testing (throwing a ball during special is quite hard!), and now there's this bug.