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The VC Advantage: Double Glitching

JC Fletcher — 2008-05-14T19:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Virtual Console, Features, The VC Advantage

Dave was totally right in his VC Monday Madness video: I enjoy Double Dragon glitches. The best-known glitch -- and the most useful -- is the experience factory found in the second level. It's easy to completely fill up your heart gauge and unlock every move simply by walking over to the pile of girders after the climbing fence, then going back across the fence, and back again. This will cause the Williams enemy who was standing in front of the girders to disappear, and you can punch the crap out of his ghost for as long as your timer allows. Later in the same level you can defeat the boss by running away from him. He disappears and the game counts it as victory. I'm also a fan of the glitch-bat, which occurs when you swing a weapon just as it's supposed to disappear, leaving a weird bar made up of other graphical elements from the game.

But my favorite glitch in Double Dragon on the NES is at best useless and actually pretty likely to hurt you. At the end of the first area, you can climb up these -- gutters? Pipes? I don't know what they are. Really, they're just wall decoration. But you can walk straight up that wall. Walk up high enough and you'll come back up to the bottom of the screen. Walk downward and you'll die. Move left and you'll warp back to the ground. Try to jump or attack and you'll fall over. Sometimes one of the Linda enemies will try to follow you up the wall and will just end up in some flickery jiggle maneuver just off the ground.

I pretty much can't get to this part of the game without messing with the wall for a while. I can't even explain why it's so amusing. I could only find one video of this glitch in action (at around 2:50), but be warned -- it's one of those YouTube videos with audio of some guy mocking the game as he plays -- the scourge of the retrogaming blogger.

The VC Advantage is a weekly look at the secrets inside games -- not just cheat codes, but assorted trivia and oddities. We aim to bring back the feeling of the hint columns from game magazines, except when we do something else.

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The VC Advantage: How to Play Renegade

JC Fletcher — 2008-05-07T21:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

This week, during his VC Monday Madness video, Dave alluded to the fact that he had to enter a code to get past the first screen of Renegade. He was not exaggerating. Renegade is freaking impossible. Here's how Renegade works: three guys beat the crap out of you. Then you manage to get enough punches in between beatings to kill one of the guys, and another one walks out and beats the crap out of you.

Should you want to see the old ladies beating the crap out of you, or guys on motorcycles beating the crap out of you, you'll need to skip levels. Luckily, Technos included that functionality, presumably so people could experience the rest of their game. To skip levels, hold the down button on controller 2 and enter one of the following codes:

Stage 2: down, up, right, up, left, up, start
Stage 3: up, down, left, down, right, down, start
Stage 4: down, down, up, up, right, left, start

Now that you can see all of Renegade's content, the only thing left is figuring out why you would want to!

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The VC Advantage: How to win at selling lots of books

Alisha Karabinus — 2008-04-30T16:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

The VC Advantage is usually geared toward nostalgia -- specifically, evoking the memories of a time gone by, when we were denied resources such as GameFAQs, we had to look up codes in magazines, and we had to walk two miles uphill to school (both ways!). Help was available in other places besides magazines back then. Needed to know what to play and how to advance? You could turn to a book ... and we're not talking about glitzy Prima strategy guides packed with glossy photos, either.

Growing up, I didn't have much access to gaming magazines, and I'm not even sure why. I'm sure I was aware that Nintendo Power existed, and I know I read a few issues, but I wasn't a subscriber and rarely bought it (blasphemy!). I did, however, read many of Jeff Rovin's How to Win books cover to cover.

My family never had a lot of money, so I played my NES for a long time before I upgraded to the SNES, and I didn't buy a lot of games, but there were several rental outlets nearby -- including one owned by members of the extended family, which was complete and total win -- so I had access to a limited selection. The problem was that I had no idea what to play! Most of my friends weren't very into gaming, so I couldn't even exchange recommendations with them. I had good ol' Jeff Rovin, though. His books were available in the grocery store and at Wal-Mart, so they were easily accessible (often in the checkout aisle). I had the whole array of neon-covered paperbacks, and often rented games just because I'd read about them in one of the How to Win books. In fact, I can thank Jeff for Deadly Towers. Thanks, dude. Thanks for that (you ass).

