This is why this matters. I noticed MagForce Racing, a game nobody ever cared about (although spoilers: it's not terrible) had a "debug mode" cheat listed. Save a high score as "JOHNM" - I wonder what we can mess with... wait it's a code that turns everything into [John] Malkovich. It is the best code. Fun fact: we got this film as a freebie with our first DVD player. I've never watched it.
Just want to say thank you! Your hard work stamping out fake cheats and documenting new ones is not going unnoticed.
Improving the women's game: Silicon Dreams' ladies versus all the world's men on... the surface of Mars? It was going well until this player got frozen in time. They tried to tackle her but the ball's off the ground. Nobody wins! One move and it's a foul. Should have been a red. Should have cared enough to continue playing. UEFA Dream Soccer or "why do football games have the worst menus?". You need three codes to unlock all the stadiums, and most of the internet just labels them 1-through-16. This is "Stadium 16", which is clearly labeled as "Out of this World" in-game.
Name your character after a "recent" Olympic host city in ESPN International Track & Field and you get a metallic-coloured athlete. Including Athens 2004, which hadn't happened yet (assuming it's not the 1896 games). But for whatever reason, the 1956 Melbourne and 1992 Barcelona games are missing. I'm guessing it's because they're more than 8 letters.. but The 1952 games are in Gold and the 1960 games are Bronze. Surely Melbourne should be silver! Oh well. Incidentally this takes us to 1000 hidden content pages. Well done team
Re-Volt which I thought was done, but whatever. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/dreamcast/198470-re-volt/cheats The GameFAQs page is a bit sloppy but mostly right. Supposedly some cheats are different in the PAL version which is why there are duplicates - someone else can check, since Re-Volt is great and you should play it. But "Hi-Fi Mode" which the internet calls it... is not that. In fact, if anything it's "lo-fi": -> It's the secret 60FPS mode (which affects timing, so I can get a nice grid start). Take out some of the scenery, reduce the draw distance, and you can double the frame rate. Is it worth doing? ...maybe? Both modes look and run better than the N64 and PS1 iterations (and you always get 8 cars in a race instead of 4), but the added fogging isn't very... Dreamcast-esque. I think I prefer being able to see the road. Also reverse tracks are not a hidden thing on Dreamcast. In fact, the game openly offers reverse, mirror and reverse-mirror versions of every course - all racing games should do this!
Nice find, and yet another category I seem to recall Sega Rally 2 has one of those as well. It's been on my TODO list for ages now to return to all the Sega PC games I looked at last year and add in the Arcade/Saturn/Dreamcast sections (which are probably going to look quite similar).
Hydro Thunder's not in good shape: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/dreamcast/197594-hydro-thunder/cheats There is a lot of confusion across the net on this one - all of those codes, as GameFAQs describes them, don't work (except for clean pause, and "super start" (though even then there's two variations of that)). Other sites claim the PAL version behaves differently (I don't think it does), others claim you need a top 3 or 5 finish (or a top 3 or 5 high score?) in all the easy tracks before things will start working - it's a mess. Finishing second or third in the "Thunder Park" track, then inputting my name as "?DL" gave me the medium tracks and boats prematurely ("?DL" and/or "?DP" is meant to grant you everything), but this isn't a game where you can easily test all the different permutations - you need to have a perfect race to come 1st, so for now, this is as far as I'll go. And the other reason for that is not all Hydro Thunders are created equal: I'm not sure the original US launch version (with added Dreamcast logo) even has the cheats. The "Hot! New!" revision of the game (and the basis for the PAL version) behaves slightly differently in places, and we can't rule out people getting confused with the arcade (or PC) versions. It's also a port of a Midway arcade game, which means it might have a bazillion secrets that haven't even been discovered yet. It doesn't have Kombat Kodes, but who knows, maybe you can play as Rain if it's a full moon in December on a Tuesday.
no there is no rhyme nor reason to the games I'm picking Slam 'n Jam '96 Featuring Magic & Kareem Simple stuff. On the main menu, you press left right up down R L A down for the Left Field Lefties then left right up down R L A up for the Monsters. You can't have Monsters without Lefties. Obviously. Oh but then if you press R L A you get version info, which can be seen by leaving the game alone for a bit and pressing start at the title screen: This is "cheat level" 3. How much further can we go? L L L takes us to "Status Box". I... don't know what this does. This was glossed over in Saturn cheat coverage in favour of... R R R for "Short Quarters". And... nobody checked this at all, because it... doesn't make quarters shorter. The shortest they go is 2 minutes, both before and after this code. Okay. down down down takes us to cheat level 6: "Memory Dump". Where does it dump memory? Nobody knows - this was documented as a PlayStation cheat, but not a Saturn one (spoilers: the codes are identical on PlayStation, just swap A for X and use L1/R1). You have to input these six codes in order so you can forgive the gaming media for losing track. Do any of these codes do anything? Does it go further? Maybe someone will find out one day.
