New Year’s Day often begins in a confusing haze. You may not remember much of what happened the night before, nor can you explain the aftermath.

This year, for instance, I woke up to find that, during the previous night’s festivities, I had fully produced a tool-assisted speed run for Sachen’s quintessential NES platformer Jurassic Boy 2.

It’s annotated throughout. Happy 2012!

[Credit: This video was inspired by Frank Cifaldi's wonderful Mr. Gimmick annotated longplay. It may have also been inspired by Kentucky Deluxe brand whiskey.]

I woke up sweating.

It was freezing outside, but under those blankets, I felt like I was roasting alive. I had a lot on my mind, I suppose. I’d been fretting about my yearly bonus at work, and my dreams were a feverish mixture of financial failure, attempted murder, and my own death, many times over.

I kicked off the blankets and looked at the clock on my nightstand. It was two hours before the alarm was set to go off. Might as well go in to work early, I reasoned; maybe that’ll make my boss forget how much I’d been slacking off over the last few weeks. Well, months. Years, actually.

[Takeshi no Chousenjou is now fully playable in English, thanks to a fan translation released by KingMike and friends. It's the best Christmas!]

It didn’t take long for my nightmares to sync up with reality.

My bonus was only 200,000 yen, just like in my dream. I briefly considered the possibilities.

I was feeling pretty sick, but the chief was never much for sympathy.

Or ass-kissing, for that matter.

Paid vacation? Man, I wish.

Paid vacation and then quitting? That wouldn’t go over too well.

And I wasn’t prepared to re-explore that particular scenario.

Instead I took a long lunch and decided to walk around town to clear my head.

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Last night, I dreamed that I was at a flea market, browsing for sweet deals. As often happens in these dreams, I encountered an out-of-the-way stall that held all sorts of video game treasures. Prototypes. Unreleased games. Rare Japanese titles. Everything was so cheap that I could have easily bought the entire lot…if the dealer accepted debit cards. As it happened, I only had two dollars in my wallet.

I knew that if I ran to an ATM to get more cash, another collector would sweep in and buy up everything. I could only afford one game: a sun-bleached NES cartridge with a peeling label that read “Teletubbies and More!” I had never heard of the game, so I figured that it must be valuable.

I bought the game, and ran from the table. I tripped on something and fell…but since this was a dream, I didn’t immediately hit the ground. Instead, I tumbled into an endless void. Clutching the Teletubbies cartridge, I fell for several minutes, waiting to hit bottom.

I was still holding my breath when I woke up. My heart raced. I sat up, thankful but secretly a little disappointed that it was only a dream. It was only 6 AM, so I decided to go back to sleep.

When my head hit the pillow, I felt something underneath.

My god.

This is where I stop lying: Teletubbies and More! is a real NES game. I bought it off the Internet years ago from a seller who offered no explanation regarding its origins, and who closed his eBay account shortly afterward.

Opening it up, I found that the cart’s plastic innards were crudely shaved to make room for a glop-topped 60-pin Famicom game board and a Nintendo-produced Famicom-to-NES adapter, like the ones found in early NES releases like Pinball and Gyromite.

While the game board was likely mass-produced (more on this in a minute), the cartridge was obviously hand-assembled. The label is cheap printer paper, and given that the manufacturer would need to sacrifice actual NES cartridge shells and official Famicom-to-NES adapters for each unit, I’d bet that not very many of these were made. It might even be the only one of its kind.

I recently had it dumped. You can download the ROM here. It’s not yet emulated, but the mapper (#237) has been documented, if you want to add it to your own emulator or open-source project. Please let me know if you do!

But what about the game itself? I wish I could show it off in screenshots, but since it’s not emulated, I had to resort to taking photos of the game playing on original NES hardware. Apologies for the crappy quality, but…well, best I could do.

Okay. So it turns out that “Teletubbies and More!” is actually “Y2K 420-in-1,” a pirate multicart of unknown origin. The characters on the splash screen hint at something a little more sinister than your average pirated game, though. Top row: Pikachu, Po, Buzz Lightyear. Bottom row: Woody, Doraemon, and Raphael.

This is the game selection screen, listing the typical multicart lineup of Mapper 0 titles, save for a few unfamiliar names.

“Aladdin III” is, as expected, a clone of Magic Carpet from Caltron 6-in-1. It’s a common sight in multicarts and in the occasional standalone cartridge. Pity the poor sucker who buys an Aladdin Famicom cart expecting to find a pirate clone of the Genesis Aladdin game and instead ends up with this.

