Recent content on SUDDEN DESU
I’m a sucker for games with 1990’s cutesy anime girls, especially when they are paired with hi-tech elements like piloting ships in an STG. Burning Force, which we looked at more than a decade ago , is a great example of this, as is Plus Alpha, a silly and saccharine shooter from Jaleco.
Every now and then I strike gold: not another tile viewer or a meaningless data viewer, but something that is really interesting and unique. Riot City was such a gold mine: an English localization for a game that supposedly was onlty released in Japan, and an alternate, spicy ending! Oh, and I guess there’s some data viewers in there too…
The end of 2025 is upon us! Let’s see if we can squeak in one last quickie article before the end of the year. Let’s take a brief look at the disabled debug tools inside Rockman 2: The Power Fighters (or Megaman 2, I suppose, if you’re the kind of person who pronounces NES as “ness”).
We have something a bit special today: a prototype of a Mega CD game! ( crowd cheers ) Unfortunately, it’s one of, if not the worst game for the system: Heavy Nova. ( crowd boos ) But it does have something pretty interesting within it’s data which redeems its value a bit. ( crowd cheers cautiously ) Let’s take a look.
We’re back on our CPS2 jam, and we’re looking at Alien vs Predator this time. Buried in its code are a bunch of debugging tools and an alternate staff roll. Compared to the mess that was Progear no Arashi , things were pretty straightforward this time, but there’s still a fair bit of technical complexity we need to cover, so let’s get into it.
Tōki Denshō may not be the most refined or serious fighting game in the world, but it’s quirky and has a unique place in Tecmo history. It’s also a miracle that the game even made it to release, suffering during development from an understaffed team, threats and bad ideas from upper management, bad location test results, and the spectre of Dead or Alive that was stealing away the few…
Good grief, has it really been almost two years since a proper article was posted? Let’s finally correct that by taking a look at Progear no Arashi and the mess of debug tools and code oddities tucked away in its data.
SUDDEN DESU officially turns ten years old in October. My, how time flies…
We’ve looked at secrets of the game’s data in part 1 . Now let’s look at what didn’t even make it past the planning stage, at what could have been…
Let’s take a look at a fighting game with a troubled development history, questionable aesthetic choices, cut characters and hidden debug tools. No, we’re not talking about Tōki Denshō this time. It’s Psikyo’s 1998 fighting game, Daraku Tenshi: The Fallen Angels! In part 1, we’ll look at the game’s hidden development tools and other code mysteries, then in Part…
A Tecmo game featuring boobs? Simply unheard of! WARNING: This article is slightly NSFW. Turn back now if you’re in a sensitive area or are offended by low resolution pixel breasts.
The CPS 2 has a storied history in the emulation scene and hardly needs an introduction. You may think there is nothing left to discover with this hardware, but there are remaining secrets indeed. 24 of them, in fact, in the form of little blue switches…
We’ve taken a look at Donpachi and Dodonpachi in the past, so of course DDP 2 was going to come up eventually!
Sometimes you begin disassembling some code thinking, “well, there’s not much here, this won’t take long to research and write about,” and then it spirals out of control and takes up all your free time for multiple weeks. Anyway, here’s more than you ever wanted to know about what’s hidden away inside Magical Crystals!
It’s Sexy Parodious! Flying pigs, a horny octopus, and a really janky debug tool hidden away in there.
It’s a mahjong game! It’s a falling-block puzzle game! No, it’s Oh! Paipii, a mix of both that isn’t nearly as fun as either of those genres are on their own!
This is just a quickie article to archive some work done via twitter.
Today we’ll look at the sequel to Numan Athletics: Mach Breaker! If you have a particular interest in debugging tools, then strap in because you’re going to have a ball playing with what Namco left in the game. Let’s dive in!
The game responsible for bringing Mighty and Ray into the world also has a bunch of debugging tools, a ton of cut content, and an interesting development history tucked away.
A solid shooter from Taito with impressive scene transitions and even better music from Zuntata. And a handful of debug tools that took some wrangling to get working. But wrangled they have been!
A competent but relatively uninteresting shooter from Face, the people who are way more famous for Money Idol Exchanger. At least there’s a stage select!
Aurail is a half top-down, half quasi-3D mech based shooting game developed by Westone and published by Sega. It’s fun but a bit difficult to play (or more likely I just suck at it), and there’s a debug/cheat lurking just beneath the surface of the code…
In which we take a look at the House of the Dead cheats and how they can be used to load model data from unused characters.
Aside from disassembling games, I also occasionally enjoy assembling them. While I don’t have a lick of talent when it comes to the creative side of game creation, I love to work on the code and technical minutiae. In particular, I enjoy the Sega 16-bit era hardware, and while we have a great library for easy Megadrive development in the form of SGDK, the Mega CD is still a bit difficult to…
I hope your holidays were happy! Now let’s talk about the upcoming year.
Looks like I can finally cross “discovered a previously unknown debug code in a Sonic game” off my bucket list.
One of the most loved games by fans of the legendary Neo-Geo has a boatload of debug tools and a hidden mini game…
Just a quickie article so this isn’t lost to the sands of Twitter.
