BRAVE FIREFIGHTERS

In the arcade game Brave Firefighters, Sega gets creative with their long time stand-by: the shooting genre. "Brave Firefighters is a real-time polygonal romp through towering infernos and blazing hotels. And instead of a light gun, you get an enormous fire hose controller, which vibrates to simulate the water spray," claims Colin Williamson of IGNDC. "You tread your way through blazing areas from a first-person perspective, unleashing your liquid spray on flaming furniture. The main goal here is to get the flames put out as quickly as possible; there’s a set time limit that starts ticking down from the second you start. Blasting a blaze in record time adds a few seconds to the clock, while adequate performance isn’t acceptable."

"Extinguishing the flames systematically is the only way to succeed; if you start shooting the flames from the outside and move in to the larger fires, you’re golden. Just keep the area doused, since embers can ignite the whole kit and kaboodle all over again. And remember to regulate how much you shoot; the pressure gauge at the top of the screen keeps you in the know."

"From time to time, all hell will break loose: the floor above will collapse downwards, sending flaming chunks of wood headed your way. You’ll have to whip that hose around in time to knock them out of your way, otherwise, you’ll lose health points at the bottom of the screen. There are also panicked survivors running about from time to time, and while it’s really fun to knock ‘em over with a jet of water, it eats up valuable time."

In designing Brave Firefighters, the Sega engineers were faced with the daunting challenge of creating 3D images of flames and sprayed water, both of which have a nearly infinite number of shapes, sizes, colors, shadings, shadows, and levels of opaqueness. And combining the two by simulating sprayed water over flames created entirely new challenges that would have been nearly impossible to overcome utilizing existing 3D computers. For this reason, Brave Firefighters utilizes a modified Naomi Hardware system called Hikaru, which incorporates a custom Sega graphics chip and larger memory capacity.

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