(The only April Fools joke in this post is that it's entirely serious.)
We bought this a while ago and are only just now getting around to releasing it. Sorry.
This is a prototype of Air Fortress, a HAL Laboratory game for the Famicom/NES. But, uh... itâs a FDS disk. The game didnât come out on the FDS.
Air Fortress seems to have been intended for the FDS originally; the conversion to Famicom cartridge was extremely sloppy, with duplicated graphics and wasted space abundant throughout the ROM. In any case, this prototype took the form of an FDS disk we bought from auction.
The disk is two sides, with side A containing the title screen and side B containing the game itself. There is no actual way to start the game from side A; you have to specifically start the FDS with side B inserted. (As far as the FDS knows, both sides are "side A".)
The title screen has music that uses the extra FDS channels and sounds pretty good. It's otherwise close to the final, except that pushing start doesn't do anything and the story crawl is quite different, featuring a strange story that seems to reference... something. I lost my notes. At some point in the future Iâll edit it into this post when I find it again.
To start the game, you must turn off the FDS and insert the disk with side B up. Once the console boots, the disk immediately dumps you into a fortress; there is no side-scrolling shooter stage in this prototype. After defeating the core, the fortress goes dark, but the music does not change and the fortress never self-destructs. The escape hatch opens, but you can't interact with your ship and are trapped inside forever. Or until you power the game off.
The map of the fortress itself does not match any of the fortresses in the final game and appears to be completely unique to this version. The large empty space is actually empty as well. The map is fairly large, with a lot of looping paths and a few dead ends; if you take a direct route, you can effectively visit only about half of it.
You start with 1000 energy and 10 bombs. You can't die; you will go down to 0 energy. If you take too much damage, your max energy will actually underflow, leaving you able to reach up to nearly 65,535. (In the gameplay video, we set the starting health/bombs to 9999 and 99 respectively to make it easier.) Some of the enemies in this game are far more aggressive than their final counterparts, firing bullets too quickly to be able to dodge. In some cases, it's possible to be completely pinned into an elevator door from the constant barrage.
As for the prototype itself... the disk is not the original. The seller of this prototype, or someone who had it before them, created this copy by copying it over a different game. While the prototype itself seems to be authentic, this means that any data that might have been on the original disk 'out of bounds' is lost; instead, data from a different, unrelated game fills the rest.
There are still some leftovers, The code that remains looks like some sort of editor; the code abruptly starts and ends, though enough remains to create a mockup of what the screen would have looked like:
It is unknown what purpose this would have had, and no code that resembles it seems to exist anywhere else.
Thanks again to our Patreon supporters; without them we would not have acquired this prototype for release. Thank you for helping us preserve video game history.
Become a supporter of TCRF on Patreon
View and download the prototype on The Cutting Room Floor
We bought and dumped a prototype (as well as a bunch of related documents), and weâre releasing them!
 But first, some backstory.
Most people are probably familiar with Nintendoâs nostalgia-slathered Tetris DS. It had several unique modes that took advantage of the dual-screen setup, and was generally regarded as a pretty good game.
What people are probably not familiar with is that THQ was developing their own version of Tetris DS in late 2004. Information about this version has been quite sparse, with Wikipedia claiming that it was simply âcancelledâ ...
THQ announced Tetris DS before E3 2005, and scheduled it to make an appearance at the show. However, the company decided to cancel the game, and Nintendo released their own make of Tetris DS in March 2006.
However, the 2005 annual financial report from THQÂ (PDF)Â paints a rather different picture of the gameâs fate:
Tetris Litigation. On April 14, 2005, THQ filed a complaint against The Tetris Company, LLC (âTetrisâ) in the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles. The complaint alleges that Tetris breached its license agreement and certain oral agreements with THQ, which prevented THQ from releasing a Tetris product for the Nintendo DS system as planned in March 2005. Additionally, Tetris has indicated that it believes the term of THQâs license agreement with Tetris may have expired on March 24, 2005, despite THQâs compliance with the requirements for renewal pursuant to the terms of the license. Our complaint seeks monetary damages and injunctive relief against Tetris, as well as a judicial declaration that the term of THQâs license agreement with Tetris extends to March 24, 2007.
