[adaml]

No idea what gave me the urge to play this crummy game. I was messing around in FCE Ultra's cheat system and found cheats for infinite health, gun and grenades. Being completely bored I took it one step further and found the address for the stages.

If you are familiar with emulator cheating, you can take address $0088 and set it at any number from 1 to 10 to start on that particular stage. However, if you set it at 12 then start a game from the title screen you will be brought to an ending sequence that congratulates you for "wasting Insane" and that you have "met the challenge." The great thing about this is that this isn't present when you actually go through and beat the game.

This game has one of those crappy "GAME OVER" messages flash on the screen when you beat the third "Sadist Insane" at the end of Stage 10. Why wouldn't they have included the ending? I set the stage address at value 255 and it gives you that "GAME OVER" screen when you start, so maybe when you beat the final boss the stage value jumps to 255 rather than 12 (the real ending).

Also, setting the stage address at value 14 will give you a neat little intro to the game that is also not present during regular gameplay.

I would have to guess bad/rushed programming is responsible for the intro and the ending not being included in the game. This is Cutting Room Floor material

[ArnoldRimmer83]

The fact that they were seriously terrified of Saddam when they made that game might also have something to do with it.

That is neat find though. Those wacky Color Dreams programmers.

[handofg0d]

A very interesting find. This makes me wonder how many other games have left out content in them. I'm sure it doesn't but for example, Contra's Japan release had cutscenes between levels that are completely missing from the US version, likely due to laziness in translating them. I doubt that these were left in the US release, but situations like this might be able to dig up hidden/missing content.

Too bad this find was for a game noone cares about...

[Carnivol]

I dunno much about NES cartridge manufacturing, but I could imagine the bytes saved on cutting away the intro/cutscenes in Contra/Probotector saved a small fortune on Eureopean localization and also cartridge production costs. (Dunno if they use different mappers between the versions, but I know there are size differences for the English and Japanese versions of that game, which I guess could make a difference in cart production when a game is 192kb(?) after cutting and 256kb(?) before)

(heh, boy would it be awesome if they still made Contra games into Probotector these days, but nooooope, the GBC "Konami GB Collections" actually says Probotector on menu and titlescreen for Euro releases but are Contra in visuals, silly Konami :/)

[handofg0d]

Well if they really wanted to save money than they would've released the FDS in those territories because floppies were dirt fucking cheap even then. Plus they were write enabled for save files, and plenty of other reasons they are (in some aspects) superior. But whatever, the past is the past.

[kap]

At the same time, I think the hardware was crazy inferior (warning: making shit up) compared to the nes itself or any other video game system. If they'd sold it in the states and it broke down as often as I see broken ones on yahoo japan or whatever, good lord.

If you thought angry moms at authorized Nintendo repair centers were commonplace before, you ain't seen nothin'.

[handofg0d]

Good point. The FDS had the bright idea of using a rubber band to spin the disc drive. Not only a rubber band, but a custom one at that, so that you can't you know, repair it yourself.
But they redesigned the NES for the states (sorta) so why not the Disc system too?

It's not that I have a hard-on for the FDS, it's just that I have a hard-on for saving my Metroid game, rather than typing in a bunch of bullshit letters.

[tgarcia1981]

Well... we have a lot of info omited from the final release in too much games... I was testing Megaman 3 from NES, and i find some strange info (like weird and incomplete stages and stages with the enemies of other stage) when change the value of the stage in the memoy... i can't remember in this moment which address of the memory is, because i'm in my work and i have the game at home, but the next week i'll post something more.

[lugnut]

Regarding Contra, I may be entirely wrong, but I'm fairly sure the U.S. version was released before the souped-up Japanese version (from sometime in 1988), so if that's the case, I'm sure all the 'extra' stuff isn't present at all in the US code.

[handofg0d]

Ok so Contra was a bad example. But I think you all got my point