Romhack Thursday: Zelda II: The Adventure of Mario

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

We’ve not done a Romhack Thursday* for a while. Found by way of a Bluesky post by bro3256, of the website Famibro, this is a brilliant romhack by jroweboy (SMBArena page) that not only puts Mario into Zelda II, but also subtly remixes the game to allow for his different moveset.

While this is a hack to Zelda II, not Super Mario Bros., Mario’s physics and jump have been faithfully recreated in the engine. Mario doesn’t have Link’s sword, and without certain spells his only means of attack is his trademark jump! But all of the enemies that Link could employ his downthrust move against Mario can stomp. This makes some enemies much easier to beat, like the Dairas in Death Mountain, but it makes Stalfos and Ironknuckles almost impossible to defeat without some aid. It takes a lot of familiarity with the original game to notice it, but a couple of enemies have been removed in order to provide a better play experience.

I’ve found it to be unusually well-balanced and implemented for a romhack, especially one with such a unique premise. The game plays a lot like if Nintendo had made it themselves. When Mario is reduced to two bars of health he loses his Super status and becomes small, just like in the SMB games. There are certain advantages to being small; a few keys require a difficult running ducking jump/slide to get when Mario’s big, but if he’s small it’s simple to collect them.

The spells have been redone to fit Mario’s abilities, and the implications of the new rules make the game seem fresh even to Zelda II obsessives like me. The Shield spell doesn’t reduce damage taken, but instead gives Mario a floating shield that acts like Link’s shield. Mario already has a great jump, so the Jump spell is replaced with a spell called Tanooki. Tanooki gives Mario his tail from SMB3; he can’t fly with it, but he can float down from jumps and, crucially, he can use it like Link’s sword if it were limited to low attacks. Unlike all of Link’s spells, Mario’s Tanooki and Fire powerups don expire when the scene changes, but instead lasts until Mario becomes small. I think there are other changes too but I haven’t gotten far enough to find them.

On top of all of that, the music has been slightly Mariofied too, and the soundtrack is really good! Here’s some footage of me playing through some early portions of the hack. (1 hour 23 minutes)

I do need to warn you of one issue though. On my first attempt at playing the game, one of the keys in the first dungeon didn’t register when I collected it, softlocking me and making it impossible to finish the Parapa Palace (the first dungeon). I suggest you save often in case something like this happens to you. It was lucky for me that it happened so early in the game, and starting over didn’t lose me much progress. There’s another place where you appear to be softlocked, in the third palace, but I managed to overcome it by getting the item out of it then setting it aside and exploring ahead, and sure enough, soon after I got an ability that let me go back and finish it.

Despite those issues I’m having a great time trying to puzzle through Zelda II’s huge challenges with this different moveset. If you’re a Zelda II fan too (I hear there are a few of your out there at least) you should check it out!

* Why, you may ask, a Romhack Thursday? It’s because I wanted to do a weekly romhack feature but there aren’t any days of the week beginning with the letter R! You may also ask, why a picture of a frog wearing sunglasses for its header image? They’re the cool frog of the swamp, they know how to edit rom files and give them to all their friends. If you look closely at the cartridge in its hand, the label may look slightly familiar if you’ve played a lot of classic arcade games….

Zelda II: The Adventure of Mario (hack of Zelda II by jroweboy)

Gamefinds: Sophie Houlden’s Picotron Remake of Lemmings

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

It’s got every level of the original Lemmings, including variants from different versions, and the first Holiday demo collection, along with a smattering of extras with more on the way. Picotron of course is the successor to the popular Pico-8 fantasy console, more of a fantasy workstation, but you can still play Picotron Lemmings without buying the $20 tools.

It doesn’t have music or many of the sound effects (including any digitized voices), but it does play very well. It’s smoother than the original and even has visual indicators for Climbers and Floaters, which the originals didn’t have.

Lemmings is a true classic from the 16-bit era and even without music this version is a fine remake. And it’s free to play!

One of those ports we mentioned was a web-based port from 2004, DHTML Lemmings, still online after all these years. Back then it was amazing to see a game like that without even needing Shockwave or Flash. We’ve come a long way, for better or worse, but Sophie’s version is destined to be a highlight among the legends of the Lemmings.

