Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron - Search for Homeland: Finding the white horse/glitch horse
I hope this is the right place for this topic, couple of searches showed other people bringing up this game here.
Spirit is nostalgic to me and my sister growing up, along with the games we played based on it. Far as I know, there were only 2 games we owned and played: Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron - Forever Free for the PC, and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron - Search for Homeland for the GBA. The former we never completed due to not finding a certain item for the last horse in a town, but we've completed the latter game quite a lot.
However, Search for Homeland isn't exactly the best: its difficulty is horrendous, has bad enemy AI (the cowboys being the worst offender), limited resources in levels (but you can restart via menu/password if things get unbeatable), the horse taming mechanic in general, bad/glitchy collision on objects/enemies resulting in you getting stuck or moving through them, odd precise jumps, random graphical glitches/lag, and loud, blaring, repetitive music that'll not only give you a headache but also stick to your brain like glue.
This game is a mess. Fun sometimes, but still a buggy mess.
One thing that always stuck out to me about Search for Homeland is that the game randomly generates the horses you can ride for the 4 levels on each playthrough. On booting up the game, I always saw the following horses on these levels:
- Rain (Forest)
- Shadow (Prairie)
- Buttercup (Cliffs and Caves)
- Dream (Desert)
Spirit is always assigned to the final 2 levels, Cattle Ranch and Final Race. After completing Final Race and hitting the final jump, the game goes back to the title screen and upon playing again, you're likely to find new horses in the Taming Area. Rain always seems to be assigned to the Forest level, however I have vague memories of her occasionally being replaced with another horse and her being assigned to the Prairie.
Supposedly the horses change regardless of boot up/prolonged play, but I've only ever seen the previously mentioned 4 on boot up 100% of the time and new horses being shuffled around on long, continuous plays. The game's manual mentions this and showcases all the horses in the game:
Not counting Rain and Spirit, there are 8 other horses you can find and play with at random. How are they assigned, I can't say. I played the game on emulator to test and see if I could find all 8 other horses prior to the big jump via save states, but the game seems to set them for your next loop upon entering the final level. But I did notice the horses seemed to change if I accessed Cattle Ranch and exited it right after, but who knows how the game actually determines and generates the horses you'll get or if it swaps them out after exiting/completing a level.
There has always been a small enigma about this game's horse list, in that throughout my years of playing, I never once found the white horse. Or rather I vaguely recall finding it, but it wasn't quite right. The manual mentions a white horse named Cloud that you can find and play with, but I've never had this horse appear in the game. And apparently I'm not alone on this experience. Couple people I've seen talking about this game have mentioned never finding Cloud at all despite repeated playthroughs. On my emulator playthrough, I found nearly all the horses after at least 3-4 runs, but never the white horse:
In-game overworld sprites also provided for reference
As a child, I remember really trying to find this horse and supposedly stumbling upon it finally, but the problem was it wasn't a white horse but a light gray/blue/teal horse. I remember seeing the name Cloud on the status screen and questioning it, but I also could've been mistaken and remembering a different horse with a similar appearance named Lightning. According to other accounts, they found an entirely different horse. This horse has a corrupted palette and name, where looking at its status screen reportedly crashes the game. There's no denying this game is buggy, but I was curious about this glitched horse and wondered if maybe Cloud's palette was messed up due to poor programming. I set to work on doing a long playthrough loop of the game in an effort to find and confirm this rumor, but finding Cloud is like hunting for a full odds shiny Pokemon and not 100% guaranteed. Not to mention, having to play through the entire game, same areas, same enemies, same puzzles, same navigation, with the same music and dealing with all the bugs and difficulty is a nightmare that takes several minutes, especially with how grueling Cattle Ranch and Final Race are since they're the hardest and buggiest areas in the game.
Luckily I didn't suffer for too long since I discovered cheat codes exist for keeping your horse's health and taming bars infinite/static, plus also giving you all the items in your inventory (including a blue bird for some reason that I never knew about.) Here's the cheat codes for both the EU and US versions of the game: https://gamegenie.53lu.com/cheats/gba/spirit-stallion-of-the-cimarron.html
Unfortunately, you are required to beat each level anyway because Spirit is coded to only let you ride him and progress once each horse is in Homeland and you have the Taming Talisman item from Cliffs and Caves. Just having the item is not enough, but with cheats, knowledge of where to go, and muscle memory, you can just breeze through the levels with ease.