I wasn't entirely sure if it was an error, but yes, NBA 2K2 has pretty much the same cheats as NBA 2K1. Yes the pixels do match up. Annual sports games, everybody.
I was gonna say something like "at least back then annual sports games had fun stuff like big head mode", but it turns out modern NBA 2k does have Big Head Mode, at least as recently as 2k20. (Sounds like it's a special event or something, but yeah)
More baskets and balls. College Slam, specifically the Mega Drive version, is a bit wobbly: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/genesis/915986-college-slam/cheats I could only get the "on fire" and "quick hands" cheats to work after looking at the SNES codes (and making educated guesses), but the rest are fine. I do wonder if there's a big head mode hiding somewhere in the code - every basketball game should have one! However there is an "infinite shot clock" cheat listed that's... not a cheat at all. It's a bug. And a fun one. For whatever reason, if you press A+B+C while highlighting the shot clock time option, you're taken back to the title screen, and the option breaks. If you revisit the config screen, the upper and lower boundaries of the shot clock will have been removed, letting you set it to stupid numbers. Finally I can play basketball the way it was intended - with BLANK-0 or n9 second shot clocks. You can set the value to something stupidly high (and therefore essentially remove the feature) but you can also set it to a negative time, which means you get SHOT CLOCK VIOLATION: the game: it's like an episode of Scooby Doo.
They did themselves a disservice in the 90s - NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC is basically "NBA Jam 3" (or "NBA Jam 4"?), but you would never know, because they couldn't keep the old name and they're in bed with broadcaster NBC, despite NBC not really doing a whole lot here. But just like previous entries there's a bazillion cheats (including the Mortal Kombat-style Kombat Kodes "special codes"), including a whole set of weather effects for outdoor courts... that you probably wouldn't see, because those are also secret. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/dreamcast/198091-nba-showtime-nba-on-nbc/cheats Quite a few of these "vs screen" codes don't work though - anything with a "5" in it, from what I can tell. I suspect these work in other versions, but not on Dreamcast for whatever reason. A bug? And yes that is a badly resized HUD. Redream also can't cope with the commentary, so emulated versions on YouTube should be easy to spot.
Kill me now I have documented all 66 secret characters in NBA Showtime, which includes those often missing from lists and... five duplicate (or prototype characters?) with very minor differences. Anyway some highlights, because if I'm going to waste my day taking screenshots, you're going to waste your day looking at them. I've not done the research yet so some of these might be US celebrities or whatever. "Crispy" "Horse" "Jacko" "Nikko" "The Wiz" "Dennis Rodman", a North Korean favourite. "Biggy" "Smalls" Smaller Biggy. Bigger Smalls.
The reason Dennis Rodman was a hidden character in NBA Showtime is because he was going through a period of being waived by multiple teams when the game released. LA had just sat Rodman for essentially an entire season, kind of like what they wanted to do with Russel Westbrook recently, and then he went to the Mavericks in late 1999 only to be waived after like 4 games. Rodman was actually a standout player in the previous game, NBA Hangtime aka NBA Jam 3, and has some unique code to handle his constantly switching hair color. They threw him in as a hidden character in Showtime because they didn't want to waste the unique character they had created for the game. He wasn't really a contributing player on any NBA team at the time, so they made him a hidden character. Also, NBA Showtime absolutely sucked, what an enormous step back from NBA Hangtime. Who wants to play an NBA Jam game with fouls and freethrows??? EDIT: For clarification, a close friend of mine worked on NBA Jam TE, NBA Hangtime, and NBA Showtime (along with various Midway fighting games).
Good grief that's alot of secret codes, makes the MK games look relatively simple. Well done for persevering @Black Squirrel ,especially with all those screenshots! I've got a copy of Midway Arcade Treasures Deluxe for PC (which has ports of Dreamcast Hydro Thunder & SF Rush 2049) so I'll take a look at those two. I had a lot of luck working out all the MK4 cheats on PC then applying it to MK Gold, so maybe this will work well again.
