On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Last month we brought you Metroid + Saving, a passable attempt to make a classic game, that has a number of quirks related to it being a fairly early NES game, less frustrating to newer (younger) players. This week’s hack is another with that theme, snarfblam’s hack of NES The Legend of Zelda that adds a working automap to the game.
Like Metroid, finding your way around 128 screens of Hyrule is challenging, even if the game isn’t as large as, say, the Gameboy Link’s Awakening, which had 256 screens. But the limited number of tiles also decreases each screen’s visual distinctiveness, especially up in the mountainous regions.
The map appears in the upper-left corner of the overworld screens, which you can see in these screenshots. A special touch is that the map isn’t revealed all at the start but fills in as the player explores, and doesn’t consist of blank squares to show explored areas but even shows some detail. Places where screens are blocked internally are shown on the map, which is a great aid to both navigation and memory.
It immediately becomes evident that, like with Metroid + Saving’s mapping feature, it’s how the game should have been written originally, and probably would have been if design trends had evolved just a bit further at the time.
There are a couple of other graphical niceties in the hack, like health being shown in the life meter in 1/8th-heart increments. But overall the map is the main attraction here. It’s such a fundamental change to the game that the much more involved hack Zelda Redux uses it too. It is also worth trying out, if you still find the original Legend of Zelda to be a bit too hardcore for you.
I’ve created a new category to give more spotlights to games. For this one, I’m honoring the games that didn’t blow up as a revolutionary take on the genre but were all around great games that did what they set out to do.
Honorable Mention: Drainus
Drainus was a great shmup that was released to little fanfare as the latest game from Team Ladybug. I really like the pixel art and the ability to modify your ship and shots on the fly. What keeps it from scoring higher is that while it was a good game, it didn’t really stick around as a memorable one. I would love for someone to take this concept of ship modification further in a future game.
#3: Shadows over Loathing
The latest game from the king of dry wit and humor is Shadows over Loathing. We’re trading the wild west and horse-related puns for Lovecraftian mysteries…and puns. This not-so-spooky sequel to West continues the series’ design of puzzle, adventure, and wacky RPG hijinks. At this point, you are either all in or all out for a Loathing game, and I enjoyed my time slinging cheese at fish people.
#2: Infernax
What if we take a traditional 2D action-adventure and cover it with all the blood? We get Infernax. This challenging modern retro game had some of the most shocking NES-styled cutscene around with meat on the bone in the form of multiple endings. As with the other games on this list, while the game doesn’t stand out among the modern retro classics I’ve played, it’s still a solid game for action fans.
#1: Swordship
Swordship is one of those games that I feel deserves more praise than what it has gotten. A smartly designed arcade-style game. The hook is that while you must dodge and fight against drones trying to stop you from delivering contraband, you are never able to directly attack. You need to maneuver around to get enemies to take out each other.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
The Complete Guide to Koholint was his first Zelda podcast, and it discusses each of the 256 overworld screens of Link’s Awakening. 256(!) episodes. They vary in length between one minute and 47, with most being just a few minutes long. RSS.
Back in the days of the Apple II, there was a thriving scene in trading copies of commercial software. Means to prevent this, through copy protection schemes, were just as rampant, as publishers sought to protect their work from those who would use it without paying. The process of figuring out a disk’s copy protection and making it so it could be copied and run by others was called cracking, or sometimes, kracking.
Cracking was, and still is, a black art. There are many ways to protect a disk from being copied, and just as many to deprotect that data. Some disks remain uncracked to this day. It is the work of Apple II cracker 4am (Mastodon) to try to unlock the data on these rapidly aging pieces of media so they can be preserved. (On 4am, jump to the bottom.)
The Apple II Kracker’s Guide seems to have been written by a anonymous user known as The Disk Jockey. It’s a good overview of basic forms of copy protection and ways to defeat them. A copy is at the Internet Archive, but I encountered it in the collection at bitsavers.org, here. It’s like candy to someone of the right frame of mind. Like me!
