Does anyone here actually enjoy playing ROM hacks?

[koifish | 589]

On 7/29/2024 at 3:57 PM, MegaMan52 said:

Mario Adventure: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/63/mario-adventure-the-best-nes-game-hack-of-all-time

Came here to post this. Best romhack of my life. DahrkDaiz (sic) is a genius and I wish he had kept on making hacks.

On 7/31/2024 at 8:14 AM, final fight cd said:

As already mentioned kaizo aka super Mario world rom hacks is big on twitch and people literally have careers playing super Mario rom hacks. Very smart people will even create custom code for the game.

You can get a job playing Mario? Reminds me of this farside comic.

[koifish | 589]

A small part of me is still amused by the stupid NES tileset hacks that people used to make 20 years ago. Pussy City Pimps comes to mind. Probably just nostalgia for when the internet was ultimately just a big joke, not someplace that people took seriously.

[cartman | 195]

I probably would enjoy it. If it's a whole new game when i already like the existing one, why not? And even if it's a character you're supposed to be able to play as there's a certain novelty and experience to be had.

[koifish | 589]

Oh, and related to previous comments, "improvement" hacks are something I never really like. The only one I could approve of is a translation fix, and by "fix" I mean making it readable and not stiff, awkward nonsense. But even then I understand now how much was done to deal with technical issues on older games.

My least favorite such "improvement" I have seen was a set of hacks for the game boy castlevanias to make Belmont move faster, more like the NES games. That's all well and good, but they didn't increase the speed of anything else, be it enemies or crumbling platforms. The result is that they trivialized multiple aspects of the game difficulty.

I tend to argue that anything about a game, no matter how much someone may like or dislike it, is inherently part of the final product, and you cannot change or revise anything without ultimately ending up with a different game. It's why I'd argue there's no such thing as a replacement remake; All you can do is make the same game again in a different style. To suggest total replacement would be like arguing that a cover or arrangement of an existing song can replace a previous version. Unfortunately our hobby is awash in people insistent on finding "definitive" versions and similar all-or-nothing positions.

[koifish | 589]

@fcgamer

You know, I bet people are a lot less interested in the sprite edit romhacks that were done over the years to rebrand or relabel games for different markets. Whether it was unofficial edits like Duck Tales 3 and Super Mario 14, or official edits like Decap Attack and Mônica no Castelo do Dragão, I notice most people online don't care about them, unless of course it was in their local region.

Here too the outsized influence of US gamers on English internet is visible, because game edits that were sold as official in the US, such as Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, are treated like legitimate products (that one even got a nod in Sonic Mania!), while Brazilian Master System games get summed up as "oh, look at this weird regional edit, haha those wacky third worlders at it again!"

[T-Pac | 7,857]

This makes me wonder how many games I've dismissed / ignored just because I don't like the IPs they're based on, but would absolutely love if they were connected to a franchise I'm into.

Like ... what if the NES games for Jaws, the Karate Kid, etc. were based on Ghibli properties or something?

[T-Pac]

[fcgamer | 5,005]

37 minutes ago, T-Pac said:

This makes me wonder how many games I've dismissed / ignored just because I don't like the IPs they're based on, but would absolutely love if they were connected to a franchise I'm into.

Like ... what if the NES games for Jaws, the Karate Kid, etc. were based on Ghibli properties or something?

[T-Pac]

My brother has no interest in Batman, but a few years back I got him to play Batman Returns on NES and he quite liked it, as it plays similar to the TMNT games. Actually, if someone wants to hack that game into a TMNT game, I'd gladly pay for it, lol.