Next up is “Pokemon,” which could be anything. Pirates have shoehorned Pokemon characters into a number of NES games over the years — like Little Nemo and Felix the Cat, for instance.

In this case, it’s a hacked version of Hudson’s first NES game, Nuts & Milk. In this new version, Muddy Pikachu must escape the grasp of a sickly Gray Pikachu while collecting…uh, bananas, and things. Beyond the simple character sprite switch, no attempt has been made to make this resemble a real Pokemon game.

Game #4 is “Toy Story II,” which surely must be more interesting. A pirated NES adaptation of the Genesis and Super NES Toy Story game is known to exist, so maybe that’s what this is?

No. It’s Bomberman, with Woody from Toy Story. Keeping the theme of the movie, Woody wanders a series of underground mazes and plants bombs to blow up his friends.

Next is…oh my god, seriously? That’s what it’s called? “Ding Dong”?

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Happy April Fools’ Day! Perhaps you’d like to play a game with a superpowered wrestling ape in it. If that’s the case, I wrote up a little thing about Bio Force Ape here at Lost Levels. Would you believe that there’s a downloadable ROM in there somewhere? Dare you believe?

The article also includes a full playthrough from TheRedEye himself, Frank Cifaldi. It’s just like the good old days! Stay tuned — I’m converting Dream and Friends into a self-loathing blog/ROM distribution site in preparation for Weird-Ass Pirate Multicart Day 2011.

SCENE: The cluttered offices of the recently expanded American branch of Japanese games publisher Culture Brain. The company is finishing up work on its most ambitious project to date: a localization of the karate-themed action-RPG Flying Warriors for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The project’s lead programmer — we’ll call him Bill — sucks in a quick breath as he inserts a mangled prototype cartridge of Flying Warriors — previously flashed with a release candidate of Little Ninja Brothers; before that, an early version of Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll — into an equally mangled NES console.

Both cart and console have somehow survived the branch’s first two years of operation, and this isn’t the first time that Bill has said a silent prayer for a prototype game to work on the first try, without protest from the aged hardware.

Bill’s prayer is answered. The game flickers to life on the 13-inch television screen in front of him, and the stirring Flying Warriors theme — which haunted the dreams of Culture Brain USA’s staff over the last several months of localization and testing — blared proudly for the group of company executives in attendance.

“At last,” Bill thought, “it’s finally over.”

The last round of bugfixes had been particularly rough. Culture Brain USA’s staff was a mixture of hungry, smelly, and sleep-deprived; many worked 16-hour shifts and slept at the office. Bill didn’t even have time to test the prototype cartridge that was currently on display, as its EPROMs had been flashed only minutes before Culture Brain’s executive staff arrived.

Bill looked forward to showing off the game’s final script to his superiors. He was proud of the subtle content changes made for western audiences. He’d been dying to hear words of praise — or, at least, a grunt of approval — for the clever bit of programming that had allowed for more efficient text encoding.

Suddenly, a peal of laughter erupted from the attending crowd. Bill looked at the screen. He cringed.

Culture Brain’s American branch was disbanded three years later.

In this fast-paced digital world, things can change in the blink of an eye. Dream and Friends would like to share with you these recent updates to our late-breaking coverage. This is news you need, when you need it.

When I theorized that the “original edition” of Donkey Kong bundled with European Wii consoles was an unreleased prototype game, I was making an assumption based on the likeliest case among a series of unlikely scenarios. I was wrong. Donkey Kong’s reality is, somehow, even stranger than what I’d suggested.

After examining the ROM’s code, NES hacking wizard BMF54123 posted the following analysis at Lost Levels:

Guys, I don’t think this is a prototype at all, but an official Nintendo ROM hack.

The first half of the PRG ROM contains all the new data for the cement factory level, a copy of the title screen with the updated 2010 copyright, and a lot of code patches. The second half is identical to the US PRG1 ROM, except various routines have been hijacked to point to the new patches.

A lot of them do really hackish things, like manually copying the entire sprite data page to unused RAM and shuffling it around (so the cement pies don’t disappear), checking Mario’s current animation frame to see if he’s climbing (for the moving ladders?), and shoehorning in new data if the current level number is 02. It’s also coded pretty sloppily in places, jumping to the same subroutine 5 times in a row, for example. This might explain why it glitches occasionally.

