Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master
Also known as: The Super Shinobi II (JP) Developer: Megasoft Publisher: Sega Platform: Genesis Released in JP: July 23, 1993 Released in US: July 22, 1993 Released in EU: July 24, 1993 This game has unused enemies. This game has debugging material. This game has a prototype article

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master is, as you'd expect, the third game in the Shinobi series.

...Except it's not. Hm.

Character Editor

Pro Action Replay code 004C0A:4E71 enables a character editor which can be accessed by holding B + C and pressing A. You'll see a bunch of crap appear onscreen and the words "CHARACTER EDITOR 3.52" under everything.

The character editor allows you to modify the VRAM. You can redraw individual sprites and change the color palettes. Press Start to restart the game and ignore the changes, or hold B and press Start to save the changes and proceed.

The code also allows you to access the editor from anywhere in the game. Interestingly, it still resets the game when pressing Start rather than going to the memory and level editors.

(Source: saxman)

Unused Enemy

This unused enemy is coded such that it clings to walls and ceiling, hopping around while doing so. However, when spawned in the game, its graphics are incorrectly loaded, with the tile mapping being completely wrong and the palette appears to be missing.

(Source: EclipseVoid)

Six-Button Controls

You might not be aware of this, but you could use it with a cheat code in the original. The game actually supported the 6-button gamepad for the MegaDrive, which at the time had just been released.

...

I’ve never asked the original development team, but I hear this game took a quite a while to develop and I have a feeling they wanted to make it so that the guard action was instantaneous. Perhaps they gave up when they were doing adjustments to the game balance or something. At the very end of the development cycle, they heard 6-button controller was coming out and implemented support for it, so I imagine that at that point it was too late to include the guard by default.

— Yousuke Okunari - SEGA CS3 Producer

Button	Function
A	Guard
B	Slash
C	Jump
X	Use Ninjitsu
Y	Throw kunai
Z
Mode	Change Ninjitsu

The game contains support for six-button controllers, but none (including the official one) seem to have been available at the time of release because the controllers were first released in most regions along with Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition months later. The support is locked behind a cheat code. The code to unlock it, with a six-button controller in port 1 and another controller in port 2, is to highlight "Options" on the title screen, hold Mode on Controller 1, hold Up and C on Controller 2, and press Start on Controller 1 to open the options menu. To confirm successful entry, the "OPTIONS" text will change to "OPTION". From this point on, the game will use six-button controls.

In six-button mode, the game uses the default configuration shown on the left, which adds separate buttons for throwing kunai, slashing and guarding (normally performed with a single "Attack" button in different contexts), as well as a button to switch Ninjitsu (which normally requires pausing the game). Only A, B and C can be reconfigured, and are mislabeled as the game still uses the three-button labels ("Ninjitsu" and "Attack" instead of "Guard" and "Slash"). The dive kick is performed using Slash and thus the same default button (B).

The Nintendo 3DS version of Shinobi III makes this option readily available via a menu option. However, this code is impossible to implement on the Sega Genesis Mini, since the system's emulation menu was set to the "Mode" button.

(Source: M.I.J.E.T.)