Tamagotchis - Unused content and version differences

hwd45 · Dec 26, 2015

I've always been pretty interested with unused content in games, or how games developed over time with betas and prototypes etc. Version differences too - maybe there's some rare revision of a game that's slightly different from the rest, maybe there's minor differences between different versions of the game depending on which region the game was sold in. Something about it all is just... really interesting to me?

Recently I've been using this interest to actually actively seek out such information - and as it turns out, there are lots of features of Tamagotchi that never saw the light of day. Most of it is really hard to find because of the way Tamagotchis are coded, but with recent advances in Tamagotchi hacking (see any of Natashenka's hacks, for example), we've been able to find plenty of interesting unused features. Sometimes obscure versions of Tamagotchi are released too, though most of the time the differences are so subtle they're hardly noticed or the version is so rare that information on it is hard to find.

That's why recently I've been compiling lots of information about this sort of thing and I want to share it with you all - hopefully some of you will know stuff that I don't.

A good place to start is "The Cutting Room Floor" - it's a site dedicated to exactly this kind of thing. Currently there are four Tamagotchi pages, though one of them is a very short page on the Tamagotchi Town SNES game. I recently created pages on the Tama-Go and Tamagotchi L.I.F.E / Classic, you can find them here if you want to read them:

https://tcrf.net/TamaTown_Tama-Go

https://tcrf.net/Tamagotchi_Classic

With regards to Tamagotchi Connection the page is a bit less complete - there's a lot we don't know and I'm hoping we can fill some gaps in our knowledge.

For example, did you know that there's a rare version of the Tamagotchi Plus called the "GLAY EXPO" edition, which featured a different birthday animation and a unique dating partner? Did you know there's a rare version of the V2 designed partly by PUMA which features a different egg / hatching animation? Did you know that glitches on the V2 have shown graphics for the ticket items and the flag game, despite neither of those features being normally obtainable until V3? (Don't believe me? Skip to 8:35 and 10:05 in this video:

//www.tamatalk.com/IB/applications/core/interface/js/spacer.png ).Did you know that tickets were also featured on the Music Star, functioning exactly as the concert cutscenes do, but they were only obtainable through passwords despite never being obtainable on Music City? Did you know that there was a cancelled version of the V6 called "World Tour Edition" - could this version have used the unused tickets?

So yeah. There's lots of obscure information and lots of things we just don't know yet. I hope we'll be able to find out more!

EDIT: just realised this is in the comments and rumours section - I had multiple tabs open when I wrote this so I might have put it here by accident since it was meant to go in Seriously Tamagotchi, does it need to be moved? Or is this section still appropriate?

Priestess of Syrinx · Dec 27, 2015

I love tcrf! :3

Would you count the debug-only characters as 'unused content'? I haven't really seen "debugging" talked about in the recent versions the way it was discussed for the V1 and V2, so I'm not in the loop as to whether that's 'a thing' on the newer versions.

Of course there's also the screen test on those versions, but I believe that's a feature of some piece of hardware rather than the Tamagotchi program itself.

hwd45 · Dec 27, 2015

Priestess of Syrinx said:
I love tcrf! :3

Would you count the debug-only characters as 'unused content'? I haven't really seen "debugging" talked about in the recent versions the way it was discussed for the V1 and V2, so I'm not in the loop as to whether that's 'a thing' on the newer versions.

Of course there's also the screen test on those versions, but I believe that's a feature of some piece of hardware rather than the Tamagotchi program itself.

Yeah, I'd totally count those characters as unused. Like, there's actually a bunch of (normal) unused characters on the V1 which would later be seen on the V2. Given that the V2 also seems to contain V3 sprites, and the Japanese versions jumped straight from their V1 equivalent (the Plus) to their V3 equivalent (the Keitai), I sometimes think that maybe the V2 was actually an unfinished attempt at re-creating a Keitai for western markets, perhaps due to time constraints. An interesting fact about the other debug characters (apart from the weird three blocks thing that nobody understands) are actually from the old Tamagotchi Deka consoles. You'd be able to connect with these massive tamagotchis if you visited certain stores in Japan, and the characters would visit your Tamagotchi. There's another character which apparently behaves like the Deka characters if you connect with it but you can't get it through the character select menu - the character is called Tsutayatchi, named after the "Tsutaya" company, and its data is so incomplete that it only appears in place of some of the character sprites for the other Deka Tamagotchi characters - for example when they use items.

You're certainly right about the Debug hyper going down though - since V4 the only "exclusive" character you can get is Nazotchi, as far as I know. Furthermore, a pencil alone is no longer enough - accessing debug mode on the V5 involved soldering and even newer versions seem to have no easy access to debug whatsoever. Despite that, there's actually a lot of interesting stuff on newer versions. Tama-Go has a "Test Mode" which allows you to change the character's stats, view their care misses and change the spouse character as well as the main character. There is also apparently some unused functionality left on the Tama-Go ROM visible in test mode, suggesting that more features were actually planned. Interestingly the ROM Test menu on the Tama-Go displays the version as "Ver.7", suggesting that despite the fact that it wasn't marketed as part of the Tamagotchi Connection brand, it was still recognised as being part of it, or at least a successor to it. Similarly the Friends and Friends: Dream Town models are Ver.8 (as displayed on the ROM Test) and V9 (as displayed in the connection menu) respectively.

Nazotchi25 · Dec 27, 2015

These are quite the interesting things. Aside from the debug stuff, I never knew about any of this

hwd45 · Dec 28, 2015

Nazotchi25 said:
These are quite the interesting things. Aside from the debug stuff, I never knew about any of this

I'm glad you're learning new things! I never knew about any of this stuff until maybe a year ago? And since then I've been looking into it more and more, it's really strange because this information is really obscure for some reason, so it'd be cool to make more people know about this sort of thing

Nazotchi25 · Dec 28, 2015

hwd45 said:
I'm glad you're learning new things! I never knew about any of this stuff until maybe a year ago? And since then I've been looking into it more and more, it's really strange because this information is really obscure for some reason, so it'd be cool to make more people know about this sort of thing

I found your topic at around midnight and was up until 2AM reading articles on The Cutting Room Floor. So many things I didn't know