THQ ended up instead getting the rights to publish a Tetris game for the Xbox 360, which ended up being the rather mediocre Tetris Evolution.Â
This build of Tetris DS is dated December 4, 2004. While the documents suggest the game was still being worked on until at least mid-January, this one is still in a somewhat early state.
Now, itâs time to talk about the prototype itself.
Developed on a 64 MB development flash cart, the game itself only takes up a fairly small 6 MB. When booted, the game has a (temporary) icon and title text, featuring everyoneâs favorite font.
Upon starting the game, you are greeted with a debug menu. The menu is shown only on the bottom screen, and has various options.
The âTestâ menu lets you go directly to one of several screens, including each game mode, the rank in screen, and the settings menu. âOptionâ lets you configure most settings that you can get to with the in-game options, though the âTrash BGâ and âWarning BGâ options arenât changeable.
The sound test is... well, a sound test! You can choose music with A and play it with the X button, or stop it with the Y button.
Pushing select at any time will act like the Xboxâs âBackâ button, in that it will generally take you back one screen; e.g. from in-game, to the game settings, main menu, title, and debug mode. In at least one case itâs possible to softlock the game doing this, though.
Choosing âTETRIS DSâ on the main menu or âTitleâ on the Test menu will take you to the title screen proper.
Pieces will fall from the top screen onto the bottom screen. You can skip the animation. After pushing a button, all of the pieces turn gray (starting from the bottom) and the menu appears.
The settings menu is rather spartan, but allows you to set if you want the âguideâ (also known as âghost pieceâ or âtemporary landing systemâ for us TGM dorks), âHard dropâ, or to change the language. Most languages arenât implemented and just use the English messages.
Hitting âCreditsâ will unceremoniously dump you back into the debug menu.
âSelect Gameâ will (surprise!) take you to the main menu, which uses the titleâs pieces as buttons to select one of 7 different variants (though only 6 are working). Each game offers the ability to play, view scores, or read the rules, which are explained using the top screen.
Classic Tetris is, well. Itâs Tetris. The game allows you to hold a piece with the X button and hard-drop with the usual Up, but also maps L and R to hard-drop, which is sure to throw off any veterans of Nintendoâs Tetris DS.Â
The top screen shows your current playfield, and the bottom screen shows a zoomed-in version focused on the level your current piece is at. You can move the piece by tapping on the screen (it will âjumpâ to where you tap, but not through obstacles) or rotate it by tapping the piece directly.
This game uses the same âRankâ system as Tetris Worlds, where you have to clear a âgoalâ score in a certain time limit to advance. If you fail to clear the goal in time, your level increases, but your rank doesnât. Iâll admit Iâm not entirely sure of the impact each has, but the game does speed up quite a bit at the end. âRankâ caps at 16, where it displays an invalid Goal amount that never decreases. The high score screen will show this rank as âMAXâ.
In Classic, âgoal pointsâ are scored by clearing lines, with small bonuses for the bigger ones.
Cascade Tetris is the same as Cascade from Tetris Worlds, and is basically just Tetris with gravity. Pieces are treated as one solid block that can be broken apart by line clears. Individual pieces will freely fall, instead of being suspended in midair as in more normal Tetris variants.
Goal points in Cascade are awarded by clearing lines, with increasing bonuses for every âcascadeâ (chain) you trigger per piece.Â
Hotline Tetris continues the Tetris Worlds theme, being largely the same as the other games from that series. Goal points are scored when clearing lines only on the marked lines, with more points for the higher ones.
Making this game somewhat more difficult than normal Tetris is the fact that pieces can spawn âpre-brokenâ, made up of multiple color segments. When placed, theyâll break apart. The game follows cascade rules, so this can lead to some... interesting problems.
When clearing a goal segment, all of the pieces on the playfield will break apart into 1x1 blocks, usually causing a big clear and filling any holes in the playfield.
This is the last ânormalâ mode. The next ones are all unique to Tetris DS.
Tetris Draw is ... well. It certainly isnât much fun the way it is.
