Documenting an Obscure Japanese Wii Game
and-Kensaku
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I have been using Claude for the past couple of days this week to document and modify the TR2 game file format for an obscure Japanese-exclusive Wii game called And-Kensaku, or 安藤ケンサク. And-Kensaku is a game related to Googling. There are a few game modes, but the most famous one asks you a question and gives you two answer options, and you win if you choose the most popular Google search. I have been able to do the following: 1. disable signature checks on the files, and 2. allow edits to the Phrases.tr2 file, making it possible to modify the content of the aforementioned game mode. I wanted to go on this little adventure because reverse-engineering file formats is an extremely difficult (at least for me) and time-consuming task, and I wondered how well Claude would do at it. Right now, not everything about this game is documented, but I would like to fully document it and maybe release an English patch.
HN · launched Jun 6, 2026 · 7 upvotes (top 58%) · 1 view
Niche: video game modding and translation tools · 44 launches, 4 in the last 7 days ▼ -56% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Content generation
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 44 launches in video game modding and translation tools →
Could you build this?
Partial While LLMs can help write unpacker scripts, reverse-engineering proprietary binary game archive formats typically requires specialized binary disassembly and hex inspection. The author even noted using Claude to assist, but discovering the underlying format specs requires hands-on reverse-engineering.
What it would actually take: A developer needs tools like Ghidra/IDA Pro to disassemble Wii PowerPC binaries and Dolphin emulator memory dumps to identify how the TR2 file format is structured. Once the header offsets, compression (e.g., Yaz0/LZ77), and byte-alignment schemes are mapped, custom unpacker/repacker scripts are written in Python or Rust. The hard part is the initial reverse engineering of proprietary byte layouts and decompression routines.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Feature requests: Port to DS
Competitors
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Attention rank: #82 of 138 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 207 days after the earliest competitor.
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