Under the microscope: Beach Spikers (GameCube)
Virtua Beach Volleyball
It’s long been known that this AM2 game uses special player names to unlock hidden “uniforms.” This list from GameFAQs shows the set of known special player names:
But is this list complete? Answer: no! There’s another special name that unlocks all player customizations at once. Details are below…
Unlock all player customizations
Enter your player’s name as VDF5PS to unlock all player customizations:
You’ll get the special Sega-themed uniforms:
And the special faces, hair styles, and sunglasses:
And you even get the Dural-themed faces:
Technical details
I checked a memory snapshot from this game and found that the special names are sitting there in plain text. ARKATA is at 8016a0d8, JUSTICE is 0x40 bytes away at 8016a118, DAYTONA is another 0x40 bytes from that, and so on.
At the end of the list is VDF5PS. Somehow it seems to have escaped everyone’s notice!
I checked to see whether there’s any way to access the unlockable stages with a cheat code, but didn’t find one. All unlock data starts at 801e9420 in memory, so if you set everything from there to 801e9432 to 0xFF you’ll have everything.
Outro
IGN’s review of Beach Spikers said:
Simple controls a la Virtua Tennis could have made Beach Spikers a classic, but its appeal is just relegated to those with enough patience and determination to unlock the myriad hidden bikinis.
Now everyone can see the appeal!
For more cheat code mining articles, see my archive here at Substack.
