So you know about ChuChu Rocket, right? You set panels on a board to direct mice to rockets while avoiding cats and such. The GBA version has a selection of 2500 puzzles from the Dreamcast version's userbase, from mind-bending challenges to automated filler and... a shameless exact duplicate of the final official level. I used to play it a ton on my GBASP back in the day, and cut it down to like 80 puzzles before I resorted to a Gamefaqs walkthrough. So here's the thing: when one finally clears all 2500 User puzzles, the credits play as usual but there's a secret message afterwards, with some congratulations from Sega and their address so the player can send proof of clearing the game and get something in return. This message only appears once and there's no way to review it. As far as I know, there is no screencap or record of the secret message online even to this day, and the Sega Retro page lists the American version of the ROM as having an unknown dump status. The European and Japanese versions could have different messages or none at all! Is there anyone else here who cleared 100% of the game on real hardware and knows anything more about the subject? Incidentally, the game doesn't run properly in emulators. If you try to start the Battle Mode the game glitches and forces the multiplayer setup screen to show, so playing alone against the CPU becomes impossible. I even thought I was misremembering it, but I found somebody else on Gamefaqs confirming it is an emulator glitch.
I completed it 100% back in 2007-ish (it was my game of choice for school trips, after Sonic Advance on the same cartridge got completed). I don't remember seeing a secret message at all, but it's possible that I just missed it. (Europe 2-in-1 with Sonic Advance, for completeness.)
Via the MD5, I was able to determine that the common filename for the ROM is "ChuChu Rocket! (USA) (En,Ja,Fr,De,Es).gba". Located a copy of the file, verified all three hashes to match those listed on Retro.
Thanks for responding. Higan runs it the same way. The only online copy of Chuchu Rocket GBA's manual I can find is the Japanese one on Retro, so I can't confirm anything, but the menus do say Battle mode should work for 1P-4P. I swear I'm not just Bloodstain Bearing all of this! :v:/> Edit: Found an old review that mentions Battle mode working on single-player.
I was able to get 1p battle mode working in mGBA by opening a new multiplayer window and then setting up 1p battle in the second window. It's wonky to set up, but it works.
Yeah, tried that on VBALink and it worked. Thanks. Oddly enough it is because it fails to connect both players.