I knew the ins and outs of games I'd never even seen, thanks to Jeff Rovin, and a lot of my development as an obsessive gamer can be laid directly at his feet. I read anything and everything as a child, from my parents' books to the backs of shampoo bottles to the encyclopedia (yeah, I was that kid), but Jeff Rovin's books legitimized the minutiae of gaming for me. Because these books existed, because someone published them and they were available in stores and even at the library, video games were okay, and so was spending hours trying to find and do everything.

Now, searches for Rovin's books return derision, and probably for good reason. They were written for sheer profit and probably not out of any genuine enthusiasm, and even bad games rarely got bad ratings (see above: Deadly Towers). Rovin, who went on to edit the Weekly World News, was probably one of the original shills. But he was a god to the kid I used to be, and those bright covers and pulpy pages still occupy a soft spot in my gamer's heart.

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The VC Advantage: Merlin's Mystery Shop

JC Fletcher — 2008-04-23T19:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

In River City, the streets, parks, and even high schools are populated by gangs of identical-looking, identically dressed teens who spend the day protecting their turf from any interlopers by beating them savagely with chains and throwing garbage cans at them. And yet, despite their efforts, turf can change hands from gang to gang in a fraction of a second -- leave the Frat Boys' area, turn right back around, and it's now the Generic Dudes' property.

Yet, to these violent, truant (except for the ones who inhabit River City High, but even they aren't in class or anything) teens, malls are sacred. A shopping center can stand between two gang warzones, and yet no Jock or Squid dares step foot into the Flatirons Mall. Shoppers walk through the center with impunity, unaware that the Internationals are just a few yards away, being kicked in the face by a guy who is standing on top of a fence and thus invincible.

Chances are those stumpy thugs would be even more reverent of River City's shopping options if they knew about Merlin's Mystery Shop. Conveniently located in the middle of the wall in the Armstrong Thru-Way Tunnel, Merlin's Mystery Shop offers rare items that provide pretty great stat boosts. We've got those items and their effects listed after the break, so you'll know just which items you'll have to beat up Benny and Clyde repeatedly to save up for.

Excaliber: $100 (Weapon + 30, Will Power + 48, Stamina + 99, Max Power + 24)
Zeus' Wand: $200 (Throw + 48, Strength + 48, Stamina + 99, Max Power + 24)
Rodan Wing: $100 (Defense + 30, Will Power + 48, Stamina + 99, Max Power + 24)
Gold Medal: $100 (Punch + 30, Will Power + 48, Stamina + 99, Max Power + 24)
Isis Scroll: $20 (Throw + 20)

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The VC Advantage: A good old-fashioned code list

JC Fletcher — 2008-04-16T20:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Virtual Console, The VC Advantage

We've been diverging lately into video game history and ephemera in these VC Advantage columns, because those are usually a lot more interesting than just plain old cheats, while keeping in the spirit of extending the enjoyment of games through secrets. But sometimes it's nice to get back to the original stated purpose of presenting codes for Virtual Console games as if we were writing a column in an old gaming magazine.

Mega Turrican seems like an excellent candidate for this treatment, because it is hard as all get out. While previous entries in the franchise involved huge, maze-like levels, Mega Turrican is basically Contra but faster (and with backgrounds that don't contrast enough with the enemies) -- a straightforward left-to-right run-and-gun. And that is almost universal code for "punishingly hard game whose first level you will see about fifty thousand times."

With that in mind, an invincibility cheat seems like a perfectly relevant and helpful thing to offer. It couldn't be easier to pull off, either: just pause the game and hit A, A, A, B, B, B, A, A, A. You don't even have to write this one down! You can also skip a level by hitting right, left, down, right, and then B while paused. And now you can pretend to be successful while playing Mega Turrican!