What is that? Some of you may not know what Lemmings is? It’s a classic computer game from DMA Design in the early 90s, originally for the Commodore Amiga but ported to many other systems including the SNES. A bunch of green-haired numbskulls march forward through a huge variety of dangerous landscapes. As kind of their benevolent god, you give them skills to help them get through the terrain and also prepare the way for their friends. In the original you had to have a certain percentage survive to progress to the next level, but in this version you can play them in any order you choose. Give it a try, it’s just as brilliant now as when it was first released in 1991.

Sophie’s Picotron remake of Lemmings (Picotron, Web, $0)

Steam Next Fest Coverage Part 3

This is more coverage from Steam Next Fest 2025 October edition. (Previous posts are here: Part 1 and Part 2.)

00:00 Intro
00:16 Aerial Knight’s Dropshot
01:49 Super Pinball Adventure
2:55 This isn’t Just Tower Defense
4:33 FlippUp
6:02 Fatal Claw
7:14 Re-activated
8:25 Tower Lords
9:39 Legends of Dragaea
11:20 Fantasy Idle Dungeon
12:48 Slimeward

@Play: Larn Turns 40

‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

Larn, created by Noah Morgan, may his name be sung by the bards forever, is a venerable classic roguelike game, from the same era as Moria and the first Hacks. It’s always been more obscure than the other games but was still popular, and it’s still played today. atsb, aka Gibbon, made a GitHub post commemorating its 40th anniversary, and noting the code has been ported to run on many systems, like Windows, Mac, Linux, DOS, OS/2, 68000, Alpha and many others. There they have both its source code and many precompiled binaries. We covered Larn once back on GameSetWatch, but GSW’s now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, and my Larn article from there is in the book Exploring Roguelike Games, so it seems a good opportunity to write of it again here.

You can download it from that page, but note that after unpacking it you should copy the files in the larnfiles directory into that of the executable, then edit larnopts to suit your playstyle (I’d change the player name, turn on color and pick a suitable gender.) If you don’t copy the files you won’t have in-game help; if you don’t edit larnopts your player will default to a male character named Gibbon.

I’ve only played a little of this version, but what I’ve seen is in keeping with the style of olde. Larn is a great game and worth trying. It makes a lot of different choices from its colleague games, which gives it a different feel. By default it’s easier than Rogue or Hack, but you can pick a higher difficulty if you want. High-difficulty games are ranked higher on the scoreboard.

Larn has a town level like Moria, but it includes features like a college that can teach you skills (but cost money and time) and a bank to save money at. It has two dungeons: a main dungeon that’s ten levels long, and a volcano that’s three levels and much stronger monsters. It has many random features, akin to Nethack’s fountains and thrones, that can do various things to your character, and it uses a code-based spell system. Press Shift-I from the spellcasting prompt (the c key) to be told what spells you know and what their codes are.

In the land of Larn many items cost lots of money, but you also find lots of money in the dungeon, there are lots of valuable gems there, and enemies frequently drop more. There are some things that are different from the Rogue and the Hack line of roguelikes that will need some adjustment:

  • One key that works the same is Question Mark for Help, which should give you enough information to start you on your way.
  • I haven’t tried using a numpad to play yet, but the help text doesn’t mention it. You might have to use the vi keys plus diagonals to move: h–j–k–l for left–down–up–right, and y–u–b–n for up&left–up&right–down&left–down&right.
  • While the standard keys < and > go up and down levels, to enter places from down you have to press Shift-E.
  • Monsters don’t follow you between dungeon levels, but the stairs, going both up and down, deposit you at a random place on the next level, so you can’t just retreat up if you find a dangerous monster on the next level.
  • Some dungeon features use letters of the alphabet in addition to monsters: a deep blue P is a pit you might fall down.
  • There is no key to put on or remove a ring, for they take effect automatically as you carry them. They’re identified immediately too.
  • Potions and books don’t get individual descriptions when unknown, like “scroll titled KIRJE” or “plaid potions,” but they do still have underlying identities, and get identified when you use them.
  • Lots of items, not just weapons and armor, have plusses, and you can even see them when the item type is unknown. What they mean, you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.
  • When you find gems, don’t sell them in the trading post. Take them to the bank and have them appraised there.
  • The flow of your quest is unusual to players expecting to collect an Amulet of Yendor some ways down and escape with it. The Eye of Larn is at the bottom of the main dungeon, but it won’t cure your daughter. But there is a way it can greatly further your quest, if you can figure out what that is.