Aside: If the name 4am sounds familiar, and you find yourself thinking “Didn’t he used to be on Twitter?” He was. He’s not anymore. This happened several months before the Age of Musk. Twitter’s automated processes decided somehow that a video he tweeted of Apple II software Super Print booting was revenge porn and banned him, even rejecting an appeal. He moved to Mastodon. Now that Twitter is missing half of its employees, situations like this will probably become more common. 4am is not the subject of this post, but if you want to read more about Apple II protection and its breaking, you should follow him on Mastodon. He has about one tenth of the followers there that he had on Twitter, which is a shame.
This one’s crazy. The Gameboy does not have external video output. In order to get its display to appear on a screen other than its built in LCD dox matrix, you absolutely have to at least crack open the case. Don’t you?
Well, actually, yes, if you always want a perfect image. Sebastian Staacks (an awesome name) figured out a way to do it that mostly works. It’s a cartridge that goes into the Gameboy, that itself has a slot into which you plug the cartridge that you wish to play. Simple, right?
No, no, wait. There’s a problem. The Gameboy doesn’t expose its video through the cartridge port. There is no pin leading out providing a video signal that can be converted for display. There’s no way this could work!
Well, there is a way, kind of. The device contains a Raspberry Pi that runs its own Gameboy emulator, that it tries to keep synced with the version running on physical hardware. It does this by watching bus activity exposed to it through the cartridge port!
But while there’s a lot that it can do with this information, there’s also a lot it can’t see. It can’t, for example, see directly what buttons are being pressed. However, by watching how the cartridge reads the cart ROM, it can deduce what inputs were pressed.
The process is not perfect. While it can spy some memory accesses, a few things escape its inspection. While it can recreate the layout of the starting blocks in Tetris Game B, it can’t catch their randomized appearances. Also, while a Raspberry Pi is much faster than a Gameboy, it’s not fast enough to carry out its display in the same frame as the main unit, so it lags behind a couple of frames. Still though, it’s a very clever idea, and it’s amazing that it works as well as it does!
Sebastian made a Youtube video explaining and showing off his work, here. (It’s the same one embedded above.)
Oh no! As a New Year’s Day “treat,” today’s weird game video is Animal World Soccer! Despair and dismay!
A “game” for the Playstation 2, this amazingly cheap production has no Soccer-based play. Instead, it’s a collection of simple puzzles and activities bundled along with a 43-minute video file of some of the worst animation that this spectator has ever seen, and I’ve seen Paddy the Pelican!
How and why this was made is unknown to me. It’s an inexplicable artifact of an unknown process. Why is the entire video under-laid with that tension-filled drumbeat? Why are character designs so inconsistent? Why does it look like they outright stole the designs for Simba and Mufasa from The Lion King for their lions? Why do some animals go about on all-fours while others stand upright and wear clothes? None of these questions are answered. None of these questions have answers! You see folks, they just didn’t care.
Okay, there is a bit of an explanation….
This animation was produced by a company called Dingo Pictures. The game, which Destructoid called “the worst game ever made,” (which is a big claim, there’s lots of awful games), was produced by Phoenix Games, which only distributed to the European market.
There is certainly more to this story. But I can’t bring myself to dig into it.
I worry that he’ll never finish his many Youtube game history projects, but Jeremy Parish has hit an important milestore as Segaiden, his Sega-specific series, reaches the beginning of the Master System era! In addition to the console itself three games are covered this time, including the pack-in that’s so packed-in that it’s included on the system’s circuit board itself.
There’s no shortage of game history videos out there, but Jeremy’s work is among the best, tieing the other collection of relentlessly-complete game cataloging projects, Dr. Sparkle’s Chrontendo, Chronsega and Chronturbo. I find that neither Jeremy nor Sparkle’s projects replace the other, but instead look at their subjects from different angles. Jeremy Parish has more of a view of context, both from other games and history, while the various Chrons look directly at each game’s play.