[Codes via GameFAQs]

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The VC Advantage: Planet Motavia Travel Guide

JC Fletcher — 2008-04-09T20:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Virtual Console, The VC Advantage

People who bought Phantasy Star II upon its original Genesis release knew what they were getting into immediately upon opening the box. This Phantasy Star II Hint Book was the first warning that the game was brutally hard (well, that and the Phantasy Star name, which was equally foreboding for Master System gamers). The 110-page Hint Book, clad in ALARM YELLOW (actually kind of a subdued yellow) was players' official notice that Phantasy Star II was the kind of game that you needed a hint book for.

We didn't have GameFAQs back then -- if a dungeon was complicated, we usually got lost; if a boss was challenging, we usually died. Sega's thoughtful inclusion of a hint book provided a nice alternative to assured failure: possible success -- with a side of failure.

We've excerpted the hint book for your perusal. Check it out if you just downloaded the Virtual Console version of Phantasy Star II and want help getting started, or if you'd just like to see the state-of-the-art in strategy guides circa 1990. If that's not enough (and it isn't), check Phantasy-Star.net for more transcribed information from the book!

Gallery: Phantasy Star II Hint Book

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The VC Advantage: The Meijin Advantage

JC Fletcher — 2008-04-02T22:30:00 00:00

Filed under: Virtual Console, Features, The VC Advantage

At last week's Hudson WiiWare event, two very awesome things were displayed: 1) Hudson's awesome WiiWare games, and 2) Hudson's spokesperson and mascot, Takahashi Toshiyuki, known to the world as Takahashi Meijin ("Famous Takahashi"). He's managed to carve out quite a career for himself based on his ability to jiggle his index finger sixteen times a second.

He first came into the public eye for being awesome at Star Soldier, which, in the days of the Hudson Shooting Caravan (a national, traveling shooter competition put on by Hudson), was a big deal. Hudson even began selling a device called the Shooting Watch that gauged your button presses per second. Beat 16 and you've beaten the Meijin! (You can simulate the Shooting Watch experience on the DS, or pick up a miniature version from Play-Asia).

Why do we bring up Takahashi now? Star Soldier R on WiiWare is based around the idea of the Shooting Caravan, with timed challenges designed to test your skill in a short period. Unlike previous Shooting Caravan games, you'll be able to compete from home, thanks to Wi-Fi leaderboards. With the competition opened up so, the next Takahashi Meijin could pop up any time now, from anywhere.

Both Super Star Soldier and Soldier Blade on the Virtual Console feature timed "Caravan Modes," so you can start training your reflexes, and your index fingers, now. Or you could get a Hori Periborg Ore-Commander and become a Takahashoid cyborg.

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The VC Advantage: Square's Knight

JC Fletcher — 2008-03-26T21:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Virtual Console, The VC Advantage

King's Knight is fairly bizarre, much like anything else Square did before, say, Final Fantasy. A medieval shooter is at the very least more original than Square's takes on OutRun and Space Harrier. What is most interesting to us is how related it seems to be to what eventually became Final Fantasy.

We wanted to provide just the endgame sequence here, but we were limited to what YouTube would provide. If you'd like the ultimate spoiler, you're free to watch the entire video (or, hey! Gameplay strategy: do exactly what this guy does) but our interest is around the 17-minute mark, when the final boss fight is about to begin. By now, the four player characters -- the knight, the wizard, the monster, and the thief -- have united to form a party, moving in concert, and have all leveled up significantly. Each character has gained the ability to use powerful spells -- the knight's, shown here, is a Pegasus transformation that is extremely similar to a summon. The final boss is a giant dragon who seems to have crawled up through the floor.

We like to imagine King's Knight as an evolutionary relative to Final Fantasy, and think of what would have happened if Hironobu Sakaguchi had decided to continue down this path instead of lifting Dragon Quest's gameplay wholesale. Would Square have turned into a hardcore shooter company? Would they be making games with flashy graphics, memorable characters, anime-like storylines, excessive cutscenes, baroque character leveling systems -- and blazing-fast arcade gameplay?

