Wai Wai World 2

The second mishmash of Konami's all-star heroes in a unique action/adventure game, and being vastly different from its predecessor. Starring Rickle and accompanied by Simon from Castlevania, Goemon from Ganbare Goemon, and more. You can even pilot the Vic Viper and Twinbee.

Unused Tilemap#

There is one unused packed tilemap, near the character selection screen packed tilemap in PRG ROM with index $05. It matches the same CHR bank setup and palette, and represents an unknown "EDIT MODE", probably a debug leftover or possibly an early variation of the character selection screen itself. There're no code to access this tilemap at all, and no actual debug routine can be found in the final game. While the character selection screen indicates that the player can freely choose the characters, in the final game the player can only choose one of the four character combinations.

Note that the first icon is for the main character リックル itself ("Rickle"), which is only seen during the ending credits. The fifth one is for character ビル ("Bill", from Contra), but with the wrong tileset.

Build Dates#

An ID string listing the build version and date can be found at the end of the PRG ROM:

MSTR901023

A similar ID can be found in many other Konami games.

"MSTR" means it's the "master" version of the game, and the numbers represent the date. So, this build was compiled on October 23, 1990.

Anti-Piracy#

As with most of the games Konami has published after 1990, this game features a copy-protection routine. it checks for the presence of the "©" symbol in the nametable at the title screen. If the check fails, then the game enables the hidden "HARD" difficulty mode by default from the first stage. Also, after beating World 8, you'll be looped back to the World 2 complete screen, and start from World 3 accordingly.