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Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Launches

Posted by Zonk on from the my-first-video-game-crush dept.

The sequel to Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has been released to consumers. Details on the sequel can be found via a Gamespy hands on look or a Gamespot review. A snip from the review: "If you've played Metroid Prime, you've essentially played Metroid Prime 2. Retro hasn't mucked with the original, winning formula, so veterans of the first game will feel quite at home resuming their position behind Samus' computer-enhanced visor."

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  1. Re:JUSTIN BAILEY by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    For the record, the JUSTIN BAILEY password (and its many variants) is almost certainly a complete coincidence. I spent hours reverse-engineering Metroid's password system, and it just so happens that the number of possible passwords (many of which will give the same results, and some of which will do unexpeced things such as locking up the game) is so vast that there are many, many passwords that spell interesting and novel things. In fact, you can put in any password at all, minus the last 2 characters (which encode a checksum) and calculate the final characters to make it valid.

    There is one password that is hard-coded into the game, and this can be verified with a string dump[1] of the ROM. The password is "NARPASSWORD" (speculation is that this stands for North American Release Password). Enter this while leaving the remaining characters blank (or equivalently filling them with 0s[2]) to get what I assume is some kind of debugging mode. There are a few notable things about it: 1) Samus is invincible, and has infinite missiles. 2) Samus has both the Wave Beam and the Ice Beam equipped, which results in a beam that behaves just like the Ice Beam, but the projectile appears to be a blue Wave Beam projectile. 3) Destroying metroids has a tendancy to freeze the game.

    Footnotes:

    [1] The strings are not ASCII. IIRC, the character set is laid out exactly as it is on the password screen, so the value 0 corresponds to the character '0', etc. Obviously, strings are not 0-terminated.

    [2] Unfilled spaces on the password screen are equivalent to 0s. The space character that you can enter is something different. In the case of the NARPASSWORD password, only so many of the characters are actually significant, so the last 8 or so characters can be anything. I've forgotten exactly how many are ignored.