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The VC Advantage: A Field Guide to Psychological Hazards in Spelunker

JC Fletcher — 2008-03-19T19:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Virtual Console, The VC Advantage

Today's VC Advantage breaks with the exploit coverage and veers -- however tenuously -- into strategy territory. Sort of. Talking about how the game works is a little bit like discussing how to play the game. Right? Right?

The title character of Spelunker is beset by obstacles and dangers in his quest to, well, spelunk (get used to the word "spelunker" and its variants). Bats, steam vents, and even ghosts put his life in danger as he searches for treasure. He also has to deal with high explosives, not to mention the danger of equipment failure. But the deadliest adversary in Spelunker is one that you can't avoid: moderate heights. If you fall any farther than the height of your own body, you'll die, blinking out of existence, and a surprisingly pleasant little "you died!" jingle plays that, despite its upbeat adorableness, still manages to be painfully annoying due to the magic of repetition.

It seems incongruous for someone who has chosen such a dangerous vocation to have such a weak constitution when it comes to falls. We imagine spelunkers as rugged types who are used to braving inhospitable conditions in their zeal for cave exploration. Why would someone so tough not be able to survive a little tumble?
To answer this question, we must consider the nature of the dangerous job (spelunking) taken on by the blue-haired hero. It's totally subterranean. This is a job whose venues are located not only near the ground, but under the ground. You start low and only go lower. Just the thought of the unfamiliar, perilous, rocky environment would justifiably -- reasonably -- trigger all manner of worries, with one exception. In other words, our spelunker is terrified of heights.

When he falls from any distance, he is frightened to death before he even hits the ground. Our spelunker tragically underestimated the amount of vertical space inside the cave environment: by descending into a cave, he found a completely new layer of heights to torture him.

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The VC Advantage: Irritating Pause Noise Man

JC Fletcher — 2008-03-12T20:00:00 00:00

Filed under: Virtual Console, The VC Advantage

This one goes out to all our PALs in Europe and Australia who have the option of downloading Mega Man. It's not like Mega Man is hard to acquire if you don't live in one of the regions on which it's VC-available. If you're in the U.S. and playing along at home, feel free to get out your Mega Man cartridge or Mega Man Anniversary Collection disc.

Mega Man is the only game in the series with a pause option other than the menu screen, and it is this pause option that provides the game's best-known exploit. Simply put, if you pause the game while a projectile is connecting with an enemy, and then unpause, you'll score another hit. This works with any weapon, but is most effective with slower shots like the Thunder Beam. Using this method, you can beat any enemy in (effectively) one shot, and also make the game very boring and annoying! For some of us, "boring and annoying" is preferable to "freaking impossible."

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The VC Advantage: A link to the past (of Zelda II)

JC Fletcher — 2008-03-05T17:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

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The VC Advantage: Finding a way to spoil Kirby 64

JC Fletcher — 2008-02-27T20:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

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The VC Advantage: Phantasy Spoiler II

JC Fletcher — 2008-02-20T18:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

My dad bought Phantasy Star II when it came out, and played it relentlessly. It wasn't until later that I picked up RPGs myself, but I loved watching and listening as he played along, consulting hintbooks and helping to draw maps. I especially loved listening to Phantasy Star II, whose MIDI music fit the brightly-colored sci-fi look of the game. When I saw this particular trick in a magazine, I was pretty excited about being able to help my dad do the impossible in the game. He had already passed the relevant section, as it turned out, so I never got to see it work. This little trick doesn't seem like such a big deal now, but it was a major glitch in 1990.

Even though Phantasy Star II is totally old, and thus seemingly fair game for spoilers, be warned that this VC Advantage is entirely concerned with the major spoiler of Phantasy Star II. If you don't want the story to be ruined, don't read this. If you're all about gameplay only, or if this is the second time through for you, then come on in!
The spoiler in question: Nei dies. Rolf's faithful companion from the beginning of the game, the lovable, innocent, purple-haired artificial life form Nei, gets killed by her "big sister," a prototype of herself known as Neifirst. This isn't like the normal deaths that will happen all the damn time in Phantasy Star II (seriously, all the time. The game is brutal. You'll die. Luckily the Clone Lab music is really nice.) This isn't a gameplay death. It's a narrative death, an Aeris death, and there's no coming back from it. Except there is, kind of!

