The VC Advantage: Continuous Fight
The internet has made it easy to find cheats for games, but we miss the tips pages from game magazines, when the discovery of a new code could inspire you to go back to an old game. These codes aren't exactly new, but oldness is the essence of the Virtual Console! We're bringing back the classic codes every week on The VC Advantage.
Much like every other brawler that followed, Final Fight's bosses and large enemies (especially the Andore family) have total priority over all your player attacks. You can be mid-combo and those bastards just stop you cold and take you down -- which kind of defeats the purpose of combos. Luckily for expert Final Fight players (by which we mean people who are willing to exploit an unintentional glitch), Capcom provided the most boring of the three protagonists, Cody, with a failsafe, game-breaking advantage. Not that they meant to do so. Everyone probably already knows about this, but that's no reason not to celebrate it!
It's a simple maneuver. You interrupt Cody's punch combo after the second jab (before the cross) by turning around briefly, then turn back around and start the combo again. The enemy remains stunned from the previous punches, and the jabs are too fast for them to counterattack. Using this method, Cody can sap the health of any enemy, even bosses, in seconds, while they stand in front of him uselessly.
Unlike Guy and Poison, this glitch actually made the cut in the Super NES version of Final Fight, so you can try it yourself if you happen to have dropped 8 bucks on the port! You could say that it totally breaks the game, and that's true. But, unless you take advantage of something like this, in Metro City, game breaks you.
It's not as if Capcom is embarrassed about the existence of this glitch. When a disgraced, prison-uniformed Cody joined the cast of Final Fight's close relative, Street Fighter, in Alpha 3, the infinite combo came along in an officially-sanctioned form. One of Cody's Super Combos, the A-ism "Final Destruction," actually begins with the familiar move. You can see Cody using the move on 'Gief at about the 2:10 mark in this video.
