Talk:Retro Game Challenge

Secret stages EE to FF and 00 in Cosmic Gate

So there has been an interesting secret about this game that I have known about for quite some time. It's quite possibly the game's only known "secret" that was never actually explicitly referenced in-game (either through dialogue or looking through the gaming magazines kid Arino has) to the best of my knowledge. So this concerns something from the Cosmic Gate portion of the game, and the ability to access what appears to be oddly-numbered minus world-esque secret stages EE to FF, followed by an asteroid stage labeled 00, then back to stage 01. To actually access those stages, the player must first activate the "hard mode" on Cosmic Gate's title screen (down, down, B, B, A, A. This hard mode code is actually referenced in-game) then play all the way to stage 64 (the game's final "normal" stage), and, instead of completing the stage normally and ending the game there, the flashing enemy must be shot first, activating a warphole that must be shot at multiple times in order to warp to these stages. (This MUST be done while "hard mode" is activated, and will not work on the normal difficulty, otherwise warping on stage 64 would just result in an "enemys trap" (sic) that warps the player to a randomly picked previous stage.) Stages EE-FF (238 to 255 in hexadecimal, apparently) consist of enemies that are completely black with glowing spots on them, and stage 00 is an asteroid stage that is incredibly faster than even the later "normal" asteroid stages. For the years since I bought Retro Game Challenge, I thought that this was a weird glitch that was simply the result of an oversight on the developers' part (not unlike the infamous World -1 of Super Mario Bros.). But then I discovered that if the player actually goes out of their way to shoot 30+ asteroids in stage 00, the game will then reward the unusual bonus of 5,963 points. It turns out that "5963" is actually goroawase for ご苦労さん (gokurôsan), which approximately means "thanks for your hard work" in Japanese, which is actually proof that those weird hexadecimal stages are indeed an intentional addition to the game by developer Indieszero, not an unintentional bug as it seemed to be at first. Does this seem like this information could be a good addition to this article, since it refers to an in-game secret that the player actually has to find for themselves? Maybe there could be further investigation on just how this secret is coded. As for why the secret leads specifically to stage "EE", I believe that EE could possibly stand for "Easter egg", though this is unconfirmed by anyone who has worked on this game. Maybe it's a reference to something that actually happened on Game Center CX, the Japanese show in which this game is based on. I don't know. What do you all think? Sources: YouTube video showcasing the secret stages Japanese Atwiki page for Cosmic Gate, information source for the 5963 score bonus in stage 00 --Nekomoto (talk) 03:33, 26 September 2021 (UTC)