Now that I’ve established some context, maybe this will make some more sense. The more games we have to try to run on our SPG/unSP emulator, the easier it will be to find and fix bugs, so when I had the opportunity to do so, I picked up a V.Smile Pocket on eBay that came with 11 cartridges, and I made some hardware to dump the cartridges.

There actually aren’t many strings in these cartridge images; mostly some library ID strings like “TVSYS TVLCD1.0” (apparently the internal name for this product), “OursLib V1.2.25 generated by TV3, 2005-05-24” and build dates. This makes the few strings that do exist jump right out. One of the games (Elmo’s World – Elmo’s Big Discoveries ) has a list of “bad words”, which presumably is in there to keep you from entering them in as your character name. (The Wii’s System Menu had a similar list, if I recall correctly, but we never actually found a place where it was used.) It’s a fairly short list of 101 4-letter words (in alphabetical order), and many of them are quite appropriately forbidden for a toddler’s video game. Some are pretty tame — here’s all the ones that begin with the letter ‘b’:

b.s. bare barf boff bong bonk boob bras brat bums burp bust butt

Well, whatever, it’s just some silly game, right? It might just be part of some standard library they use. (Nevermind the fact that there’s nothing like it in 9 of the other games that I looked at.)



However, the game that is included for free when you buy the system — Alphabet Park Adventure — is special. It has some strange strings at the beginning:

**! 80092000201101

078800 V.Smile\084080 Wall-E Save the World\info.xml

078800 V.Smile\084080 Wall-E Save the World\info.xml

078800

80-92000-201-001

2008-08-26 V1 M04

000000-1FFFFF

200000-3FFFFF

0123456789ABCDEF

crack

violate

TV 1.0

TVSYS TVLCD1.0



(I guess they cut-and-pasted a template from a Wall-E game, and maybe there’s some checksumming routine — there are 0x400000 words in the cartridge. Your guess is as good as mine as far as “crack” and “violate” go.)

From there, it just gets surreal. There’s a list of 1,023 “bad words”, varying from the tame to the bizarre. They’re in order first by word length, and then by alphabetical sort order within that length. This means that the longest words (well, phrases) are at the end of the list. I’ll provide a link to the full version of the full list below (warning — NSFW, by definition), but I’ll except some of the funnier ones here.

As far as I can tell, the list has a few straightforward categories:

Obscene words

Vulgar slang

Drug references

Racist epithets

All of those seem fairly reasonable. Then it gets strange:

Medical terms for anatomy, etc

Political terms that the Chinese don’t like

Words that I had to go look up in the dictionary

Phrases that have no real bad meaning in English, but might have some obscene connotation in Chinese

Here are some of the last group here that seem most strange. The oddest part is, I can’t even find a single place in the game (and it’s not a very big or complicated game) where you can enter any strings in at all — it’s mainly picking between 2 or 3 possible letters to fill in a blank. It’s also only in my US version of the game, and not in bmx’s French version.



bra bum gin god god gun hag hex jig jun pip pox s&m sod std war wog won

gods jeon kill lama lord lure reds spaz vamp wuss

bantu beano bosom bowel chiez chuck civil jesus leper merde nonce nymph ovary pinko ponce s.o.b satan satyr snafu state uteri vulva

a-hole accost adisms bandit bazoom be-all canuck carnal cervix chaste christ cuddle despot devils dwarfs ethnic forces geisha get-in libyan maoism plwert rabies racist rouble russki tyrant uterus virgin yoruba

apphism asexual atrophy end-all f.o.a.d fascist geishas illicit inbreed lamaism leftism lucifer marxism midgets necking offense olisbos onanism rapture ratitse "red raf" "red rag" redskin russkis sadists satanic schmima synovia tibetan tyranny vachiez virgins warlock warlord wedlock witched witches

biopsies bundling campaign colonist despotic flattery flirting funkiest gangster impotent intimacy leninism lucifers lustierl movement procurer red-bait redskins succubus trysting tyrannic warlocks warlords witchery witching wizardry

anarchism anarchist blue-skin bolshevik communist demimonde democracy despotism despotist dissident elopement endocrine exploiter "idea lewd" infatuate "live show" plutocrat socialist splittism splittist tyrannize

abiotrophy antichrist capitalism capitalist chauvinism "colour bar" demimondes democratic despotical greaseball hegemonism "jerk water" kuomintang "mao zedong" militarism repatriate semifeudal "sex lupine" sex-appeal tyrannical tyrannizer warlordism witch-hunt

antichrists antifrition "bandit gang" bourgeoisie "brute force" "creep joint" greaseballs "hair circle" officialism sovereignty "sugar daddy" "sun yat-sen" "third world"

asexualitand bandits'lair concupiscent "conjugal bed" depucelation distributism distributist extramarital hysterectomy insurrection "iron curtain" "ku klux klan" "mao tse-tung" menstruation "stool pigeon"

"white racism" "white terror"

"conjugal rite" "dalkon shield" "white primary" "han chauvinism" "lustful excess"

"white backlash" "chiang kai-shek" insurrectionary "the proletariat" "white supremacy"

bandit chieftain

marxism-leninism

sexual inadquacy

sovereign rights

chinese civil war

sexual perversion

white supremacism

white supremacist

concentration camp

cotius intermammas

mao zedong thought

the xi'an incident

white man's burden

knee-chest position

nocturnal pollution

the communist party

the return of macao

the eight route army

the republic of china

chinese-british street

the return of hongkong

great-nation chauvinism

nationalist party (kmt)

the communist gangsters

tibet autonomous region

national autonomous area

tiananmen square massacre

big-nationality chauvinism

the communist youth league

national self-determination

national liberation movement

subversion and anti-subversion



Anyone know how I can get paid for making up word lists like this? The full (NSFW!) list is available here.