Crash City Mayhem

To do: Check if the Japanese version of the game has same or similar debug leftovers. Identify which voice samples are unused.

Crash City Mayhem is the fourth game in the long-Runabout-ing series of mission-based driving games.

Minimap Test#

Test	Final

On the 3DS touch screen, a minimap shows the player's position and nearby objectives on a road map. In /2D/US is a DARC file, gamemain.arc. Notably, almost all of the game's DARC files are LZ compressed, but this archive is completely uncompressed. The file includes a texture, test_under.bclim, which appears to be either a mockup or early test for this function. The final game's bottom screen layout looks almost completely unlike the version in the test. Additionally, the individual damage values which pop up as the player crashes into objects are displayed on the top screen in the final game.

Leftovers from Debug Mode#

R3D_title.bclim	Miami Vice (2006) DVD Box Art
R3D_DebugBG.bclim

Left behind in the US version's ROMFS, in the /2D directory, is another uncompressed DARC archive, debuglobby.arc.

This file includes textures for a debug menu. The top screen graphic is also an in-development placeholder which seems to show the English localization had the working title of Crash-City GP. Part of this placeholder screen uses a crop from a poster/box art for the 2006 film adaptation of Miami Vice. The Florida license plate also looks like it might be a simple online template.

Most of the other debug contents seem to have been cleared away. In /mess/UI are the message files for all of the game modes, including MessDeBug.dat, but it's mostly empty at just 32 bytes, none of which seems to say anything (the rest are much larger and include UTF-16 encoded text). Similarly, in /Script is DebugRun.bin, essentially blanked at just 12 bytes.

Unused Voices#

All of the game's audio streams can be found in /sound/stream, in the BCSTM format. In addition to the fully unused voices, there also seem to be regional variants for the announcer voices: the samples from 81 to 94 are a female, Japanese announcer (though still in English) followed by a male, American announcer (used in the US version).

Regional Differences#

The original Japanese version featured exclusive covers of licensed songs (specifically, "Highway Star", "Axel F", "Misirlou" and "Born to be Wild"), used as background music in some of the missions. The international versions lack these, with other songs from the soundtrack now used in the respective parts they appeared in. This also means that the jukebox now only lists 20 songs rather than 24.