The mode itself, in its current state, requires you to, well, draw pieces on the bottom screen. After theyâre drawn, they will float above the playfield. You can drop them with L or R, and simply start drawing again to cancel (if you draw the wrong piece or, more likely, put it in the wrong spot). Garbage constantly rises, as well, so you canât afford to take your time, though even with slowdown I still find it impossible to play this mode.
The help text says that you can only draw a certain amount of each piece, ostensibly to stop you from just drawing all I or T pieces. In reality, this restriction doesnât exist, so go hog wild.
The documents specified a different, arguably more interesting take on the mode. Rather than being able to draw a piece anywhere, you would instead be given an âpoint blockâ randomly at the top of the screen, and then have to draw a piece using the âpoint blockâ as one of the 4 blocks.Â
This version would likely have been at least somewhat more interesting, though likely frustrating if there was no way to control where the âpoint blockâ appeared - if the player got a particularly bad string of luck, it would be impossible to avoid losing.
(The full design document and other materials are available at the end of this article for your reading pleasure.)
Tetris Warning is Tetris except played in a huge well -- 48 blocks tall. Pieces will spawn on the top screen at preset intervals, with random positions and orientations. You can only control the bottom-most âactiveâ piece, and control switches to the next lowest one after itâs been placed. Playing this mode without the Guide feature is all but impossible.
The falling pieces you arenât controlling can (and will!) lock if they hit the ground, so itâs important to play fast and maintain control.
The game music will speed up if you reach the top of the bottom screen. Normally this music is reserved for when blocks are reaching into the âredâ area near the top, but given Warningâs oversized well, it can play for a lot longer than other modes.
Tetris Trash is one of the more unique modes, featuring not one, but two playfields. The top playfield is your standard Tetris, just limited to an incredibly small 10x10 square. Placing any block outside of the playfield is an immediate loss.
The bottom playfield comes into play when you push Y. The top playfield will rotate 180 degrees, and the pieces inside will fall down the screen into the lower playfield. Pieces, on the lower field only, are affected by gravity (or âcascadeâ rules).
You can trash your top playfield as much as you want, as long as no pieces are outside of the lower playfield. As long as any piece is outside of the playfield, you canât use the trash feature until itâs back inside the playfield again.
Clearing lines on any playfield will âbreak apartâ pieces on the bottom playfield, causing them to fall and potentially clear more lines, which will cause more pieces to break apart and potentially continue the cycle.
If there are no more pieces to break on the bottom field, the individual pieces will instead be deleted, allowing you to eventually clean the field.
Lines on the bottom screen are worth very little, with even the largest cascades awarding very few points. The small upper playfield means you have to be very careful about where you place pieces, while the bottom playfield ensures you have to always be clearing lines.
Player Versus CPU Tetris doesnât exist. Selecting it on the menu will instead take you back to the debug menu, and the rules option instead seems to talk about normal Tetris rules.
However, choosing âVersusâ from the Test menu will take you to an (otherwise inaccessible) two-players-on-one-DS mode. Player 1 uses left, right, up, and down to move, with L rotating. Player 2 uses A, B, X, and Y, with R rotating.
The bottom screen always focuses on Player 1âČs field.
Any line clear will send that amount of garbage to the other player, indicated by the red bars bordering the playfields. The game follows Cascade rules as well.
Any player topping out will result in Player 1âČs side going gray and âGame Overâ appearing in the middle. (If both players lose at the same time, the speed of the graying-out will double.) The game will then simply return to the debug menu.
There are several music tracks and backgrounds available, most of which are quite nice. The music is all largely based on classic Tetris (i.e. Russian) songs, though the names donât quite match up with their real counterparts.
Also included in this release is a collection of documents related to the prototype, namely a game design document, some localization tables, and the packaging/manual art. The design document has a lot of interesting differences between the ârealâ game and designed one, and the localization tables include some notes between Tose and THQ, as well as some hints at things that were changed in a later version.
There were at least 3 known prototypes of this game that had been found; one earlier, one later. The whereabouts of the other prototypes isnât known, unfortunately.
First, this prototype ended up costing me about $700. Purchasing and releasing prototypes is rather expensive. If youâd like to support our efforts in the future, please consider supporting us on Patreon or donating directly.
Without further ado!
