America Oudan Ultra Quiz - English Patch

This is the English translation for the Super Famicom (snes) game アメリカ横断ウルトラクイズ (america ouden urutora kuizu) aka America Ouden Ultra Quiz.

Patch

The patch applies to the following rom:
Name: America Oudan Ultra Quiz (Japan)
File/ROM SHA-1: 7D53B77C51C7C7E964F40E12B641A405D2E68B2A
File/ROM CRC32: 9624E6ED

TV Show

The game is based on a TV trivia show of the same name that ran on NTV from 1977 to 1992 once a year.

The official English title for the show is TRANS AMERICA ULTRA QUIZ.

The host in the game is Akira Fukuzawa (福澤朗), a famous annoucer, newscaster and actor on Japanese television.

He started hosting the show in 1991 when his predecessor Norio Fukutome left.

Akira hosted part of episode 15 (1991) and all of episode 16 (1992) but didn’t partake in the 1998 special.

His catch-phrase and nickname, acquired when casting wrestling competitions, is ジャストミート (Just Meet).

In Japanese, the phrase “just meet” is used in baseball when the bat hits the ball perfectly. I translated it as “top-notch” in the game.

You can watch footage of the TV show on youtube or nicovideo.

It’s mostly trivia with some minor physical exercise (like running through marked paper sheets to provide a true or false answer). It starts with thousands of participants in Tokyo, and moves to various cities across America where participants progressively get eliminated until there are only two left in New York.

Some episodes also had stages in other parts of the world such as Mexico, Canada, the Bahamas, the UK, France, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and the Dominican Republic.

The Super Famicom game is specifically inspired by episode 16 that aired in four parts in June 1992.

Here are some screenshots of that episode.

Title screen

Akira Fukuzawa

The show always started at the Tokyo Dome

More than 26,000 participants gathered for the preliminary round

The first question was always about the Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty first appeared on U.S. coins in 1986 for the centennial. True or False?

Toshio Fukui, famous weatherman, doing a skit outside the Tokyo Dome, trying to predict the correct answer based on weather patterns and answers of the previous years

This person brought a pet bird for advice which is reminiscent of the animals used to predict game results in the World Cup

Inside the Tokyo Dome. For the first question, people are seated in "true" and "false" sections of the bleachers. When enough people are eliminated, they get to run on the field to the "true" and "false" areas.

Many people wore American-coded outfits or make up

The participants for this episode went through the following locations (number of participants at each stage): Tokyo Dome (26121) , Narita Airport (100), In flight (55), Guam (40), Hawaii (24), San Francisco (11), Cameron Park (9), Lake Powell (8), Santa Fe (7), Atlanta (6), Florida Keys (5), Philadelphia (4), New York (2)

This was the last show after 16 years in a row. It was later revived for a one-off program called “the last of the century” in 1998. That year, a record 70,000 people showed up to the Tokyo Dome (55,000 capacity). Only 50,000 participants were let in. Over the years, there has been discussion about reviving the program but security concerns since 9/11 have stopped any attempt.

The winner of episode 16 was Kenichi Tanaka. He’s active online and describes himself as a “quiz writer” and proofreader. Here are the links to his blog and his website.

In 2017, the 16th episode was rebroadcast on TV and fans and finalists gathered for a watch party in Tokyo.

Super Famicom game

In the game, there are two types of questions : True or False, and Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) having 3 possible answers.

In the True or False question, true is a circle (まる maru) and false is a cross (ばつ batsu).

Some stages are just questions, some also involves a mini-game.

The game contains 704 True or False (11x64) and 2368 MCQ (37x64). I’ve translated all True or False and 512 MCQ. Otherwise, the translation is fully functional.

The questions are mostly about Japanese and American cultures, with some general knowledge. The most recurring themes are animals, plants, food, and sports (The 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games must have occurred right during development).

Many of the question about Japanese culture are super specific. I’ve translated some of them as they were, others I’ve adapted.

