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All rights to Wings of Fire, Afterburn, Wings of Fire: Aftermist, Tales of the Scorching, and Wings of Fire: Legends, are owned by Tui. T Sutherland, Sutherland Electronics, and Sutherland Software.
There are a lot of tales of haunted game copies, there are even more stories about ghosts in the game copies doing something ridiculous in real life. But this time I genially would prefer to believe it was some ghost than to think some sick fucker would do something this awful to anyone out there.
Aftermist is not really a popular game, even for Wings of Fire standards. It was one of those game-‘lets’ you’d get when purchasing a package for your Sega NewGen or if you were one of the five people on earth who actually bought the console to run the game on what was, at the time, ‘ground breaking quality’. Some would argue this game is the entire reason Wings of Fire doesn’t have more games.
However, it appears someone made an emulator port of the T78’s system, and even if Aftermist was the only game deliberately made for it, I was still curious to try. The N64 port could only give me so many FPS and I wanted to see how it’d look on its best native capacity. After playing the main game for about half an hour I very quickly remembered why people didn’t like it, the game had too many catches, the animation wasn’t peak quality and the actual gameplay section was a weird blend of a flight simulator, some open world stuff and a select few combat encounters.
Despite all of that, after a few weeks people figured out ways to mod the game and make their own ROMs. It was surprisingly easy, just given a few months and custom tools were made available for the public and a lot of good ROMs actually came forth to make the game more enjoyable, SkywingArena.TTS , JustAnOcean.TTS and BOSS.TTS were pretty notable ROMs who even without custom assets at the time, made a lot with the game.
The ROM I want to talk about in particular is a specific ROM called CHIMERA.TTS. It didn’t seem sketchy at first, it ran inside the emulator just fine but it wasn’t anything like the usual ROMs. For one thing, it was way lighter than the ROMs I used to download even if the post said that it contained plenty of custom assets and code inside.
At first, ‘custom code’ sounds like a red flag for a virus, but seeming it ran just fine under the emulator and the VM I set up, I figured it was harmless. CHIMERA opens up in a pretty normal fashion, it auto-skips the long boot credits and leaves you waiting for the game in a pitch black screen.
Where the Sutherland Software logo usually pops up, it instead has the Dev’s logo, HB. The title screen is completely revamped and it looks fresh new, given most of the time ROMs kept the title screen normal due to the trouble it was to modify the textures, this seemed really promising. Again, I want to believe it was some haunted shit, because if not, the dev put a LOT of work into making some pretty fucked up stuff.
The screen now just had the new game option, with the background changed from the usual map of Pyrrhia to a monochrome shot of the mountain the Dragonets were kept at. The title, interestingly, didn’t have the name of the ROM, instead it just said ‘Unison’ in a sky blue lettering.
Never the less, I entered the game. It also didn’t have any difficulty settings, or the customization screen which I have to guess is what the custom code was for, since those appeared in every single ROM ever.
The color scheme was also weirdly unique even during cutscenes. The game opens in the Dragonet’s room which again, hyped me up because few ROMs had new locations. The color scheme was also really weird here, only blues and reds kept their color which immediately let me know who was Tsunami and Glory, however it was ridiculously dark still.
In the original game at least, Nightwings were given night vision which looked weird but always helped you cross the map during the night. I say this here because when I started to test out the controls, I figured I was playing as Starflight. The HUD was changed as well, the usual dragon picture near the health bar was missing, as well as the item slots and armor slots. Almost all the controls worked perfectly fine, but I couldn’t attack.
Leaving the small room triggered what I could only assume was the first cutscene. I say ‘assume’ because the HUD didn’t disappear, my game just turned black and a dialogue box popped up. The outline on the dialogue box seemed to be Tsunami’s but all that was visible were her eyes and the luminescent patterns.
The dialogue box stayed blank and after a while, I decided to soft-reboot the ROM presuming it was a crash. Doing so just lead me back to the same loading screen, same title screen, and the same “error”. Luckily, we are in the emulation era and I could simply speed up the game which was a blessing because it took a solid minute, even in fast forward, for the ‘cutscene’ to properly start.
