Since I completed these first two games, I've been searching around the internet to see if there's anything I obviously missed.

In doing so, I found several ‘cheats’ for both the first and second game that are activated by setting your player characters name to specific words.

These are pretty straightforward as far as cheats go. Mainly things like ‘Start with a million credits’ or ‘View the Final Credits.’ The first game in particular has quite a few gameplay cheats. As an example, you can get unlimited nitros and drive the Four Heavenly Kings cars in the multiplayer modes, which aren't available in the regular car list.

You can also drive a ‘glitch’ car - which glitches out the screen and makes some very odd sound effects…





It does make for a very fast car though!

I also played a bit with the multiplayer for the first game, having not tried it earlier. In essence. it's very similar to the first, where each player selects a car and has a budget of parts to spend.


It’s worth doing it, just for the victory message when you win.





Another interesting feature is you can load your cars from the single player game to use in Multiplayer. I don’t think you can do that in the second.

But, back to the naming codes. Probably the most interesting in both games is the fact you can unlock a music test to listen to the games soundtracks.







They even used the same background!

In the first game みかのへそ is used as the name, which translates to 'Mika’s belly button'. In the second game it is まめまあし - which as far as I know, translates to ‘Beans’


Tangentially related about the second game. Remember how we had to remember the guy ‘Macky’s’ name to be allowed entrance to the casino?





Apparently if you put in one of the names of one of the developers, you'll not only be let into the casino, you'll also be given your money back when you lose!


There's also some names that just provide some novelty. Like in both games if you don't enter a name your characters name is substituted with ‘Lazy’







And speaking of substitutions, remember back in the first game, how whenever something risque was said, it would be censored with XXXX! ?

Turns out this is an actual text replacement thing. If you name yourself a dirty word in Japanese or English, it will censor it, complete with the loud beep, every time.





These words range from everything from fuck and sex in English, and the Japanese words for things like pussy, fellatio, masturbation etc. Which means that the developers were probably actually writing all these words when creating the dialog...


I tried this in the second game, and had similar results. We also got the ringing bleep, but this time it only censored a single letter.





Finally... and amusingly... It's not only swear words that are censored.

If you choose the name of one of the developers rival gaming companies at the time, e.g. ‘Sega’, Famicom’, Bandai’, 'Human' and others, they'll be censored in the same way as if you wrote a very offensive swear.