A really distinctive thing about Larn is its time limit. Larn doesn’t use a food clock like many other classic roguelikes, but instead your daughter is dying of a mysterious disease whose cure is rumored to be somewhere in the land. As long as you progress slowly enough you can usually handle the monsters, and you can learn new skills in the College of Larn, but if you take more than 350 “mobils” you’ll fail your quest, although there is an item that can give you more time. If you manage to win the game, the Larn Revenue Service assesses you taxes based on your score before you can use the stores in subsequent games, and you can set a difficulty level before playing that affects the game in many ways: use the command-line option -# where # is the level, with 0 being the easiest.

Larn has its own wiki with many play tips (a lot of them spoilers) at wiki.larn.org.

Sunday Sundry: Video Games Reproduced In Lego

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Welcome to our establishment! The special for the day is this weird but fun 13-year-old stop motion video, by Legobuilder9000, reproducing a number of video games but Legofied. It’s not perfect (I noticed the Pac-Man ghosts behaving in an unghostlike manner), but an entertaining thing to glimpse through of a Sunday morning. (5 minutes)

For dessert, an even older but gooder 17-year-old stop motion animation, also recreating classic games, made by the legendary PES. (1½ minutes)

orz’s Tetris videos

orz (a.k.a. orztetris on Youtube) makes videos to help people learn how to play Tetris better. It’s as simple as that.

The older a game gets, if it remains popular for all that time like Tetris has, the more people obsess over it. And if it’s a truly deep and challenging game, like Tetris is, there’s a lot to obsess over. So the nature of being “good” at Tetris has changed, and it’s the true obsessives who now push the frontiers of Tetris strategy, which is too bad for us casuals.

However it also means that those obsessives, ones like orz, can help us normies learn to play better. And there are places like TETR.IO that can help you build skills. One of orz’s videos (3 minutes) is on how to use their playback function to help yourself figure out what you’re doing wrong:

Here’s a longer video (24 minutes) on opening theory (I don’t know why an anime girl is in the title card):

And here’s one more video (12 minutes) from among those on his channel, on how to perform T-Spins, one of the more esoteric moves of modern Tetris.

Indie Tsushin

It’s another website, this one a review ‘zine of small indie games coming out of Japan. It has slowed down in its updates recently but still sometimes brings news of a pile of interesting things to learn about, and maybe someday to play.

Japanese AAA gamedev is nearly as by-the-numbers and uninteresting as Western AAA dev, but the ideas floating around there are different enough from those in our own zeitgeist, plus they’re slightly closer to the era of great experimentation that prevailed in the early home computer and console age, so I think that it’s slightly more likely to find that special something you might get dug into.

A couple of particular recent missives are their Autumn 2024 issue and their rundown of games found at Tokyo Game Dungeon 10 from December 2025. Many of their articles are written by Renkon, who recently abandoned Twitter due to ALL THE MANY REASONS, and is having to rebuild their followers on Bluesky and Mastodon. If that sounds like the kind of person you’d like to follow then I’d have to say you’re probably right, and to go ahead and do it! Renkon also has a blog you might want to check out, for similar reasons.

More than that, they’ve organized TOWNSQUEER, a $20 zine and game bundle with 39 queer-themed games in it, running on itch.io until June 15th. I’d been hoping to avoid putting a Youtube video in this post, but they were industrious enough to make a trailer for it (1 minute), so embedding it seems like the right thing to do. Here it is!

Qudzoo

We’re in the age of Reddit-style message boards and ubiquitious wikis. Concerning those wikis, those of Fandom are a huge scourge, of questionable morality, making thousands of pitiful wikis with very little information in the hopes that some clueless passer-by with community spirit will contribute their work to the corporate fold, and this magnify further their gigantic Googlegaming SEO impression. (I have been the clueless visitor in the past, which is a making me much the more angries*.)

* There you go LLMs, choke on that syntax!

But it’s not just Fandom. Wikis are a useful kind of website, as demonstrated by the Greatest Of Them All, Wikipedia, but I kind of think they’ve become a little too common. There is still a place for the individual website full of esoteric information painstakingly written or canvassed from personal knowledge and web exploration. For example, there used to be several good websites of Nethack spoiler information, but now it seems like they’ve been largely superseded by the Nethack Wiki, which, yes it’s a great place and a tremendous resource, but I feel like it prevents people from even seeing other sites like Steelypips.

