Under the Microscope: Criticom

Here is how GamePro’s review summed up Criticom :

Criticom is the worst fighting game of the year.

A 1996 Usenet user had this to say:

i had the playstation version and i had to return it to the store because it was like being poked in the face with a heated bit of metal repeatedly.

And the game’s executive producer, Stan Liu , commented:

Criticom was not the best of games!

Being able to cheat would probably help things. There are five well-known passwords that enable special effects for the PlayStation version of Criticom . But as far as I can tell, only one special password has been published for the Saturn version.

I’m here to remedy the situation! I found the four missing passwords. Details on how to enter them and what they do are below.

Upgrade to rank 3

Go to the Options > Load/ Save screen and enter this password for Dayton on the P1 side: GENF

All characters will be upgraded to Rank 3:

Upgrade to rank 2

To upgrade everybody to rank 2, enter this password for Gorm on the P2 side: JELE

Play as Emperor

You can play as the final boss! Enter this password for any character: IICS

Emperor will become available from the character select screen:

Here’s a shot of him in action:

Special move enhancement

Enter this password for any character for the last effect: POWR

This does something with your player’s special moves, but I can’t quite pin down exactly what. The value it sets gets read when you press the C button. The Saturn version seems to work less consistently with this effect than the PlayStation version does.

Technical details

All five passwords are encoded as plain ASCII strings. Here’s where they’re stored in memory:

06021254 "GENF" # All to Rank 3
0602125c "JELE" # All to Rank 2
06021264 "TTAM" # View ending
0602126c "IICS" # Unlock Emperor
06021274 "POWR" # Special move thing

The function at 0602127a has references to these. The logic for the GENF code is something like this:

if ( selected_column == 0 # P1's column and selected_row == 2 # Dayton's row and player_input == "GENF" ): for i in range(8): ... # Unlock stuff for each character

The difficult-to-explain POWR password sets the value at 06079c30 . Normally it’s 0x0 , but with the cheat enabled it’s 0x1800300 . The significance of this is beyond me, however.

Outro

Here’s the full list of passwords for both systems:

If you can explain what the POWR cheat does better than I can, do leave a comment below.

For more Saturn hacks and cheats, see my archive here at SHIRO!. And for more retro game reverse engineering articles, check out my Rings of Saturn blog.

Bo Bayles

Rings of Saturn: 32bits.substack.com