I want to believe…

I’m still alive! It’s the busy season at work, so between that and working on other projects, I haven’t been doing much digital archaeology research. Tonight I spent some time doing just that.

So! Dark Seal 2 (known as Wizard Fire in the west) is a fantasy themed beat-em-up. And apparently it has a variety of debug functions remaining…

Life is finally returning to normalcy (whatever that is) after moving into my new house. And that means back to hacking old games in my spare time! Today we’ll look at Akamaru Q Joushou, a game you probably haven’t bothered with unless your Japanese is pretty good. At its heart, it’s a quiz game, but it also has a variety of simple action and word games as well to make things interesting. It has one hell of a collection of debugging tools… and a very interesting developer easter egg!

In Part 1 we examined the disabled Tool Menu, and now we’ll look at the variety of debugging tools left in, plus a couple mysteries. And then I’ll finally be done with this game… for now.

Kyukyoku Sentai Dadandarn, meaning Ultimate Battle Squad Dadandarn and called Monster Maulers in the West, is Konami’s homage to/parody of the sentai genre of TV shows, movies and comics. It’s a solid game and pretty fun; Hardcore Gaming 101 has a good review. And I got way more than I bargained for when I started taking the game apart: so much more that I’ll be making splitting this into two posts. Here we go…