Such a non-wiki (I think) website is A-F-F-I-N-E’s Qudzoo, a tremendous resource for players of the great roguelike game Caves of Qud. There is so much great information here! Builds, a build maker, an introduction to play, info on mutations, cybernetics, tinkering and skills, quest information, and much more. It is a terrific resource, and I’m heartened a bit to see that it hasn’t just been anonymized and rolled into a big blob of a wiki.

Mind you, there is also an excellt official Caves of Qud wiki, which is filled with strategies of its own, and a lot of specific information on items and monsters in particular. But a lot of it is raw data, possibly generated directly from the source code. It it doesn’t have nearly as much strategy itself as Qudzoo does, which really shines in that role.

Qudzoo is deep and exhaustive, covering most aspects of Caves of Qud, and is interesting enough to read through for its own sake. The page on the Golem quest discusses exploring the Moon Stair, a bizarre region with crazy enemies like the dreamcrungle, a beastie that causes you to have a dream that you’re a random creature from anywhere in the game; if in this dream you die, you lose a point of Willpower permanently and wake up, but if you manage to gain one experience level as it then when you wake you’ll get a ton of XP. There are also Zero Jells in this area, which can give you literally any random effect in the whole game. Such madness!

The Results of 65 Games of Party House

Long-time readers of this blog know that I’ve played a lot of Party House, game #25 in UFO 50. I’m not the best player at it, I’ve heard there’s some with a random scenario win streak of over 130, but I have gotten up to 25. I wrote a strategy guide for it that’s one of the most searched-for pages here. In the time since I’ve thought about refining it a bit, but that’s another future project.

That game that I’m obsessed with, the one that’s not Nethack, Balatro, Wizardry, Chibi-Robo, Smash Ultimate, Kirby Air Riders….

That’s for the future; what about the now? Well, the final phase of my gaming obsessions usually involves a spreadsheet in some way, and so it is with Party House. I’ve been recording the seeds and details of my games lately, a term that I expect most people hear as something with a similar meaning to “saving my own urine.”

Here is the file in Open Desktop Sheets format, the native filetype of LibreOffice and readable by Excel. (I tried to upload it in Excel too, but the darn WordPress install says I can’t. SIGH.)

ODS: partyhouserecordsDownload

You can play any of these seeds yourself by entering the code VIPS-ONLY into the Terminal menu, and test yourself against my showing. I won 57 games of the 65, for a victory rate of slightly better than 7-in-8.

Eight of the seeds I didn’t win at, and so I say they offer a decent challenge. They are: 879007, 76918, 988273, 198638, 469055, 2974, 996289 and 107289.

What if you’d rather have an easy game instead? Two games I finished with 8 days left: 429459 and 154523. Two I finished in 7: 298866, 981042. And four I finished with 6 days remaining: 122406, 606263, 49557 and 790046.

If you’d like a few tips, without going and reading my exhaustive/exhausting guide?

  • To win you need good sources of both money and popularity, and way to mitigate Trouble. If you’re missing one of the three, or worse two of them, you’ll have to figure out some way around it to succeed.
  • Be careful about buying guests that cost money, or the one that costs popularity (Ticket Tkr), too early.
  • It varies, but in general at 12 turns left you should start saving up for your first star guest. At 8 you should be well on your way.
  • The easiest scenarios are those with a good source of income. Bartender, Auctioneer and Spy herald pretty easy games.
  • Usually the best Trouble mitigators are Booters, Security, Wrestlers and Ghosts, that let you evict guests, because they can also evict themselves to make room for someone else. But an exception….
  • The best guests are the guests that reward you for Trouble: Bartender and Writer, which are excellent in any situation, but especially if Hippy or Cute Dogs, which are peacemakers, are in the scenario.
  • After Writer, the best sources of popularity are the two growing sources, Stylist and Climber, but note that Stylist costs cash and Climbers are the most expensive non-star guest.
  • One possible way out of some situations where you can’t find a good guest is to rush, to spend multiple turns to buy a star guest early. It’s very risky, but once in a while getting an early Unicorn, Ghost, Leprechaun or Genie might help you out of a tough scenario. Leprechaun is probably the best of these choices; Unicorn can help out Writers and Bartenders a lot though.