It turns out that you can resurrect Nei temporarily during the battle. If your thief Shir has managed to grab a Moondew from a store, the character holding that item can use it to bring Nei back, even after she's supposed to be gone forever. This is not a permanent solution, of course. Either Neifirst will kill Nei again, or Nei will actually defeat Neifirst and then die after the battle in a touching cutscene. She says that Neifirst is a part of her and that Nei cannot live with the other dead.

There is actually another, somewhat more lasting way to "resurrect" Nei -- by killing her and everyone else. If Nei is the last person alive in your party when Neifirst is killed, the scripted death of Nei will leave you a "ghost party" of four dead people -- who can walk around through the game invisibly and talk to people. Unfortunately, as soon as another fight is triggered, the party's "death" is completed and it's game-over time, with Nei gone for good.

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The VC Advantage: A Chris Houlihan to the Past

JC Fletcher — 2008-02-13T20:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

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.

Is your name in a Zelda game? It doesn't count if you're Robin Williams's daughter and you were named after the game. We are specifically referring to something in a Zelda game being named after you. If you answered "yes" to this question, it is almost entirely likely that you are Chris Houlihan. Hi, Chris! We like your room.
Who is Chris Houlihan, you might ask (if you aren't, as we established one potential reader may be, Chris Houlihan)? In 1990, Nintendo Power held a contest in which the winner's name would appear in an upcoming Zelda game. Chances are, Chris never actually saw the resulting room in A Link to the Past with his name in it, because it was basically designed never to be seen. Which is a really cool prize as far as we're concerned. In a way, Chris also received a decent amount of prize money. Unfortunately, it's all in Rupees.

The Chris Houlihan room, as it's called, contains 42 blue Rupees and a plaque that reads "My name is Chris Houlihan. This is my top secret room. Keep it between us, OK?" When you leave, you come out of Link's uncle's house. The room is basically a friendly error message, occurring when the game has yet to load the correct room for a certain location. As such, it requires some ingenuity to enter. The linked FAQ provides the method, as does this video, which also has the benefit of demonstrating the secret's accessibility in the Virtual Console version of A Link to the Past. The easiest and most well-known method is to rush from Sanctuary to the hole outside Hyrule Castle used at the beginning of the game. If you get there quickly enough, you'll fall into Houlihan's Room.

The room is significantly harder to access in the Game Boy Advance release of the game. The glitches that usually lead to the room have been fixed, leaving only cheat devices capable of granting entry. Furthermore, the tile announcing Chris Houlihan's name and secret message was removed, leaving nothing but a lousy, inaccessible room full of money. Even the nice blue water was taken out.

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The VC Advantage: Sonic and the Secret

JC Fletcher — 2008-02-06T21:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

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.

There is one major reason that the Sonic the Hedgehog series peaked on the Genesis. It's not Sonic's redesign or the voice actor controversy found later. It's not the move from 2D to 3D. It's not the overloading of "friends" that weighed the series down with superfluous anthropomorphoid mascots. That stuff is all vaguely annoying, but it's not as big a loss as the debug mode.

Sonics 1-3 and CD all featured a mode accessible via controller combination that allowed you to turn Sonic into a scrolling cursor who could be moved around the screen unimpeded by objects, enemies, or game rules. In addition, Sonic could be turned into any sprite, which could then be dropped into the level at the press of a button.A major part of the draw of this weirdo code is that you can instantly go through any level with no damage. But the bigger attraction is that it not only allows you level design capabilities, but takes the game completely off the rails and lets you make what you want of the game. Want to slow the game down with explosions of rings? Go ahead. You can build structures out of enemies, run through hundreds of continue points, and attempt to send Sonic uncontrollably through a level composed of springs.