Tetris DS (THQ, Unreleased).nds (7z, 2.8 MB)
Music rip (2SF set)
Design/Localization documents (PDFs; 7z, 22.6 MB)
Art and Manuals (PDF; 7z, 53.3 MB)
Thank you for your support over the years!
Note: To play the ROM in DeSmuME 0.9.11, youâll need the DS BIOS and firmware files, not included. Go to Config -> Emulation Settings and check âUse external BIOS imagesâ, âUse external firmware imageâ, and âBoot from firmware (like the NDS)â. No$GBA is capable of playing the game without these files, but will have graphical issues for the backgrounds.
Hereâs Gluk the Thunder Warrior, a game distributed exclusively by Spanish publisher Gluk. This is actually Taiwanese developer Micro Geniusâ original game, Thunder Warrior, but with the lead character replaced by Glukâs mascot. Apparently its name is Gluk, but I would have gone with Gluky or Glukbert personally.
According to the Bootleg Game Wikiâs undumped games list, a ROM for this game is not generally available, so I was delighted when NintendoAge user Werrock decided to back up and share their copy.
The game itself isâŠwell, kind of a mess frankly, but Iâm still stoked to see it available. I think Gluk was a really interesting company, and is a part of Spanish video game industry history that is mostly unknown outside of the fans who were playing its games at the time.
One has to wonder why this was done, but there was a lot of anti-drug stuff going around at the time. Remember all the âWINNERS DONâT DO DRUGSâ screens on arcade games?
Anyway, if you follow us but somehow donât follow Tomatoâs Legends of Localization, you should probably change that. Itâs all this and more.
(This post was made with the support of our patrons. Thanks everyone! You can support us via tcrfwiki on Patreon)
This is a thing that BMF and I uncovered a bit ago, detailing an unintentionally very well-hidden secret.
M.C. Kids is an NES platformer game based around finding âcardsâ in levels to progress. Clearing stages in and of itself doesnât allow you to progress beyond each âworldâ -- you actually need to find certain numbers of cards.Â
In addition to the usual world cards, there are also six secret cards laying around throughout the game. Once youâve gotten every card, you can access a hidden area, âRonaldâs PuzzLeWoRlDâ. (and yes, itâs really written like that.) This world has 3 stages, no cards, and no enemies -- theyâre just really difficult bonus levels.
Completing every stage will net you 10 extra lives when you go back and talk to Ronald at the start. At this point in the game, youâve already cleared everything, and as hard as these stages are 10 lives isnât really much of a reward. Turns out that there was supposed to be quite a bit more to it!
Every PuzzleWorld stage actually keeps track of how many of the arches (âcoinsâ) youâve collected, as well as the total number in each stage. If you can collect them all...
...nothing happens. Welp. The code checks if youâre in one of the three PuzzleWorld stages, and if you arenât, it wipes the count. The problem is that this code happens to run during the end-of-stage high-five scene, and at that point youâre not in the level any more -- itâs overridden by the cutscene. If not for that, the game would set a flag if you had gotten them all, one for each level.
But! There is a way to trigger it! Even though clearing the stage causes the bug to manifest... you can die. Dying will exit the stage, and the code still runs! So if you collect all of the arches and then off yourself, the flag will get set properly and you can trigger the secret. After doing this for each of the 3 stages, head back to Ronald and heâll give you infinite lives...
On the way to talk to Ronald...
Woo! Look at all those lives!
...
Anyway, youâll probably go play some stages after this, like the last one. If youâre not an expert, you might even die. Your count will stay at 99 the first time you lose a life.
After that, though, you start losing lives again! Turns out they werenât so unlimited after all.
If you keep playing and doing poorly, youâll eventually sink to 95 lives...
If you lose one more life here, instead of going back to the world map, youâll be treated to another cutscene with Ronald at his secret house.
Your lives are again set to 99, and this time, they donât decrement any more -- you really do have unlimited lives for the rest of the game.
Oh Ronald, you card. Guess he really is a clown.
Anyway! Being as this is TCRF, some technical details follow.
