Under the microscope: Criticom (Saturn)

Can you feel the POWR?

Here is how GamePro’s review summed up Criticom:

Criticom is the worst fighting game of the year.

A 1996 Usenet user had this to say:

i had the playstation version and i had to return it to the store because it was like being poked in the face with a heated bit of metal repeatedly.

And the game’s executive producer, Stan Liu, commented:

Criticom was not the best of games!

Being able to cheat would probably help things. There are five well-known passwords that enable special effects for the PlayStation version of Criticom. But as far as I can tell, only one special password has been published for the Saturn version.

I’m here to remedy the situation! I found the four missing passwords. Details on how to enter them and what they do are below.

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Upgrade to rank 3

Go to the Options > Load/ Save screen and enter this password for Dayton on the P1 side:

P1 Dayton: GENF

All characters will be upgraded to Rank 3:

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Upgrade to rank 2

To upgrade everybody to rank 2, enter this password for Gorm on the P2 side:

P2 Gorm: JELE

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Play as Emperor

You can play as the final boss! Enter this password for any character:

Either player, any character: IICS

Emperor will become available from the character select screen:

Here’s a shot of him in action:

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Special move enhancement

Enter this password for any character for the last effect:

Either player, any character: POWR

This does something with your player’s special moves, but I can’t quite pin down exactly what. The value it sets gets read when you press the C button. The Saturn version seems to work less consistently with this effect than the PlayStation version does.

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Technical details

All five passwords are encoded as plain ASCII strings. Here’s where they’re stored in memory:

06021254 "GENF"  # All to Rank 3
0602125c "JELE"  # All to Rank 2
06021264 "TTAM"  # View ending
0602126c "IICS"  # Unlock Emperor
06021274 "POWR"  # Special move thing

The function at 0602127a has references to these. The logic for the GENF code is something like this:

if (
    selected_column == 0  # P1's column
    and selected_row == 2 # Dayton's row
    and player_input == "GENF"
):
    for i in range(8):
        ...  # Unlock stuff for each character

The difficult-to-explain POWR password sets the value at 06079c30. Normally it’s 0x0, but with the cheat enabled it’s 0x1800300. The significance of this is beyond me, however.

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Outro

Here’s the full list of passwords for both systems:

If you can explain what the POWR cheat does better than I can, do leave a comment below.

Logo by Ashlyn Anstee