Passwords and cheat codes
The Password line sits in Options and gives you no hint how it works. Open Options, move the cursor onto Password, then press or until one of the eight character slots lights up. From there L and K run that slot through the alphabet, the same left and right presses walk you between slots, and or commits all eight letters. Back out of Options and the code takes effect.
Available passwords
Level passwords
- Mercury: IMPERIAL
- Pluto: DOOMLORD
- Nero: CYBERTOX
- Secret Level: MYSTICUS
Cheat codes
- Invincibility: SOUTHPAW
- Infinite lives: PURIFIER
- 50 continues: BERNHEIM
- Level select menu: ARGONATH
- Shows the solar system: HATAMOTO
SOUTHPAW has one hole in it: you survive everything except a deep pit, so a misjudged jump still ends the run. BERNHEIM is the code worth typing even if you normally refuse to cheat. Continues are limited, single player is punishing, and fifty of them decide whether you see Algeroth or replay the Venus jungle for the sixth time.
Boss fights
Every boss here keeps one rule to itself, and until you work out what it is, you are just wasting ammunition.
Demnogonis (Venus)
He opens up only when he throws a bone. Take the right corner of the arena, wait for the throw, and shoot the bone back into him. Six returns or so and he is finished. Empty every special weapon you are carrying into him while you work, because specials do not travel to the next world anyway. Let the fight drag and he starts vomiting. The pool rises, and once it is over your head your health drains every second until you drown in it.
Semai (Mercury)
Stop shooting him. His magic makes him immune to bullets and special weapons alike, and every round you spend here is simply gone. He cycles three attacks: eye beams, a staff that sends blasts along the ground, and a whirling ball. The ball is the whole fight. Put shots into it, it spins out of control, and when it swings back into its owner he takes the damage. About six of those. Between his attacks, jump and grab a ledge, because hanging makes you untouchable.
Razide (Pluto)
The soft one. He cannot be hurt while he is firing, so shoot into the gaps between his volleys and jump when you need to. With a second player alongside you he barely counts as a boss at all.
Algeroth (Nero)
Shoot the floating Legion emblem before he teleports in, since there is a gun clip hidden behind it and you will want every bullet. When he arrives, only head shots hurt him. He guesses where you will be and gets it wrong often enough to materialize facing the other way, and the back of his skull takes damage just as well as the front. Burn whatever specials you have left, because nothing comes after him. His machine gun cannot be fully dodged, so eat the shots you cannot avoid and keep firing. The helmet coming off means he is almost down.
What the game never tells you
Hanging from a ledge makes you completely invulnerable. Hold the direction toward a ledge while you are in the air, the Doomtrooper catches it and pulls himself up on his own, and for as long as you dangle there nothing in the room can touch you. In a crossfire that grab is the closest thing to a pause button you get.
Can you shoot while running?
Firing works standing, kneeling and in mid-air, and never at a run, so moving and shooting stay two separate decisions you keep making all game. Building your reflexes around that split is most of the learning curve. Keep firing and swing the direction around, and your shots follow it through eight angles. Holding before you shoot kneels you down; holding it once you have already started shooting fires downward while you stay standing.
The melee button does more damage than it has any right to. It kills in fewer hits than your gun, and it shoves enemies clean off platforms. Hang from a ledge and shoot a Dark Legionnaire and he drops in a single hit.
Know what hurts you. A grenade takes 22% of your health, a sword swing about 15%, a bullet only 6%. That ranking is your target priority: the grenade throwers cost you nearly four times what an ordinary gunman does, so they die first. The Dark Legion is no more immune to its own hazards than you are, and enemies will happily fall into lava, get flattened by rolling boulders and blow each other up with their own grenades. Duck and shoot a headless Legionnaire, or vault over him and finish him from behind. Even your own death is useful: the body parts explode outward and can take a nearby enemy with you.
Ammunition and special weapons
Empty your gun and you simply cannot shoot. The weapon does trickle rounds back when you drop low, one bullet at a time, at a rate that will not save you from anything already in the room, so a bullet crate with its fifty rounds is worth a detour. You will be taking those detours constantly. Levels run left to right, but there is nearly always a ledge above you or a drop below, and that is where the health, the extra lives and the spare continues are sitting.
Blue and red crates trade your standard gun for a special weapon carrying a small stock of rounds. Mitch fires rockets straight ahead on blue and homing rockets on red. Max gets a short flame stream on blue and exploding fireballs on red. If you are playing Mitch, take the red one into Algeroth's palace, because homing rockets are worth a great deal in the nastiest stage of the game.
Hoarding specials backfires. Whatever you pick up overwrites what you were carrying, so the rockets you have been saving for an emergency vanish the second you touch the next crate. The crates run on a timer too: break one open and the power-up inside spins, spins faster as the clock runs down, and then it is gone. Occasionally a crate holds an enemy instead of a prize, which is exactly the kind of joke this game finds funny.
The traps on each planet
Venus opens with water you cannot cross. No bridges, no rocks, and stepping in drowns you. What it does have is Dark Legionnaires hiding under the surface, so draw them out, shoot them, and cross on the floating bodies. The gap after the second corpse is longer than your jump: hop off it, steer your fall back down onto the same body, then gun down the Legionnaire that pops out and cross on him. There is a bonus area tucked into the cave by the falls, worth the detour. The second half trades drowning for an airship that sweeps the ground with a searchlight. Once the beam holds you it bombs the whole area, so keep moving and watch for landmines that sit almost invisible against the dirt.
Mercury
The big pink plants release swarms of bugs, and any bug that touches you flips your directions, so left becomes right until it wears off. Which happens quickly, though never quickly enough. The beehive structures do both jobs at once: touching one damages you and scrambles your directions together. On the climb out of the volcano, boulders come down at you, and you can shoot them out of the air.
Pluto
Everything slides, and icicles fall on you while you slide. The wind here is transport as much as hazard: jump into a gust and it carries you up to platforms nothing else reaches, or into a wall of ice spikes if you read it wrong. Inside the base, shoot the giant fans on sight, because being pulled into one kills you outright, and one of them hides a switch that opens a door down at ground level.
Can you survive the reactor escape?
Yes, but only if you arrive loaded. Blow up the control panels to open the escape hatch, then go to the bottom right and destroy the mask-like structure making all that noise. That triggers the self-destruct and leaves you a little over a minute to get clear while Legionnaires shoot at you the entire way back. This is the one stretch worth spending every special weapon on, purely to keep the path open.
Nero
The first stage is nearly a victory lap: lava lakes, scenery, and not much standing in your way. The palace that follows is the hardest stage in the game and the most generous with power-ups, which tells you something about what it expects from you. Right before the exit there is a hidden platform. Jump and hold the direction into it to catch the ledge and you land in the secret level; walk left instead and you go straight to Algeroth. Pack ammo first, because the secret level is stingy with it. Playing online makes this part far less painful than it was on a cartridge. ARGONATH drops you on any planet you like, and the emulator keeps one save state per game in your browser, so you can save right before the hidden ledge, or before the reactor timer on Pluto, and retry it as many times as you need without spending a continue to earn the trip back.