My attempts at finding Cloud came up empty regardless though. I then tried to use other people's passwords of the game to hopefully find a game state or loop where Cloud might be more likely to generate and appear. Like most licensed games, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron - Search for Homeland does not have a save file system, but a password system to retain progress and pick up where you left off. Youtube only has a few passwords scattered around of people's random playthroughs and speedruns, so I turned to another source: the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/spirit-search-for-homeland-manual/mode/2up
I found the game's manual on there when I was looking for a checklist for the horses to keep track of, and wouldn't you know it, the person who scanned their copy also left in written passwords in their booklet for me to play with. Maybe one of these will produce Cloud?
None of them did, but! I did discover 1, single code that produced something. On the back of the manual, the following password was written:
nwghhKG
DBCCwLq
And with it, you will find this horse:
This password has Rain's level completed, and the horse assigned to the Prairie level is a glitched horse, with the other 2 levels having normal horses (Orchid at the Cliffs and Caves and Fire at the Desert.) I was pretty excited to have finally found something entirely by chance that no one had documented before.
This glitched horse's name is not Cloud though, so it's unknown if it is Cloud but its data is corrupted/incomplete or some random corrupted data.
This horse functions like any other horse, its palette is just corrupted with junk colors. Even the status screen has it with messed up colors and its name being a random, unknown string of text cut off, but it surprisingly does not crash the game. I am playing on emulator though, so maybe that factors into things. I can't test on an actual copy since I can't find my game anymore.
There is a strange oddity about this horse though, and that's any password this horse generates does not work. I had 2 passwords for playing with it in the Prairie level, and when I input them on a fresh game reset, the game does not consider the passwords valid despite it being the one to generate them. The only reason the above password works is because you are taken to the Taming Area and not assigned a horse in a level.
Won't let me type the last character here because it thinks the code is invalid
While testing with the other written passwords, by pure chance I found yet another one that produces not only the glitched horse but an interesting game state:
HFnrrjN
ldCBBrr
This one starts you off on the second part of Cliffs and Caves, but with Rain as your horse with a very low taming and health bar, and the game alerting you that she no longer trusts you. You can cheat to instantly fix this, but you do have enough supplies without resorting to that to quickly fix this situation and get Rain up to snuff to complete the rest of the level. Upon completion, you'll find Rain is also assigned to the Forest level despite being at Cliffs and Caves, and that same glitched horse at the Prairie appears once again (the Desert has Buttercup.) This horse, despite being the same as the last glitched horse, has a different name:
Obviously this horse is getting its name from Orchid, a light brown horse. But it is curious as to what this horse is exactly and whether it truly is Cloud or the same glitched horse and a result of bad coding/glitches (given how shoddy this game is and the beta elements present in the manual, I'm thinking the latter theory.) Maybe Rain isn't supposed to be assigned to other levels and this horse appears because of that? Could the game's code for generating the horses be broken? Who knows? Unless someone knows how to code and maybe hack the game and access the data, we may never know if Cloud truly exists in the code and if there's a way to find it, or if this glitched horse is Cloud in some way and what causes it to show up.
Here's a few other codes I found via mistyping some on purpose that also have the glitched horse. Maybe some of you guys with the physical game can test them and see if the glitched horse crashes the game or not (might require you to beat a level to see it in the Taming Area):
tFnrrnj
NldCBBr
kNnkmgj
NldCCCq
I did this little playthrough experiment in the hopes of quenching a small childhood memory and also to put this information out there for others who've played this game and had this experience, but never saw any proof of it online until now.
It feels weird to make a detailed post like this for such an obscure game, but I like being able to find and share things for posterity on the internet.
If I find anything else or even Cloud, I'll be sure to update this post and provide a password for other people to enjoy. I'd also like it if anyone out there can share whether they found Cloud, the glitched horse, have a story about this game, or knows how to read game code and look into this game's inner workings.