What happens when you cross Breakout with puzzle game versus mode mechanics? You get an adorable hot mess called Blocken!
Witches on their brooms shooting magic missiles is the name of the game, literally: gunhōki translates to “gun broom.” There’s a stage select buried in the code, which is accessible on actual hardware without any code hacks. Neat!
A cute falling blocks style puzzle game with a spellcasting twist and a surprisingly detailed CPU Player debugging tool.
Today we look at Magical Speed, a simple but surprisingly fun Allumer game based on the card game Speed . Turns out there’s a hidden debug menu in the code that’s super simple to re-enable, and lots (LOTS) of unused graphics.
Getting back to our roots of hacking on obscure Japanese quiz/mahjong games that no one else cares about, we’re taking apart Athena no Hatena today!
A fun color-matching puzzle game with colorful graphics and cute animations… and bunches of disabled dev functions and unused data!
Lucky & Wild is a crossover between arcade racing and lightgun shooting genres with a buddy-cop twist. As always, Hardcore Gaming 101 has a great description of it . Unfortunately, I’ve never seen it in an arcade, but it seems like a lot of fun. The game code has a few disabled test menus as well as a round select that has what appear to be test levels! There are also a small truckload of…
In the beginning, there was Virtua Fighter 2. And Suzuki Yu looked upon the game and saw that it was good. Thus were Fighting Vipers and Sonic the Fighters developed upon its game engine. And, lo, there dwelt within the code of each a bounty of debug tools!
Tōki Denshō - Angel Eyes is an enigmatic fighting game from Tecmo and the second (and last) game on their proprietary Tecmo Motherboard System hardware. It was quickly overshadowed by Dead or Alive and sunk into relative obscurity. It would be a stretch to call the game good, but some of its aspects, like the jarring mix of 2D and pre-rendered 3D sprites, make it oddly fascinating. While I…
This is a great little collection of classic Namco games - Pac-Man, Rally X, Dig Dug, Mappy, Galaga and Xevious. Not only are the original games faithfully recreated, there’s an ‘arranged’ mode for each with new graphics, music and gameplay. Oh, and there are bunches of debug tools leftover…
Platformer arcade games are a bit rare, so it’s a shame that Recalhorn (that’s ree-cal-horn, according to the katakana) never got past the location test stage. The graphics are quite nice, even beautiful in some backgrounds, and while the gameplay isn’t ground-breaking, it’s classic and solid. But other people have written better reviews than I ever could, so let’s…
Phantasm is a creative take on platform shooters, where as a ghost you can posess the bodies of enemies on screen as your person avatar. It’s a well-made game, definitely ‘hidden gem’ status. It also has a very nice selection of debugging tools!
Just a quick article this time around after Zerochan, who is writing an exhaustive Raimais guide , asked me to take a look at the game and see if I could find any debug leftovers. Do level select and invulnerability count? Yes they do! I’ll even throw in a bonus (possibly-)never-before-seen game ending!
Ah, Rod Land, the colorful and popular Jaleco platformer known mostly for its home computer ports, especially on the Amiga. The arcade version is the original, though, and has the most content and best graphics. It’s been more than two years since I first started taking the game apart. I was new to disassembling code at that point and was making pretty slow progress on understanding what I…
Don’t feel like cheating your way through a Japanese text heavy quiz game to see some of the cute artwork in the game? I’ve got just what you need!
I cut my teeth on game hacking and research in the Sonic communities of the early 2000’s - Area 51, SSRG, CulT - and the Sonic arcade games were always something of an enigma to us. It’s been especially exciting to see that these rarities have been finally dumped, including Cosmo Fighter. I opened the data not expecting to find much and, unfortunately, I was correct. But there are a…
Just a small article this time. I came across an intriguing line of text as I was taking apart Detana! Twin Bee (arcade version) recently. Though part of the message shows up normally at the end of the game, it turns out there’s more to the story…
I’ve had this article half-researched and half-written for more than a year now, just sort of laying around. I’ve lacked the interest in finishing it because, frankly, the game is pretty awful. Well, after months of Donpachi and Dodonpachi, it’s time to take a short break with something easy. Enjoy, I guess?
And now for the article many people have been waiting for: Dodonpachi! Unfortunately, I didn’t make it in time for the 20th anniversary of the game on February 5th, but oh well; better late than never right? This game seems to have a larger following than it’s predecessor, so I’m sure shmup fans will enjoy the re-enabled debugging tools available to play around with.…
Happy New Year! As promised, here is the writeup on the classic Cave shooter, Donpachi. I’ve decided to do something a little bit different here. Instead of spending so much time writing out the technical details of my findings, I’m instead just providing an overview and MAME cheats to access them. I’ll do the same with the Dodonpachi which will follow later. Later this year…
2016 turned out to be an amazing year for me personally. It was because things were so great that the site didn’t get much love the past few months…
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Some major events have happened in my life, namely planning a trip to Japan later this year and finally returning to college, which have stolen much of my attention. But I still enjoy disassembling and researching old software, and there’s still a backlog of content to finish writing and post, so the site is definitely not dead! And speaking of…