The bits used for the arch/unlimited lives check live at $074BÂ -- the first three bits are for getting all arches in each stage, the next bit is for getting the fake unlimited lives, and once you get the 94-lives fakeout and full extra lives, everything is cleared and the fifth bit is set. (Basically, $07 -> $0F -> $10)
Completing a level via the âgoal tapeâ sets the current level number to the cutscene, even if it doesnât play, ruining the check for full arches. When this happens, the âis this a secret levelâ check fails, as itâs looking for $3B, $3C, or $3D, not the cutscene. When it finds that youâre not âinâ those levels any more, it wipes your arch count, and the all-arches flag isnât set. No bonus.
The most likely explanation is that this secret was added before the high-five cutscene was in, and was never updated, leaving it broken. It likely went undetected because of how difficult it is to pull off -- PuzzleWorld is already hard enough to get to, let alone complete, and collecting all the arches -- with no way to tell if you have all of them! -- is a task only for absolute experts.
As far as we can tell, this has never been found or documented before, so itâs an entirely new discovery in a nearly 24 year old game.
The unused music from Tetris Elements, with the Tetris (Game Boy) Korobeiniki (A-TYPE) music overlaid on top of it. Itâs pretty catchy, which is surprising coming from such a crap game.
patrickkulikowski submitted to fuckyeahbreathoffire:
Through reverse engineering, YouTuber Myriachan discovered a few years back that by inputting a special code on the name entry screen on the second controller, and then naming Ryu after certain familiar Street Fighter characters, youâll be able to unlock saves that start you off later into the game.
Youâll even get a level increase, some equipment and 100,000 zenny.
To make this work,
- Go to New Game and select a blank file to get to Ryuâs naming screen.
- On controller 2, press and hold A, Y, L and R while you press the following directions on controller 1: up 4 times, right 2 times, down 8 times, and left 1 time.
- If you did it correctly, the background will turn red. If not, cancel out and retry.
- Switch back to controller 1 and enter one of the following names without hitting backspace. Keep in mind it has to be case sensitive:
Official BoF sites:
â official promotional site: http://www.bof6.jp/
â official Twitter: http://twitter.com/bof6_jp/
â official Facebook: http://www.Facebook.Com/bof6.Capcom
â BoF Series Portal Site: http://www.capcom-s.jp/bof/
A few games on the NES seem to have some interesting relationships to Nintendoâs flagship Super Mario Bros. game. For example, hereâs Kid Kool, whose main character happens to share the exact same walk cycle as our hero Super Mario:
Even the pint-size version has a few distant cousins, shown here with Bomber Man and Challenger:
There are likely other games, too. The theory we had was that Mario was passed around as an example in a devkit, and some early games simply modified and reused some of the graphics. For the most part, though, nobody ever really noticed.
Shantae has some labels and other stuff hidden out-of-bounds where youâre never supposed to see it, likely used by whoever was designing the maps. They were left in probably because many areas are all on the same âmapâ of sorts; you just canât see them because of camera boundaries.
You can usually only see them by unlocking the camera, but several in the underground (caves) section are visible just by using debug mode.
Anyway, youâre probably interested in how to see these, or at least how to move around on your own.
Enable Debug Mode: On the title screen, press Left Ă 2, Right Ă 8, Left Ă 6, Right Ă 2, Left Ă 7, Right Ă 6, Left Ă 8. (The attentive among you will notice this is very close to WayForwardâs phone number...)
Youâll be taken to a screen with âStart Normal Gameâ or âStart Debug Gameâ; picking the debug option will, when you start a new game on the next screen, start you with basically everything in the game (all dances, etc.).
To use free movement mode, Hold A and press Select, then press Select to exit out of it again. Youâll know it worked if Shantae looks like sheâs falling, like the images below.
To unlock the camera, set the following memory addresses:
Camera boundary, left: C9E9: 0000
Camera boundary, up: C9EC: 0000
Camera boundary, right: C9DD: 2000 (Little endian, 0020)
Camera boundary, down: C9E1: 2000 (Little endian, 0020)
Youâll need to move away from the edge of the screen if itâs been pushed against the previous edge already... and several areas within the same map might use different tilesets, so they will look broken/garbled.
To automate unlocking the camera, use this script in VBA then press âZâ: https://github.com/Xkeeper0/emu-lua/blob/master/gameboy-vba/shantae.lua (will also show you the current player/camera coordinates so you donât get lost).