But importantly, neither of them succumb to the many excesses of Youtube gaming culture: they aren’t hyperedited, they aren’t overloaded with sound effects and swishy graphics, neither of them feel like they’re aimed at 14-year-olds, and no video in any of their series looks like it’s trying to complete with Tiktok. Whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing–well, let me clarify your thinking for you. It’s a good thing. It’s a very good thing.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Everyone’s favorite, or at least the most famous, charity speedrunning marathon is back! It’s January 8 through 14. This is the one with Awful Block, BTW! This year AGDQ is being run to support the Prevent Cancer Foundation.12
This year I have a schedule conflict and so I won’t be able to watch it as carefully to report on day to day here. But I can try to say something where I can when I happen to catch a stolen moment!
Of note, AGDQ 2023 this year is completely online again. SGDQ this year went back to being in person, but particular issues resulted in AGDQ going back to online-only. Specifically, back in 2020 before the pandemic happened, they had locked in a venue in Florida. Since then not only did the pandemic hit, but Florida went absolutely anti-vaccine crazy, not to mention anti-trans!
Both of these factors resulted in their decision to not hold the event in Florida, even though it requires paying substantial cancellation fees. That sucks, but I support them in this decision, and I say this as someone who lives in a state close to Florida.
Even though I won’t be able to follow it as closely as last time, they will still be posting archives of all their runs to Youtube so they can be watched after the fact! And I can still take a moment to have a look at their schedule right now and find some things that might be of interest out our audience of three, maybe even four people. All times here are US Eastern:
SUNDAY, January 8th
Noon: Splatoon 3, still a really new game so you’ll probably to be able to see a lot of new tech!
1:30 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The past six years this game has been absolutely blown apart in strange and entertaining ways! This may be its last year in the spotlight though, since its sequel is coming out this year!
4:29 PM: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. An old favorite!
11:19 PM: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky. This is a randomizer run, so unusual events may be in the offing!
MONDAY, January 9th
4:30 AM: Ax Battler, A Legend of Golden Axe. A fairly obscure Game Gear game, focusing on the least charismatic character of the original Golden Axe trio.
7:35 AM: Bomberman 64: The Second Attack.
11:39 AM: Shovel Knight Dig. A race!
2:54 PM: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. This is that recent game made as an homage to the classic Konami arcade titles! This is described as a “chill race,” and is being played in co-op mode.
6:59 PM: Portal. A “bonus game,” which will be done if a donation incentive is met. Portal is another game that’s been annihilated by speedrunners.
10:59 PM: Fable Anniversary.
TUESDAY, January 10th
12:29 AM: Ape Escape 2.
3:39 AM: Goat Simulator. “Here comes that goat again….”
10:29 AM: Castlevania: Harmony of Despair.
11:39 AM: Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.
2:30 PM: Super Mario Galaxy 2.
7:05 PM: Outer Wilds.
WEDNESDAY, January 11th
4:02 AM: FEZ.
6:28 AM: Final Fantasy VII. Over seven hours!
2:03 PM: Stardew Valley. A glitchless race.
2:53 PM: A Sonic the Hedgehog block, with Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Colors: Ultimate and Sonic Advance 2, which is the subject of a character bidwar. #teamamy
5:21 PM: Pokemon Red “or Yellow,” I don’t know what that means. Glitchless, but only two hours long. How?
7:36 PM: Ocarina of Time 3D.
8:21 PM: Last year’s hit Stray as a bonus game.
11:54 PM: Kirby Star Allies, with a “Guest Star?”
THURSDAY, January 12th
12:44 AM: Pac-Man: The New Adventures. This is that funky 16-bit game where you don’t directly control Pac-Man but instead try to influence an AI-controlled Pac to do what needs doing. This may be intended to kick off Awful Block, but I don’t think it’s really awful, just, not really much of a Pac-Man game.
