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.
In case you've been exiled on a remote island for the last seventeen years, we'll refrain from spoiling the game -- until after the break. Then it's on.
At the end of the game's fourth chapter, protagonist Mike Jones learns that his uncle Dr. J, who has been abducted, is in possession of a tracking device, and that he has sent Mike a message containing the frequency required to track him. Dr. J's assistant Baboo tells Mike to submerge the letter he received in water.
For some of us, it took a few minutes to realize that the reason we couldn't find any letter in the game to submerge was that he wasn't talking about anything in the game. Baboo is, here, referring to the physical letter enclosed in the game's box; when dipped in water, the number 747 appears. The moment of recognition that the silly paper included in the box, attached to the instruction booklet is actually important is one of the best moments of NES gaming, as StarTropics unexpectedly breaks the fourth wall.
Computer gamers were a little less dumbfounded by this puzzle. Thumbing through the other stuff in the box was the mundane reality of computer games at the time. Copy protection schemes relied on forcing the player to find numbers, symbols, or words in the instruction manual or some other included material; it came off as irritating at the time, although in retrospect companies were remarkably creative about it. Like StarTropics, the best copy protection was integrated into the game's story in a clever way. Space Quest V, for example, required you to enter coordinates from the manual in order to travel between planets. The Ultima games went overboard, first requiring you to translate Britannian runes, then find information on the included cloth maps written in those runes.
On the consoles, however, this has no motivation other than gameplay. The wacky idea of referring to out-of-game materials in-game came up again in Konami's generally postmodern Metal Gear Solid, in which ArmsTech president Kenneth Baker actually refers you to the game's CD case.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-09-2008 @ 7:58PM
Jhongerkong said...
"Nintendo may be able to get away with changing the name of the basic weapon in the Virtual Console release..."
They changed the name? How so?
I remember the weapons were called morning star and supernova or something like that.
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1-09-2008 @ 9:02PM
hvnlysoldr said...
Island Yo-Yo was changed to Island Star. Eric Caoili was most displeased over the trademark issue.
1-09-2008 @ 9:05PM
Jhongerkong said...
Thats it? Phew, I thought they changed morning star to whacking stick or something.
1-10-2008 @ 1:00AM
Haohmaru said...
Indeed. Morning stars are infinitely more badass than a mere yo-yo.
1-09-2008 @ 10:20PM
Rocketboy said...
This reminds me of the dasterdly puzzle in X-Men for the Sega Genesis. Even worse then a reference to a pack-in item, there was one screen at the end of the game where Professor X tells you to 'Press the Reset Button!' when you're trapped in a room that's counting down to an explosion. Who would have thought that you had to press the Reset button on the Genesis itself? That's the very thing that you would NOT want to do at the end of a video game. Man that was rough.
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1-10-2008 @ 12:15AM
Peter S said...
OK, it's sad that I got extremely good at reading the Ultima runeset. (Which actually was incredibly similar to Tolkien's runes and I'm pretty sure those weren't original.) Of course, the copy protection schemes that bothered me were the "look up word 9 in paragraph 2 on page 15" type questions. That and Zak McCracken's insanely huge dark brown sheet with black symbols that was needed to travel by airplane. I vaguely remember hex-editing the "passphrases" Ultima used to all be the same. I think I gave up on Zak because it was such a pain looking up the codes on that sheet.
As for the x-men deal mentioned above - I can't even imagine hitting Reset towards the end of a game (perhaps if I were on an emulator, but even then...). I just remember the incredibly insane copy-protect schemes. Infocom was generally pretty clever and entertaining in their schemes, but most of the copy protection was just annoying. It's a pain to sit down to play a game and then realize you left the booklets elsewhere so you're out of luck.
Of course, some modern-day schemes aren't much better - load all CD's on your PC and then get prompted to put one in the drive in order to play? Install some form of rootkit copy-protection? Ugh. I have to admit that I'm pretty content with buying/renting games for the Wii at this point - worst I have to deal with on a console is people not realizing that I really do just want to start the game, not watch title sequences until I'm maybe given an option to skip them. :-)
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1-10-2008 @ 10:40AM
James said...
I can't believe nobody's mentioned Wasteland yet! My absolute favorite copy-protection scheme (never thought I'd type those words...) was how Wasteland cleverly both protected the game and crammed additional content into the box next to those 4 low-density floppies.
It came with a big book of story text, all out of order like a Choose Your Own Adventure. When you got to critical parts of the game, it just said "Read Paragraph 44" or whatever, and you got out your manual and read it -- you wouldn't know what to do next in the game if you didn't. Of course, all the paragraphs are available online now, but at the time you had to have the original book. I remember that in the very first paragraph, one of the characters yells at you for reading where you weren't told to look. Man, that game was awesome.
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1-10-2008 @ 4:46PM
HellsHammer said...
After reading this I went in storage and found my copy of Startropics. I am stoked to say that my 'Letter' was still inside. However, it has yellowed (almost orange-ed) considerably, but I never even got it wet, it seems... soo cool.
Clever ideas like this help make awesome games exceptional.
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1-11-2008 @ 9:39AM
Rocketboy said...
One thing that keeps popping up, is that are these measures for console games really copy protection? As far as PC games, yes they are. But for console games, I would think that if you could fake a cart, you should have been able to fake the copy protection as well.
And the Wasteland CP sucked. With it's amount of fake entries, it really bugged me when I gave up on the game and tried to figure out what to do. But this was standard for SSi games at the time. The the Pool of Radiance type games had the same. (Man, that was a totally awesom-o series..._
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