Romhack Thursday: Max in Streets of Rage 2

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

There are lots of Streets of Rage romhacks. Just a partial list: Billy, Nick Fury, The Punisher, Nightcrawler, Ditto, Colossus, Zitz and Pimple, Wolverine, Garfield and many more than that.

Many of them seem to exist only for the questionable thrill of playing character from Property X in Video Game Y, fun for a few minutes maybe, then time to move on. They’re so disposable, and there are so many of them, that I’ve resisted linking to any of them here.

And I’m not going to claim that playing through as Max, from underground comic, cult adventure games and short-lived cartoon show Sam & Max, is much different. But if there’s any irreverent comic character that feels like they were made for this kind of beat-em-up nonsense, it’s the hyperkinetic rabbity thing themself, so please take this hack as representative of the whole. Video, two minutes long:

Max in Streets of Rage 2:
Hack (by Metal64, Ultimecia and Dazz)
Video (by RetroGaming)

Another Retro Blog: Retro365

If blogging is ever going to come back from its loss to social media, it’s going to have to be from going more social itself. By that I mean links between blogs, making it easier to surface sites to others. Not only directly, but by helping to raise each other’s Google rank, although I think time has shown that Google is a fickle friend to people producing material for the Web, any site prominence you gain can easily be wiped away the next time they change their algorithm. Bigsites naturally get traffic just from being established, and other sites try to become big by gaming their placement with hyper artificial SEO techniques. Meanwhile us littlesites have to succeed largely by being interesting and direct views, as well as what traffic we can gather through followers through RSS, social media, Patreon and other sources. And there’s no reason not to help each other out. We’re not in competition between us. Any cross link, wherever, strengthens us all.

Here’s one from me. Retro365 has a vast collection of gaming media from the earlier days of home computing, and has been going for about three years now. They’ve got lots of demonstrated software on their Youtube channel. If you have an interest in learning about, or just seeing this stuff, they’ve got plenty for you.

Here’s a few choice items from their channel. There’s the classic CGA DOS game Paratrooper (the player doesn’t last long, only a minute):

Dungeon! for Apple II, published by TSR themselves in 1982 (32 minutes):

Oil’s Well for the Atari 400 and 800, a variant of the arcade game Anteater (8 minutes):

And a complete playthrough of comedy adventure game classic Sam & Max Hit the Road for PC (an hour and 47 minutes):

Retro365 blog, and on Youtube.