The HUD finally vanished and the sprite loaded properly, however the video itself was just Tsunami in her idle ‘wounded’ animation. If you never played the game, or just doesn’t want to look it up, ‘wounded’ animations are animations used when a dragon has its HP below 15%, and it’s pretty simple, it’s just the standard idle animation with the dragon’s head low and them breathing heavily.
No dialogue played, but every few seconds or so, the sprite changed which in game, meant that it was a new dialogue box. Most of them had the same strange corruption, just the eyes and patterns.
I skipped the cutscene, and it tossed me into a battle event, the music playing was Coral’s music from her dark route fight in the Deep Palace. Tsunami was still in her wounded animation standing in front of my character now. What I also found odd was that her health bar was almost empty already and the name in said health bar was just a ‘!’. Now if you ever played a ROM of Aftermist before, you know this problem happens whenever the game just can’t properly read the file, and it was an actual trick you could use by naming your weapons that, but this isn’t an exploits blog post.
Starflight was now fully equipped with his Traitor of the Night armor –a glitched set that was coded in for the dark route for Starflight but was unobtainable due to an oversight in the code- with maxxed out stats. There was no interaction but to push Tsunami around and because I just didn’t think much of it, I attacked and one-shotted her.
The blood was also still a vivid red, so bright that when playing this at late night, with brightness settings all the way up just to see the outlines of the ambient; it was like pointing a laser straight at my eyes. As usual, Tsunami fell to side using her usual death animation and a boss cutscene started. It was fucking awful; the screen now just displayed some gore art of Tsunami being brutally cannibalized by the others, while a high-pitched sound played bursting my ears, the image itself flickered and shook in a way anyone with epilepsy was guaranteed to have a convulsion right there.
Luckily, my parents were out for the night and so I could be sure that no one would barge in my room screaming at me. After that cheap and awful attempt at horror, the game started its second cutscene. This one was just a straight up seizure hazard, colors flickered while a dialogue box was at the bottom of the screen with Starflight’s outline glitched in a similar way to Tsunami’s, except that this time, only the eyes were present. I skipped the cutscene and was ready to call it.
But then it loaded a brand new model in the player character, it was a two-headed dragon with four wings, one of the heads was clearly Tsunami’s the patterns were still glowing but the model was still covered in blood in a bizarre way, like the two models were sawed and stitched together. The HUD was also presumably glitched, there were now two health bars, one was bigger but they were overlapping.
I opened the info tab to check the stats, and just gave me some more questions. The name was APATHEOSIS, the tribe, attack, defense, HP values an etc. were all just ‘!’, which again if you played a ROM before, you know that having values set as an exclamation point means your basically invincible. I found this odd because I imagined that since there were boss fights, you would have a challenge.
The sounds when moving APATHEOSIS around were awful, it was a bunch of wet cracks and snaps, like snapping the joints of a corpse, it’s animation was fluid but it walked around like a wounded animal, blood dripped out of Tsunami’s mouth while it was almost dragged around. There was nothing to do, the other sleeping dragonets wouldn’t interact, and every room was just devoid of any items.
I didn’t have the patience to deep dive into this whole ROM, so I opened the menu to quit and immediately another awful decision yielded awful results. The menu was another gorefest, it wasn’t exactly realistic but it was just accurate enough you could make out everyone, and what everyone was doing. Even just moving the selection to the quit option was awful, every single time it was a long scream with a volume so high not even taking my headphones off helped. When I finally DID quit, it displayed a message.
“I hope you liked this one.
=)”
After some much needed inspection, I found out my cheap ass headphones were damaged, not to an unusable degree, but to a noticeable decline in quality. I checked the post, and the comments were disabled, no wonder why.
If you ask me, this isn’t some massive ARG or some awful attempt at horror, this was made to just fuck with people and fuck their stuff. I had my volume pretty low and it STILL fucked my headphones, I can only imagine what would happen if it was higher. The game is STRUCTURED to make you raise your brightness and volume, the footsteps sound and music are super low, same as the lighting.
I honestly wish I didn’t find that ROM, frankly I don’t want to play it ever again even if I am curious.
Maybe I’ll link it.
Cheers.