1:23 AM: AWFUL BLOCK! Yo! Noid 2: Game of a Year Edition, Yolanda, Lizard Lady vs. The Cats, Office Race, Salamander County Public Television, Battle of the Eras, Morodashi Sumo, Dokkaebi-ga Ganda, I’m going to die if I don’t eat sushi!, Sonic Blast, Bad Guys At School, and Steven Seagal is the Final Option, at 7:05 AM.
8:59 AM: The World Ends With You: Final Remix.
12:54 PM: Metal Slug. Oh I’m sorry, that should be Metal Slug!, with an exclamation point.
2:00 PM: BS The Legend of Zelda. Not only is this a terrifically obscure game, only released on the Satellaview in Japan (and only coming down to us in any form due to the hard work of preservationists and hackers), but it’s a 100% race!
6:17 PM: Puyo Puyo Fever 2.
6:57 PM: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe DLC tracks as a bonus game.
8:27 PM: The Simpsons Hit & Run.
11:43 PM: Power Wash Simulator.
FRIDAY, January 13th
3:06 AM: Kirby Air Ride. A hugely underrated game! Although sadly this is normal racing and not its stand-out mode, City Trial.
3:39 AM: A short NES block, with Jackal, Mickey Mousecapade and Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers.
5:33 AM: Beautiful Katamari.
7:03 AM: Gunstar Heroes.
8:28 AM: Kirby’s Adventure.
10:35 AM: Metroid Prime 1+2. Multiworld Randomizer Co-op. How will this even work?
1:45 PM: Cult of the Lamb.
6:00 PM: Elephants and Snakes and Crocodiles. On the SNES? I’ve never even heard of this one!
6:55 PM: Final Fantasy XIV. The description of this one is a jumbled alphabet of abbreviations and initialisms, I have no idea what any of that means.
8:05 PM: Arcade Stepmania, as a bonus game. This is a demonstration, not an actual speedrun, but these tend to be insane anyway!
9:35 PM: Super Mario All-Stars Shuffler.
SATURDAY, January 14th
2:38 AM: Blinx the Time Sweeper.
5:29 AM: Mega Man 64 and Mega Man Rock N Roll. The first of these two is the N64 version of Mega Man Legends, the second is a fan game.
9:08 AM: Donald (Duck) in Maui Mallard.
11:27 AM: Metroid Dread. All boss glitchless. To think we went from this game being a vaguely rumored cancelled title to an official release being speedrun at AGDQ in a little over a year.
1:17 PM: Terraria.
6:02 PM: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as a bonus game.
10:53: Super Mario 3. Warpless, but any%.
That should be it, although of course they like to put in unannounced bonus games toward the end, so keep your eyes open!
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Hiya hiya hiya Earth pleps, it’s your favorite alien gaming newscaster, here again with all the news that’s fit to blorp! Let’s get underway–
Ethan Gach at Kotaku notes that Nintendo had a video from DidYouKnowGaming about a failed pitch for a Zelda game that Retro Studios put together, but DYKG managed to get it reversed! Judging by the fact that like 90% of the posts on this blog seem to be about Nintendo one way or another you might think we’d be on their side in this, but nuh-uh! Nintendo abuses copyright law way too much, it’s good that this video was allowed to stand, yet it’s bad that ultimately Nintendo doesn’t suffer from these egregious actions. They can effectively throw out these legal threats with impunity, and their fans will just forgive them every time! I know that it certainly makes us feel a little bad about talking up their games so much!
So, more Nintendo stuff. At NintendoLife, Ollie Reynolds says that 2023 will be the year of 3DS GamePass. They even got an unshaven video maker on their staff to make the case for it. I mean, we’d like nothing better than to see that, but Nintendo themselves largely gave up on the 3DS and all its features years ago. It’s a nice thought though!
Pocket Card Jockey Official image, from the Mobygames site
Also from Reynolds, good news: Pocket Card Jockey is getting a new edition! And they call it Game Freak’s secret best game! Yes, sweet vendication! And to think they gave its 3DS incarnation a “solid” 7 out of 10 at its release. But wait, there’s also bad news: it’s not coming to the Switch! It’s an exclusive release for Apple Arcade! Seems pretty boneheaded to me, but I don’t have an internal skeleton so what do I know?
