Taito-tastic: Kiki Kaikai and its Hardware

So some concepts got stuck in my head early on when looking into hardware that just don’t hold. One of these was that the Neo Geo was unique because of its heavy use of sprites where other systems would use tilemaps. But that’s not unique to the Neo Geo: ADK was just upgrading their Alpha68k family, which all used the same system. Epoch and NEC’s µPD777 did the same thing in the 1970’s for home gamers. And now Taito. Sprite-centric hardware wasn’t unique to SNK at all. Kiki KaiKai Sometimes a company grabs another company’s series and runs with it. That’s what happened with Kiki KaiKai, Taito’s Shinto-themed shoot ‘em up– you probably know it better for Natsume’s take on the concept, released under the name Pocky & Rocky. Pocky & Rocky with Becky is an amazing game title and you will not convince me otherwise. And honestly, 1986’s Kiki KaiKai is a lot rougher than Pocky & Rocky. It’s an unforgiving shoot ‘em up, where the player is on ground level, so has to also interact with terr ... Read full article.