We must admit, Scarab's fighting game Battle Monsters isn't a title we have thought about much since we first heard about it back in the 90s.
The Sega Saturn title, which was originally released in Japan in 1995, was reviewed quite poorly when it finally ended up arriving in the West, leading the game to land with something of a dull thud into the already crowded fighting game market. Electronic Gaming Monthly's review crew at the time, for instance, called it "one sorry mess of a fighting game" and said that it made the "worst fighting titles look like stars”. Meanwhile, other critics like Gamespot's Jeff Gerstmann gave it a 4.5 out of 10, labelling it "a Way of the Warrior rip-off" and "a pathetic 2-player game".
In retrospect, it really didn't stand a chance with its muddy 3D graphics and choppy animation, arriving at a time when the market was already heavily saturated with games hoping to capitalize on the success of titles like Virtua Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Street Fighter. On account of this, it has pretty much dropped off our radar entirely in the years since being filed in that special part of the brain we typically dedicate to the names of old, forgotten footballers from the mid-to-late '90s and unsuccessful Saturday morning cartoons.
That was, until earlier today when Bo Bayles — the reverse engineering specialist behind the Rings of Saturn blog — posted a new article on Sega, Saturn Shiro! revealing that he had managed to discover a previously undocumented debug menu in the obscure title.
Accessing the code, according to Bayles, the process is pretty simple. All you need to do is press Up, Down, Left, Right, Start at the title screen. This will then unlock the ability to select a debug option on the main screen, leading you to a set of additional options. Here you can change the stage, disable 1-player and 2-player deaths so that you can play even after your health bar has been depleted, enable debug data and hitboxes to train, and toggle between the different characters (including the previously unplayable bosses).
As Bayles states, this functionality doesn’t appear to be in the NTSC-J version but the debug mode can be enabled with the use of an Action Replay code.
For all the ins & outs, we recommend checking out Bayles' article over on Sega, Saturn Shiro! for a full breakdown of this exciting, new discovery.