We love it when we can link to an article outside our usual stable, so here’s an article originally published in Japanese on Rockman Unity, translated into English and presented on Rockman Corner, an interview with the director of Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection about its upcoming release. Those games don’t get nearly the love they’re due, and it’s nice to see them given another chance to shine. Particularly, we’re told that the link cable battle play of the original games has been replaced with online matchmaking!
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
The 2D Super Mario Bros. games illustrate pretty well how game design tastes were changing through the NES era. Super Mario Bros. and Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 still follow an arcade-like paradigm, where players are expected to lose many games before they finally rescue the princess. (Obviously, Vs. Super Mario Bros, being a coin-op game and which was released between those two, adheres to an arcade play ethic out of necessity.)
But Super Mario Bros. 2 is more of an adventure, where a skilled player might finish it on their first try, and an experienced Mario master can amass so many extra lives in Super Mario Bros. 3, as soon as World 1-2, as to make finishing it on the first attempt quite possible. Then when we move into Super Mario World we have outright game saving, and the fear of the Game Over screen recedes almost completely. That is the structure that all the later Mario games have followed, where losing progress is fairly unlikely.
I am not here to claim that this is a bad thing, and of course, even Super Mario Bros. offers to let the player continue on the world they lost on with the use of a code. But the code is still a secret, and while it isn’t a bad thing, it is a different thing. Super Mario Bros. with the copious extra lives and rule changes of later games, would be much a different experience to play through, even if all the levels are unchanged.
The romhack Super Mario Bros. Tweaked, created by Ribiveer, makes those changes. The worlds are exactly the same, but many subtle aspects of SMB have been brought into line with its sequels. Here is a list:
• Starmen count the number of enemies you defeat while invincible, increasing scoring, and if you get enough you start earning extra lives. This change alone will earn you tons of extra lives.
• Extra lives over 10 are displayed correctly on the level start screen, and are limited to 99. Mario’s state on the start screen is properly updated based on his powerup state.
• If you hold the jump button down while stomping on an enemy, you get extra height. This happens in Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 as well, of course.
• Consecutive stomps and enemies defeated by shells and Starmen increase the pitch of the enemy defeat noise as points increase, as they do in Super Mario World and later 2D Mario games.
• Taking a hit while Fiery Mario reduces you to Super status. Also, if you make a Fire Flower appear, then take a hit before collecting it and get reduced to Small Mario, collecting the Flower still advances you to Fiery state.
• Reaching the top of a flagpole awards you not points but an extra life.
• Invisible extra life blocks aren’t disabled if you failed to collect enough coins in the previous world’s third level, as explained in our previous post.
• Collecting a powerup in midair no longer ends your jump.
• The conditional scroll stop at the end of 1-2 and 4-2, which is broken in the unmodified game, work now, making it much harder to reach the famous Minus World. It’s still possible to reach it; the patch author promises a surprise if you do.
Some of these changes mean that players get a lot more extra lives, greatly decreasing the game’s difficulty. Consider that now, 38 years after the game’s release, far fewer play Super Mario Bros. than they used to. Someone might dust off their old NES some time, or play it on Virtual Console or through Nintendo Online on Switch, or emulate it by some other means.
But most people now who play SMB are probably people who are at least very good at it: streamers and speedrunners. People who don’t need the game to be made any easier. A patch like this might open Super Mario Bros. up to people who always thought it was too difficult, though.
It does feel a touch fairer, without that expectation that players will lose over and over. If you always found the first Super Mario game too challenging, give this hack a try. The challenges are pretty much the same, but you’ll have quite a few more chances to learn to overcome them.
You can now binge on extra lives as easily as you can in later games
You don’t have to trigger the game’s secret condition to make extra life blocks appear
Oh almost forgot, some of the Cheep Cheeps are green now
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