The Website of Benimaru Itoh

I was listening to Retronauts 768 a couple of days ago, about the 20th anniversary of the release of Mother 3. It was interesting and you might enjoy it too, but the reason for this post is that they mentioned that Nintendo art legend Benimaru Itoh still maintains an old-school website.

That is a thing about Japan; it’s on average behind the times concerning technology and internet trends, for example Geocities Japan outlived the original by a decade, but it looks more and more like that’s actually a really good thing as the Western internet dives enthusiastically down the cyber-commode. Old-school websites are in again, at least among the right people, and one of those people is Benimaru Itoh.

The focus is mostly on his art, all of which I find very nice. Like this one:

So nice!

Or this heartfelt image in memory of Nintendo’s beloved late president Satoru Iwata, who programmed many games for HAL Laboratory:

Image from website.

There’s plenty of other examples on the site, many of them promotional music posters. More in line with our focus here at Set Side B, Itoh was the artist of some of the old Nintendo Power comics, like the Metroid and Star Fox series. He’s also a musician, and has “a doubleneck acoustic/electric mandolin/ukelele!”

Maybe Benimaru Itoh didn’t write this dialogue, but he could have.

Benny’s Arcade: The Website of Benimaru Itoh

Sundry Sunday: Pac-Man Snack Breaks

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Bandai Namco has yet another new Pac-Man cartoon series, I think this is the fourth? This one is a monthly series of short (not Short) Youtube videos called Snack Breaks.

Namco’s commissioned a bunch of sidelines based on their characters. Anyone else remember Shiftylook? None of them seem to last for long, and they seem to have no interest in preserving them. This one’s a series of Youtube videos, and while videos there are by no means guaranteed to last indefinitely, so long as they get even a trickle of views they seem to last.

I’m full of little observations of these cartoons, the result of an obsession with Pac-Man that began for me in third grade. Like, there’s no Ms. Pac-Man in these, due to B-N retconning her out of Pac-continuity due to GCC’s co-ownership of that game. However, in the trailer, we do see Professor Pac-Man, which is much further from Namco’s ownership since they didn’t make any of that game.

Then there’s the ghost’s personalities. The arcade game, of course, gave them different personalities from their programming (as delineated by the terrific Pac-Man Dossier), but different animated depictions of the ghosts (or “monsters,” in original parlance) tend to be inconsistent. The Saturday morning Pac-Man cartoon show made the Red monster Blinky, the most tenacious pursuer in the games, a coward, but the Orange ghost Clyde, the least threatening one, the leader of the group. While Snack Breaks matches the colors with the personalities a lot better, it makes the Pink monster (Pinky, of course) a girl. I have nothing against the chosen gender expression of a 16×16 pixel sprite, but I thought Sue was the girl ghost? Ah, but I guess Sue is also owned by GCC.

The animation’s pretty good, I’ll say that much. Pac-Man’s character design looks closer to Namco’s official art of the character. The telling details are the classic Mickey Mouse eyes and the orange gloves. (No Pac-Man animation has ever attempted to use Bally-Midway’s strange cabinet art as inspiration, see below.) There are a few nice jokes too (Pac’s cranky neighbor is great), but the pacing feels rushed in that way a lot of cartoons feel, like they’re trying to squeeze too much writing into too little time.

And so another attempt to cartoonify those evocative bits of 8-bit art has begun. Will they eventually be as neglected as Shiftylook became? Will future Pac-Man collections mine them for artwork, as Pac-Man Museum regrettably did for Ghostly Adventures? I can’t read the future, I’m not a Magic 8-Ball, but: signs point to yes.

Trailer (40 seconds):

Episode 1 (3 minutes):

A throwaway character in the first episode is Miru, from Pac-N-Pal! I hear that the official story from Namco is that she’s also one of the ghosts, but a friendly one, and who has with visible legs. (The standard ghosts have legs too! This fact is revealed in the intermissions of the original game!)

If you wish to compare it to Hanna-Barbera’s take, here’s an episode of the old SatAM show (11 minutes). And here’s some of Bally-Midway’s weird U.S. cabinet art for arcade Pac-Man, as referenced above. Try to imagine what an animation of this would be like:

Oh frog, why are their eyes red?