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The VC Advantage: Double Glitching
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.
The VC Advantage: Merlin's Mystery Shop
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.
The VC Advantage: A good old-fashioned code list
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]
The VC Advantage: Planet Motavia Travel Guide
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-20193%
The VC Advantage: The Meijin 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.
The VC Advantage: Square's Knight
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?
The VC Advantage: A Field Guide to Psychological Hazards in Spelunker
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?
The VC Advantage: Irritating Pause Noise Man
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."
The VC Advantage: A link to the past (of Zelda II)
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. We used to think that Nintendo's programming was above reproach, when, in reality, Nintendo's work -- even EAD's top-shelf games -- are just as riddled with bugs and glitches as anyone else's. And that's to our benefit, since without Nintendo's occasional gaffes, there'd be no Minus World, no secret Metroid maps, and no Chris Houlihan's Room (or no way to get there, anyway). In the case of Zelda II, you can use a weird glitch to give yourself an advantage early in the game, provided you can get through, uh, the early part of the game. First, complete a palace level. Pause the game, save, and quit while the experience points are tallying (using the in-game save system, not the Wii's). Open a game in another profile. The experience points will be added to this player's profile instead of the first. Completing any of the later palaces would send multiple levels' worth of points into a new game.As we mentioned, the catch is that you have to be able to complete palaces before you can benefit from this. The difficulty of the freaking palaces is what makes this glitch worth exploiting in the first place.
The VC Advantage: Finding a way to spoil Kirby 64
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.It can be hard work figuring out how to totally ruin surprises in games, as we like to do in the VC Advantage. Case in point: this week's highest-profile release, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, which is notable for being a good game on the Nintendo 64. Kirby games don't really have stories anyone cares about, and there aren't really any huge secrets to reveal. But there is one aspect of the game that invites experimentation and discovery and, thus, revealing Internet posts: the ability system.What makes Kirby 64 great is that Kirby can inhale two abilities: if he inhales two of the same power, it's amplified, and two different powers creates a new power. It's really fun to go through the game mixing powers to see what kind of crazy stuff Kirby can do -- or you can just watch this video from YouTube user Cloud8745, which reveals every ability in sequence. Also it has some very excited narration.In case you're wondering (and you aren't!) our favorite ability in terms of utility is Bomb + Cutter, and our favorite in terms of hilarity is Fire + Electricity.
The VC Advantage: Phantasy Spoiler II
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 VC Advantage: A Chris Houlihan to the Past
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.
The VC Advantage: Sonic and the Secret
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.
The VC Advantage: Street Spoiler II
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.
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!
The VC Advantage: Down, R, Up, L, Y, B
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. 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.
The VC Advantage: Dear Mike
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. 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.
The VC Advantage: Bobble heads
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]
The VC Advantage: A TurboPlay Holiday
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.The stated purpose of this column (see above) is to explore the nostalgia of video game magazines via their cheat columns. We've imitated those columns in style, but we've never done the most obvious thing when it comes to magazine nostalgia: link actual old magazines. When we happened upon this archive of TurboPlay magazine, we knew we had to share it. TurboPlay, published by Larry Flynt Publications (who also published the cheat-focused Tips & Tricks), was the longest-lasting TG16-specific magazine in the U.S., and featured a who's-who of game writers, including Andy Eddy, Chris Bieniek, and even Working Designs' Victor Ireland. (As a young pre-blogger, I had a subscription to TurboPlay, and also devoured all four issues of TurboForce and the three TurboEdge newsletters from NEC. You probably could have guessed that.)We encourage you to browse the entire TurboPlay archives, as well as the other two magazines' brief collections, to see what the world was like when NEC was still involved with the TurboGrafx-16 (all of that stuff has since been handed off to their partner Hudson) and was goofily optimistic about the future of their ultimately doomed, yet still beloved, console. We've provided the entirety of TurboPlay issue 7's "Turbo Tips" columns for you after the break, so you can get a taste of retro-cheatery.
The VC Advantage: The Wonder Mess
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 are a lot of games in the Wonder Boy series, but it's not always apparent which games are. For example, there are five Wonder Boy games on the American Virtual Console, a number beaten only by the Mario series and matched by Donkey Kong (according to our quick count). Of those five games, only one has the words "Wonder" and "Boy" in the title. The rest are just similar-looking (or not-so similar) side-scrolling action games, some of which have some light RPG elements. Two of the games on the Virtual Console are the same game. To put it succinctly, it's a big mess -- and one that, thankfully, has been explained for us already. We're just going to provide some codes for those of you who have dared to get into the series.