It's quite a bit more interesting than just running fast. In fact, since Sonic games are designed to be played at super-high "blast processing speed," taking Sonic off the ground and just shooting through the level still feels a lot like Sonic, except you don't get killed by the sudden appearance of a robot ladybug. Also you can turn Sonic into a robot ladybug.

This is one of the more bizarre secret codes we can think of. Its inclusion in four separate Sonic games means that it was left in on purpose, and probably specifically for the audience. We can't imagine Sonic Team actually working on levels via a controller code. It's far too buggy and unwieldy to be useful, and yet it completely breaks the game (both in terms of challenge, and, if you put too many objects down, performance.) Sonics

Sonic the Hedgehog
Debug mode: Press Up, C, Left, C, Down, C, Right, C at the title screen. Then hold A and press start. You will be in the level select mode. Press B once in the game and Sonic will turn into a floating ring. From there, press A to cycle through items, C to place them, and B to return Sonic to spiky form.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Debug mode: First, access Level Select mode by playing sounds 19, 65, 09, 17. Then hold C and press Start. Go back to the Sound Test and play sounds 01,09,09,02,01,01,02,04. Hold A and press Start to start a level in Debug Mode.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Debug mode: This code also builds from Level Select. After the "Sega" intro, press Up, Up, Down, Down, Up, Up, Up. This will open Level Select and Sound Test. From there, hold A and press Start to enter debug mode.

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The VC Advantage: Street Spoiler II

JC Fletcher — 2008-01-30T21:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

With all the hoo-ha over the new Super Smash Bros. Brawl spoilers (warning: spoiler link contains spoilers) I got nostalgic about classic fighting game spoilers. You know, as happens in this little corner of the website. I love fighting game spoilers. I love spoilers in general, preferring the buildup of anticipation to a "surprise" to the actual feeling of surprise, but fighting game spoilers are especially delightful, for the simple reason that nothing in a fighting game's storyline matters. Also, fighting game storylines are usually incredibly hilarious, whether this is intentional or not.

Street Fighter II is the canonical fighting game, and appropriately has the best goofy ending animations in the genre. If you haven't played this seventeen-year-old game, you should be warned: the above YouTube link contains spoilers that will blow the whole game wide open. If you are sensitive about such things, you should go through the game yourself to learn the motivations that drew eight people to fly around the world and punch each other in one-minute intervals.

But if you live in 2008 and have already finished Street Fighter II, then revel in some ending videos with us! Now it's time to celebrate in our appropriate fashion.

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The VC Advantage: Continuous Fight

JC Fletcher — 2008-01-23T20:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

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.

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The VC Advantage: Down, R, Up, L, Y, B

JC Fletcher — 2008-01-16T20:45:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

Immediately following the release of Street Fighter II for the SNES, my dad was out delivering mail when he saw a blurb on some game magazine's cover about a secret SF2 code. He cracked open the magazine (which was either on a magazine stand in a store he delivered to, or was part of a delivery to a residence -- either way, he didn't buy it and it was slightly rogue of him) and transcribed the code. When he got back to the post office after his route, he called me (which happened quite rarely from work) to tell me of his discovery. Expecting to unlock some aspect of Champion Edition, I found that "DRULYB" unlocked the ability to play as the same character in two-player games. Surprisingly, I didn't mind not being able to play as M. Bison.

If you think it's weird that my dad made such a big effort to send me that code, you weren't part of the Street Fighter II fandom of the early '90s. From the moment the arcade machine came out until consoles started getting pelted with too many SF2 variations, Street Fighter II simply was the totality of gaming culture. It was both casual and hardcore, Wii Sports and Halo, foremost on gamers' minds. Magazines had consecutive SF2 covers. It was, unlike anything else, a touchstone among the gaming public. It was a common experience that we all shared. When we found out that it was coming home on the Super NES, we all collectively lost it. It didn't matter that it was going to be obsolete at launch, with Champion Edition out in the arcade. Hype for the BIGGEST GAME EVER SERIOUSLY carried beyond its audience, even. My dad, a lifelong console RPG player and not a fighting game person, was responding as much to a widespread feeling of excitement about all things SF2 as to my own obvious enthusiasm.

