Vertical Force

Vertical Force
Developer: Hudson Soft Publishers: Hudson Soft (JP), Nintendo (US) Platform: Virtual Boy Released in JP: August 12, 1995 Released in US: December 1, 1995 This game has hidden development-related text. This game has debugging material. This game has a hidden sound test. This game has a hidden level select.

Vertical Force is an interesting top-down vertical shoot-'em-up employing 3D to display two different play depths, which the player can move between at will. It operates much like Hudson's other shooter, Star Soldier, except that it's headache-inducing for different reasons.

Debug Menu and Sound Test

Changing 0xB330 in the US ROM (0xB340 in the Japanese ROM) from 20 to 22 will force the game to load into a debug menu which includes a level select and sound test. The sound test in particular is notably quite nice looking, featuring names for every music track and sound effect and set against a backdrop of a 3D star field which streams toward the player like in that old screensaver. This may suggest earlier plans to make it more readily available.

Debug Menu
Sound Test

(Source: Parasyte)

Development Text

At 0x1DB7C in the US ROM or 0x1DB58 in the Japanese is the following string:

VSU DRIVER Version 0.19a,Copyright(c) 1994-95 Hudson Soft,Program : LU.Iwabuchi,Driver : ChaCha-TYPE,Note : Prototype

Near the end of the ROM, at 0xFFDD0, right by the internal name and gameID included in all Virtual Boy games, are build dates:

Japan	1995/06/16 12:01
USA	1995/09/22 11:02