A true prototype would have certainly been built on the original source code, as Mario Bros. Classic was, not split into a bunch of patches. Whoever did this either didn’t have access to the original source, or no longer had the necessary tools/knowledge to compile it.

I had assumed that Donkey Kong: Original Edition was an unreleased special version coded during the NES’s lifespan. And yet we have proof here of something even more unlikely — Nintendo apparently still employs the rare breed of individual who is familiar with the inner workings of a console that hasn’t seen a new first-party release in 15 years. Let us never doubt Nintendo’s power ever again.

Another unexpected discovery was made during Wizard Week — specifically, the mid-week break in which I focused on a series of strategy guides published by Bantam Books.

Doing some Internet sleuthing, readers Madeline Henry and Michael Stearns identified the cover artist as Bill Mayer. The surfing cat featured in “Ultimate Unauthorized Nintendo Game Boy Strategies” is actually the mascot for the smooth jazz outfit The Rippingtons — he appears on several album covers, and even stars in one of their videos!

Mayer himself later found the comments thread and left a reply:

Too funny…Where the hell did you find these? I am the illustrator responsible for those little diddies, all of the picture Nintendo Strategies were originally done for other clients and uses. They were not allowed to use any of the copyrighted material so they looked around for images of monsters. eventually ran out of monsters and started just looking for anything bright and colorful to stick on the cover. These books were done in ,I am guessing the 1980′s? Can’t believe they are still out there haunting the halls of used book stores in small quiet unsuspecting small towns all across the country Beware…

These books have been in my collection since I was a kid, and finding out more about them after all these years was a real treat. Thanks for the comments, guys!

Finally, Kotaku picked up on the iPhone smash hit My Virtual Girlfriend a full eight months after I’d originally featured it here. Somehow, the fabric of time itself was altered so that the game could be released “just in time for Valentine’s Day” in the year 2011. This serves as an important reminder to always trust Dream and Friends as your first-on-the-scene source for video game news that matters.

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[This is the final entry in a quick walkthrough for Square's unreleased Aliens game for the Famicom Disk System. Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.]

Before I finish things up here, let’s have a look at the only version of Square’s Aliens that saw a commercial release. Above is a video from the MSX home computer edition of Aliens, released in 1987 in Japan and in Europe.

Though the game’s structure is largely the same in both the FDS and the MSX versions, there are some key differences between the two. Weapons have limited ammunition in the MSX game, for one thing — a somewhat pointless change, since new gun pickups are so plentiful. If anything, it would’ve prevented players from holding on to a favorite weapon for too long. There’s also an enemy radar that isn’t present in the FDS game — another inconsequential addition, as it doesn’t show off-screen enemies.

On the other hand, the MSX version of the game is made much easier by the fact that enemies don’t spew life-draining acid after you kill them. The gameplay mechanics appear smoother, too. The jumping is less awkward, and there’s an actual rolling mechanic — with dedicated frames of animation and everything! — eliminating the need to jackhammer the jump button to crawl under low ceilings.

It’s difficult to say which version of Aliens was intended to be released first, or if both editions were developed concurrently. It’s likely, though, that the FDS version was incomplete when it was scrapped, and the MSX game’s enhancements resulted from additional development time.

Anyway, to level 3!

Sorry to say it, but level 3 is mostly unremarkable. There are far fewer doors here than in level 2 (thank god), and it’s much more action-focused.

…which, in this game’s case, means that enemies now spawn in groups of three or four at a time. It’s pretty annoying, but nothing that can’t be overcome with rampant savestate abuse.

Hey, a fellow human! What’s up man!

Well. This is awkward.

(Side note: if you die while a chestbursted human is on-screen, a glitchy chunk of his flesh will follow you back to the beginning of the level, and will float in front of you until you enter a door.)

No level would be complete without at least a few doors that take you back to the starting point. Hopefully you know better by now.

This is where the game really changes things up and delivers something unexpected!

Nah, just kidding.

The same strategy applies here as in level 2. Rush behind the queen, and shoot her until she’s dead.

And now, the final level.

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[This is the second part of a quick walkthrough for Square's unreleased Aliens game for the Famicom Disk System. Part 1 is here.]

Welcome to level 2! Before we continue, here’s another bit of trivia discovered recently at Lost Levels — the background music in Aliens was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, who would later create music for first dozen or so games in Square’s Final Fantasy series.