Only later did we realize that it all seemed to be a plan, Capcom's version of EA's annual sports releases. SF2 games with minor upgrades hit the arcades and then the consoles with frightening regularity; the more insane among us gratefully threw down another $80 for basically the same game with some new characters. I did. I couldn't bear to look at the pictures of a playable Vega, or the extraordinarily ridiculous Super Street Fighter II lineup, including a guy with the word "Maximum" written on his pants (it was going to be "Mantis," but the letters would be obviously reversed when he faced the left), and not have access to that new material. I was too far gone.

To me at age 11, the inclusion of the same-character code was an amazing bonus. Not only did it allow my friends and I more options for character choice -- something that was crucial to keeping the game fresh -- but, with the alternate character colors, it made the game look a little bit like Champion Edition. I could sort of pretend that I wasn't playing an antique version of Street Fighter II. Now, with the benefit of having been turned into a total cynic by both life experience and the corrosive influence of the Internet, I see that code as an affront.

It suggests to me that Capcom could have implemented more of the Champion Edition additions, but chose not to. Charitably, I could say that it was because there wasn't time to add new characters and backgrounds. But the cynical view is that Capcom chose to hold this other content back to make more money. Why include the code at all, then? It can't be that the same-character thing was considered so vital an improvement that it couldn't be left out, because then it wouldn't have been hidden behind a code. Maybe the end of SNES SF2 development dovetailed with the beginning of CE development, such that only the most minor new addition could be sneaked into the game on the way out the door. I suspect, however, that it was to provide a taste of future versions, just the slightest peek of what was coming up next.

So basically either Capcom was super-nice or total jerks. You could see it either way.

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The VC Advantage: Dear Mike

JC Fletcher — 2008-01-09T19:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

Chances are, even if you've never played StarTropics, you have heard about its gimmick. The letter included in the box is by far the best-known aspect of the game. Nintendo may be able to get away with changing the name of the basic weapon in the Virtual Console release, but there was no way they could excise the letter and get that by us. As much fun as playing the actual game is (and it really is the nearest successor to Zelda on the NES), this addition made digging around in the box even more fun.

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.

We don't usually expect to interact with games through conduits other than the controller and the screen. We push buttons (or wave around, these days) to communicate with the game, and the game makes the pictures moooooove to communicate back to us. You can't usually heal your character by making yourself a glass of chocolate milk. But that's what happens in StarTropics. Your actions outside the game affect the progression of the game.

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.

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The VC Advantage: Bobble heads

JC Fletcher — 2008-01-02T20:00:00 00:00

Filed under: The VC Advantage

Now it is the beginning of a fantastic story! This week, one of the iconic classic game experiences made it to the Virtual Console in its NES incarnation. Bub and Bob are synonymous with video games and gamer culture, for two unsurprising reasons: 1) they're really damn cute, and 2) Bubble Bobble is awesome. With that in mind, we thought we'd focus a bit on the cheating options available in the NES version of Bubble Bobble.

Now, Bubble Bobble is best experienced with two players, in which case progress isn't really as important as kickin' back and having a good time bubblin' up some baddies with your dino-pal. There's a whole host of level passwords for your single-player excursions, available ~~where fine passwords are sold~~ at GameFAQs.

More interesting than the plain level passwords, however, are the "special" passwords, that give you options beyond starting at a certain level. DDFFI allows you to access a level select mode for the "normal" Bubble Bobble levels, and HEAGD does the same for the advanced Super Bubble Bobble levels. BACCF starts you off with 99 lives. If you complete Super Bubble Bobble mode, you'll get access to a sound test. Of course, by that time you'll be so freaking tired of the music, you won't want to go into a menu and listen to it again. The music's totally great when you haven't been playing the game for five hours, though.

Should you decide not to employ the 99 lives code, then you and a friend can play cooperatively, or be huge jerks to each other, depending on your temperament. In two-player mode, when you die, you can pause the game and hit the Select button to steal a life from your friend.

[Jamie's awesome shoes found here]

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