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stumbled upon this when I was trying different starting levels in the game, to see if any of the other Extra/Bonus stages would be worth it.

Pay attention to 3-7 on this recording. When the Extra Stage icon is uncovered, Joe lands right next to one of the captive girls. Normally in the game if a captive girl is hit with the club instead of touched (freed), she knocks you back and won't give any bonus items. Prior to entering an Extra Stage, the character clubs the ground and makes all the enemies disappear, immediately followed by the screen going all wavy. Even though the club animation is different from the normal attack, this required club animation will act as a "hit" on the girl. What happens is that the ground is clubbed and all the enemies disappear - but the screen never changes, and you're stuck on the level forever, until you reset or exit.

Okay that was quite possibly the most confusing thing I've ever typed, and only like 3 or 4 people are going to care about this. But whatever. :)

I just checked this replay out and it's quite weird.

That run was a darn good one up to that point. Losing the game like this would be a real bummer especially if you had it happen later on.

Data East should've made the Extra Stage club not be able to hit anything.

Malibu wrote:That run was a darn good one up to that point.

nah, I had a pretty stupid death on... 2-5 I think it was. Had it been a serious score attempt I probably would've hit Esc and started over.... but I kept playing since I was just sorta messing around anyway.

Interestingly, this bug seems to be fixed in the joemacr version of the game. As shown by this hacked INP file (which fails its checksum).

Kranser.

...and as BBH's recording plays back fine up to the 'bug' in joemacr, the only difference between joemacr (ver 1.1 1994-05-27) and joemacra (ver 1.0 1994-05-19) could be the fix of the bug!

Barry had actually asked about that on IRC but I was too lazy to play through just to try it again. Glad you did it, anyway... at least now we know one of (maybe the only?) the differences between the two romsets

I guess its a pretty serious bug which could be triggered easily in the arcade, wouldn't surprise me at all if that was the only fix between the revisions, especially if the inp otherwise plays fine indicating that there were no other changes to the game logic.

This is the type of thing that should be documented somewhere