(NES-wise, he also wrote the catchy main theme from 3-D WorldRunner and the excellent “track 3″ from Rad Racer.)

Shortly after starting level 2, this is what you’ll see. But wait! It gets better.

yyyyyyyep

First of all, note that Ripley enters the room on top of a wall-mounted alien for some automatic and unavoidable damage. The bigger problem, though, is oh my god so many doors.

Might as well get started.

Remember to keep holding up on the d-pad when you exit! This is instant death, otherwise.

The remaining doors offer a random combination of progress, backtracking, and death. The one you want is this one.

You’ll end up here.

And you’ll want to take this door…

…which leads to here. After that, all you need to do is jump over to the door on the left.

And that pleasant little slice of hell is now over with. At least, that is, until you lose a life, in which case you’ll have to do it all over again. Don’t take that next door, by the way — it leads right back into the maze.

Halfway through the level, you’ll find a 1-up. This is where I discovered that, for whatever reason, there are multiple 1-up icons. Here’s the space fish, previously seen in level 1.

Then there’s the space puppy.

And finally, the space snail. Space is such a fun place.

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Did you know that Activision and Square once partnered to release a game based on James Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi action movie Aliens? Are you aware that it was released for the MSX home computer, and that a port for the Famicom Disk System was completed but never released? Do you care that a prototype copy of this unreleased FDS port was recently discovered and is available for download here?

Honestly, this is something I never thought I’d get to play. The world’s only known copy of Aliens for the FDS popped up in a Yahoo Japan auction a few months back, where it was bought by a private collector for a stupidly large sum of money. In many similar cases with unreleased prototype games, this is where the story would end.

A few days ago, however, “Yuki” at the No-Intro forums released a disk image of the game, commenting later that “I bought this FDS from the collector who went mad.” How much was paid? “Oceans of money.” Yikes.

(Yuki also regularly tracks down and buys sealed copies of FDS games, just to ensure clean disk image rips [trivia: an FDS game is automatically corrupted in some way once it's been played for the first time, as save files and other changes are permanently written to the disk]. It’s a ridiculously expensive undertaking for an act of preservation that very few people know about or appreciate. Yuki is awesome, basically.)

The game itself is gloriously bad. It’s not so overwhelmingly awful as to be no fun; it has just enough quirk to inspire you to keep playing, just to see what bad design decisions await you in later levels. It could have easily stood alongside Predator, Rambo, and other not-unplayably terrible games that were released for the Nintendo Entertainment System during its lifespan.

For your consideration: this is how high your character is able to jump. Note that this is only possible with a deep, full press of the A button — tapping it only scoots Ripley across the ground. You’re eventually able to upgrade your jump by collecting power-ups…which disappear every time you lose a life. And losing a life is really easy to do, because…

…every enemy sprays acid all over the damn place after you kill it, damaging Ripley if she’s in close proximity. Problem: enemies appear so suddenly that they’re always in close proximity. It’s not uncommon to be damaged by an unexpected enemy and to then absorb another couple of hits after killing it.

So, after losing a few lives, you start blasting every single enemy and egg you see, leaping away in panic after firing every shot, so as to not to be showered with acid from exploding aliens. You soon discover a few new power-ups.

There are several different kinds of grenades. You can throw them by holding up and pressing the B button. In any other game, you might use them to take out faraway groups of enemies.

In this game — in which many aliens introduce themselves by teleporting in front of your face — grenades are basically worthless.

The invincibility item is more useful, especially since you can collect and store up to three of them at once. Activating it is easy and intuitive — simply hold up, then hold A, and while you’re at the top of your jump, tap B.

(By the way, the Select button? It does nothing.)

Here’s the game’s first major obstacle. Even if you collect every single jump upgrade available to this point, you still won’t be able to jump over this wall.

The solution? Hold A, then hold up on the d-pad. You’ll do a silly-looking somersault and appear at the top of the cliff. This move is required throughout the game, and even when you know how to pull it off, it only activates a fraction of the time. The real fun is when you have to do it over a bottomless pit!

Equally fun is the crawling mechanic, which is required to pass under low ceilings. You can slowly crawl by ducking, holding left or right, and rapidly tapping the jump button. Like, really rapidly, to the point where it feels like you’re doing something the game doesn’t want you to do.

You’re almost there! Did you remember to collect all three jump power-ups? If not, you will die here, and you’ll have to start again from the very beginning.

Soon, you will learn to hate doors.

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