Drake & Josh: Talent Showdown

This page is rather stubbly and could use some expansion. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue this article? Notes: The game's files are still in the early stages of being parsed through and more hidden information will likely be revealed.

Drake & Josh: Talent Showdown, ostensibly a sequel to Drake & Josh for GBA, is a DS adventure game. Part Guitar Hero, part Operation, part collectathon, and mostly fetch quests, it didn't do well enough at any of the above for anyone to take notice.

Development Level#

An additional level exists, indexed one higher than the last level in the game, called prototype_school_floor. It has a few friendly characters, one jock, some walls, some air nozzles, and a lot of free-standing doors and keys.

One level list includes a level called None, indexed two spaces after prototype_school_floor, with no level in between. This level cannot be loaded, and there is no indication of a level between the two. It shares a group with the last guitar level, but the meaning of this group is unclear. As it also has one internal ID value after all the guitar levels (the equivalent for prototype_school_floor is after all the normal levels), it might have been a test guitar level.

Hidden Text#

Additional Translations#

Translation strings for Italian, Spanish, and German remain in the ROM, indicating a planned European release (the game released in English and French). These translations are extremely incomplete, with only a handful of menu strings translated for each.

Cutscene Haiku#

Between the credits and main game text strings in the ROM are a few unused lines:

I have words to say
I have words to say
But designers left me mute
No cutscene haiku

MIDI names#

The game files include 13 MIDIs. The eight regular music tracks are named:

ACT_Factory.mid
ACT_LAStudio1.mid
ACT_LAStudio2.mid
ACT_Magic.mid
ACT_School1.mid
ACT_School2.mid
SPL_Menu.mid
SPL_Stress.mid

The five Guitar Action tracks are named:

MIDI.mid
MIDI_JD_Toune2(1.0).mid
toune5.mid
S4_Midi_Rev.mid
I found a way - Midi.mid

There is also text for the names of the tracks/instruments in the MIDIs.

Extra Font Characters#

A number of unused characters exist for one or more of the game's fonts. These include characters that may have been necessary for the three European translations (ßäöüÄÖÜìíòóúÌÍÒÓÚáñÁÑ¡¿), characters for European languages with no evidence of planned translations (åæøÅÆØ), symbols that simply aren't used (eg., []{}()*^+©), and letters that simply aren't used (eg., œëŒËÇ). Notably, neither $ nor any other currency symbol appears to have been included. Additionally, all two-byte characters from 85 00 to 85 FF appear to be a control character which duplicates the following sprite and places it three pixels higher than normal, which is not used in-game.