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 was finding. Every few months I would pick it back up and chip away at it some more, but never formalized anything into an article.

Well, I decided to finally power through it about a month ago, and here we are. This is the most thorough disassembly I’ve done to date, and this article covers all the interesting bits.

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 couple interesting tidbits worth looking at…