I’ve had to completely change or remove questions that didn’t make sense to translate. For example, crane (construction equipment) is クレーン (kurēn) but crane (bird) is つる (tsuru), so asking “what does crane mean? Answer: crane” only works in Japanese.

I’ve also fixed a few errors in the original version:

• Nixon was not elected 3 times
• All Quiet on the Western Front is not set at the Polish border
• Konpeitō doesn’t come from Spain
• Japan launched a 4th Himawari satellite in 1989

Easy mode reduces the number of points required to pass in some stages but doesn’t change the way questions are selected.

Stages

Stage 1 - Tokyo Dome

It’s a True (〇) or False (Ｘ) quiz. You have to move to the correct section of the field to answer.

Stage 2 - Narita Airport

It’s a rock-paper-scissor duel.

Stage 3 - Flight

30 questions. You don’t get to see your points. I think you have to answer half of them correctly to pass.

Stage 4 - Guam

It’s a True (〇) or False (Ｘ) quiz. You have to land on the correct pad to answer.

Stage 5 - San Jose

You have to complete 5 ball mazes. You steer the ball with left and right, it moves automatically. The longer it goes, the faster the ball. When you reach the Q area, you are quizzed. Then you have to reach the correct spot (1,2 or 3) to answer.

I find that this is the hardest mini-game. Fortunately, the ball speed resets after the question.

Stage 6 - Nevada

This is a hovercraft race. You speed up with A and steer with left and right.

Your energy bar in the top right is both your fuel and your life. It goes down over time and when you hit other racers or go off track.

There are two different boosts on the track: N for nitro (speed boost), E for energy (energy boost).

At the end of each track, you are quizzed. You must pick a lane to answer (1 is left, 2 is middle, 3 is right), if you’re correct your energy is refilled.

You must complete 5 tracks to pass.

Stage 7 - Key West

This is a shooting game. You shoot at the panels to flip them and reveal the True or False statement. Then, you must shoot the panels (〇) or (Ｘ) to answer (wrong answer are -1pt).

If you shoot the balloons, you have to wait for the panel to respawn. Time is limited.

You need 4 pts to pass.

Stage 8 - Kentucky

This is a MCQ quiz. You first have to run around in a field to catch flying envelopes. Once you got one, you must take it to Akira and answer the question.

Some envelopes are empty. You need 5 pts to move on to the next stage.

Stage 9 - Washington

This is a shmup! Move with the d-pad and shoot with A. You must pick up 4 question marks to get a multiple choice question.

There are 3 power-ups: Blue P is speed, Red P is upgraded shot and yellow 1UPs.

Once you reach 5 points, you have to defeat a boss.

Stage 10 - New York

No mini-game. This is a regular multiple choice quiz against the CPU. The questions are slowly printed out, you must press A whenever you want to answer. When you do, it interrupts the printing of the question and you only see the choices.

You must get 10 pts to win. Go down to -3 and it’s game over.

Ending

One odd thing about the ending, if we’re flying back from New York to Tokyo, why are we going East over the Atlantic ocean towards the rising sun?

Question selection

This is a romhack started many years ago that was only missing the questions. I haven’t touch on the code which is why the dialog display is a bit clunky.

The statements/questions are grouped in file of 64. There are 11 true or false files and 8 MCQ files. For a given stage, a file is randomly chosen between the briefing and the start of the mini-game. Then the questions used during that stage are random among the 64 of that file.

So if you’re using save states after the briefing of a stage, don’t be surprised to see repeats of the same questions. You can save state at the end of the briefing to avoid that (when the blinking cursor changes from an arrow to the head of the Statue of Liberty).

If you play without save states, you can also get lucky and have the same file selected in a later stage, meaning that you’ll have already seen some of the questions.

Play however you want, know that the game is very hard for any non-Japanese people.

I may translate more questions in the future but I think that 512 out of 2364 already gives a good overview of what the game entails. It also takes a lot of time and research to fact-check everything. For what it’s worth, I feel that I’ve done the game justice enough.