SMS Power claims that entering the password EDA00 while holding 1+2 together in Shinobi II: The Silent Fury will get you a Round Select, but...the Round Select is already part of the main gameplay and shows up anyway when starting a new game. So what does that hidden password really do, then? Turns out that it starts you off with all five ninjas and nine Ninjutsu points! GameFAQs also claims the same password gives you the Round Select as well as all the Crystals, except it doesn't give you the Crystals.
If I remember correctly, you have to rescue 4 guys and can pick the 4 levels in any order. When you've got all 4, only then can you pick the 5th level. Does the password also unlock the 5th level without doing anything else? Presumably it does if you have all five ninjas.
Army Men: Sarge's Heroes, or "why is the woman not green" has dozens of codes, because it was published by Midway, and those are the rules. Too bad they didn't spend the time making the game better. While hunting for Dreamcast codes I found the next best thing!... Nintendo 64 codes, which exist on the disc too. Not that anyone has bothered to verify that version's cheats either (and I'm only assuming N64 - some of the codes match lists, but the lists are seemingly incomplete), but yeah: Code (Text): CLNLGRMM Attack TRGHTR Spy Blue TDBWL Bathroom MSTRMN Riff Mission TLLTRS Forest SCRDCT Hoover Mission STPDMN Thick Mission BLZZRD Snow Mission SRFPNK Shrap Mission GNRLMN Fort Plastro HTTTRT Scorch Mission ZBTSRL Showdown HTKTTN Sandbox PTSPNS Kitchen HXMSTR Living Room VRCLN The Way Home CNN Cinematic Level One CNTWN Cinematic Level 2.1 CNTWTW Cinematic Level 2.2 CNTWTHR Cinematic Level 2.3 CNTWFR Cinematic Level 2.4 CNTHR Cinematic Level Three CNFR Cinematic Level Four DNSTHMN All Levels NSRLS Weapons MMRTL Immortal MMLVSRM Max Ammo CNTN Continues DNLVSHSF Invisible xxxTNSLDRS Tin Soldier BGGRN Big Green One GRNGRLRX Vikki PLSTRLVSVG Plastro SHRMNSLDR Hail Mendheimicus THDTST Test Info LVNGLRG Living Large DRVLLVSMM Mini Mode JHNNBRZ Johnny Breeze PNKBNN Pink Bunny CHNG Chunga FTHD Fat Head SLPHLLW Sleepy Hallow NBRNR No Brainer XRCST Exorcist FTFT Fat Feet SPRKLWRLD Sparkle World LNRGRVT Lunar Gravity RBNML SFFRMV Saffire Making Of MDWTSTR Day in the life CHNGLVNGRM Chunga Living Room FCFJHNRN Face of JohnRen FCFHL Face of Hal FCFBRN Face of Bryan FCFJHNN Face of Johnny FCFMK Face of Mike FCFRCHRD Face of Richard FCFSTV Face of Steve FCFBRNT Face of Brent FCFRBN Face of Robyn FCFSTWRT Face of Stewert FCFTDD Face of Todd FCFJN Face of Jun FCFKTH Face of Kathy FCFJRM Face of Jeremy FCFDNN Face of Danny FCFBRD Face of Brad FCFDSTN Face of Dustin FCFCRR Face of Carrie FCFRNNX Face of Ryan Nix FCFTLRRNSTRM Face of Tyler Renstrom FCFMGNRNSTRM Face of Megan Renstrom FCFNKKPN Face of Nikki Pino Face of Alexis Pino FCFBRTPN Face of Bret Pino FCFZCH Face of Zach FCFBRNTNGN Face of BrienAtangan FCFVRGLBD Face of VirgilAbad Many are the same as on Dreamcast (or have Dreamcast equivalents), but "Chunga Living Room" is unique to Nintendo's machine. We have to make do with features such as "Disco Madness" instead: Because nothing says "disco" like BLACK TEXTURES. I think maybe my favourite is the "evil spirit" (VLSPRT) code which makes the characters heads rotate like in the Exorcist. The problem is this is running at 640x480 and all the heads are green - you can't tell which direction they're facing!
Yeah, that's exactly how the game's structure goes, same goes for its predecessor The GG Shinobi. I don't understand why other sites believed the password is a "Round Select" password and didn't look further than that. And no, the password doesn't unlock the final level - you still have to gather the Crystals. Given how the password is just like the other hidden passwords to view the sound test and ending in that you have to hold 1+2 for it to work, it's a hardcoded password.
Nice one, that's a good spot! And yes, definitely hardcoded View topic - GG Shinobi II hidden cheat codes - Forums - SMS Power!