Under the microscope: Big Air Freestyle (GameCube)
Also: MX Rider (PlayStation 2)
Some sites (like this one and this one) list several cheats for Big Air Freestyle, the 2002 motorbike game from Paradigm Entertainment and Infogrames:
To unlock these cheats enter the code at the code screen:
Cheat Mode: SOMONEY
All Bikes: FACTORY
All Characters: FULLHOUS
There’s one problem with these, however: Big Air Freestyle doesn’t have a “code screen.” It looks like these cheats are actually for Freekstyle, which is an entirely different motorbike game.
I looked through the game’s code and found some cheats that actually do work. Details are below…
Unlock the bonus characters
Navigate to the Rider Select screen, then press X to edit your rider’s name. Enter the string SPIKEJENNYALIEN:
As the name suggests, this unlocks Spike:
And Jenny:
And Alien:
Unlock all arenas
Enter your name as IRATA to unlock all of the arenas:
Normally you can only play in the Fish Bowl arena on a new save, but with this cheat you can also access Flamin’ Fountains, Zap Trap, Arctic Air, Volcano Island, and Tar Pits.
All stunts
Enter your name as INCONCEIVABLE to unlock all stunts:
Navigate to Options/Extras > Stunt List to see everything in action.
Miniature bike and rider
To make your bike and rider very tiny, enter your name as MINIBIKE:
Extra languages
Strangely, this game lets you unlock extra languages if you enter your name as BABEL FISH:
By default, English; French; and Spanish are available. This cheat unlocks German and Italian.
Unlock Brutal difficulty
Enter your name as BRUTAL to unlock an extra “AI challenge” level. After entering the name, navigate to Race > Championship. The new level will appear after Severe:
MX Rider (PlayStation 2)
According to Wikipedia, Big Air Freetstyle is an “enhanced port” of the PlayStation 2 game MX Rider. Do any of these cheats work on it? Yes!
SPIKEJENNYALIEN unlocks the three bonus characters.
IRATA unlocks all tracks (this was already known).
MINIBIKE makes everything tiny.
INCONCEIVABLE unlocks all stunts.
TURBO does…. something, maybe — see below.
Technical details
I found these special names by using the Dolphin emulator’s “Cheats Manager” to isolate the memory addresses that store which rider you’re using. I used the “Search and Filter” function after changing riders to get a short list of addresses that change after making a selection:
Once that was done, I set Memory Breakpoints in Dolphin’s debugger for those addresses to find what code actually writes to these addresses. That led me to the function at 80094cd4, which executes when you try to choose a rider. It’s got logic like this:
If the index associated with the rider you’ve highlighted is less than 0x17, allow the selection to proceed.
If the index is greater than or equal to 0x17, check the array of booleans starting at
802b70a6to see if the selection can proceed.If the array check failed, also check the flag at
802f9b74. If it’s set, allow the selection.
The flag at 802f9b74 turns out to be the “unlock all characters” flag. I traced writes to it by loading a Dolphin memory snapshot into Ghidra (with the Gekko processor plugin). This led me to the function at 8005ed70, which does the checks for the special rider names mentioned above. The corresponding function in the PS2 game is at 0015f908.
Interestingly, the both games also checks for these names:
CHAMPION
SMOKE
TURBO
The results of the checks for the first two names are discarded, so they don’t unlock anything. TURBO sets a flag that gets checked during gameplay, but I couldn’t tell what it does. If you’re a fan of these games, try it out and let me know if you can detect an effect.
Outro
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