For more information on cut/buried content in the game, see https://tcrf.net/Shantae .Â
Namco(t) game Valkyrie no Bouken features a somewhat silly character creation menu, where you choose your characterâs blood type, Zodiac sign, and color scheme. The color has no impact other than graphic; the blood type determines EXP requirements for each level; and finally, the Zodiac sign determines your starting HP and MP, and with it what spells you start the game with.
For blood types, one gives an EXP curve thatâs much easier at the start but much harder later; the second gives a much flatter curve throughout; and the third one gives a hard start, but relaxes the curve greatly later on, paying off with a lower requirement for later levels. The final blood type just gives you a random curve decided every time you level.
There are twelve Zodiac signs, and internally these are divided into four groups:
There is a big variation between the first three, but the last one is only one point different from the group before it.
It turns out that this is due to a bug in the programming! The final group is actually supposed to randomly assign you max HP/MP -- HP is chosen from 32-64, and MP is 96 - HP, for a total of 96 every time.
However, as part of the character creation routine, the game wipes the address that stores the current random number, so every time the game generates a character, it will always get the same result -- in this case, a random value of 1, giving (32 HP + 1) = 33 HP and (96 - 33) = 63 MP.
Given that the relation of Zodiac sign to starting HP/MP is not made obvious (nor blood type to EXP curve), it is plausible that this bug was never caught during testing, since the impact on the game is pretty low.
I might make a patch to fix this later, depending on how far I get with the disassembly of this game...
Hereâs an unreleased Tom & Jerry game for the SNES, just recently discovered by a collector. That Tom sprite is crazy big!
This would have been published by Hi Tech Expressions, as a follow-up to a 1993 predecessor developed by Riedel, the children-focused studio whose team more-or-less became Postal creator Running With Scissors. I donât know if this would have been a Ridel game as well, but that Jerry sprite sure looks like their work to me. Iâll ask Vince Desi and update this post if he replies.
The legendary âlostâ game from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, the Saturn game-that-never-was Sonic X-Treme, is playable for the first time! Sort of.
This is actually a work-in-progress tech demo that is the result of some brave and talented folks porting the original source code to modern Windows machines. And the source itself is in an unfinished state, so thereâs not really a âgameâ here so much as there is a tech demo.
Still, this is probably as close as youâre going to ever get to playing this game and seeing what could have been.
Ah, hey, first (real) post. I will try to use this for longer, more detailed bits on stuff we've found. For example:
Did you know that there are graphics in Pinball (yes, the old Nintendo-made game from 1984) that seem to indicate there would be a few more features?
There are a few graphics for pop-out bumpers for the various slingshots around the tables? These would've popped up and out to make the ball jumping away from the edge a bit more realistic; as it is, the ball just flies away with a sound, as if the slingshots were just hyper-rubber.
There are also graphics for one-way gates, which are something just about every pinball table has. The placement for a few of these are obvious, mostly around the very top of the table.
There's also a huge mess of graphics for what appear to be a hole with a spinning gate around it. Nothing is really known about what this could have been, unless it was meant to make entering the bonus game even harder than it already is.
Finally, two sprites of Pauline walking and about to fall, maybe? Could have been useful for when she's about to walk off the edge of the platform, which ends your ball if it happens.
None of this is on the wiki proper, yet. Hopefully soon. (We discovered these over a year ago, though... documenting is a lot harder than discovering.)
Hereâs a strange one: The profile of Holy Ghost, a demon that only appeared in SMT ifâŠ, is contained in the data of Devil Survivor 2, along with Beldr, Jezebel, Belberith, and Samael, according to the Cutting Room Floor. Holy Ghostâs:
Angelic entities without names.
It is said that many are souls that never saw life. As innocent souls, they are allowed to become angels.
As Holy Ghost is a level 9 demon of the Divines in ifâŠ, this profile makes sense. Itâs a really weird design for the Holy Spirit of the Trinity, but that doesnât seem to be the intention after all (despite what some ancillary sources say). Itâs basically a slime for angels.
Would it have made an appearance in Devil Survivor 2: Break Record? Who knows, since that game is about as ethereal as Holy Ghost itself.
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