The Latest Hacks
Mar. 23rd, 2023 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAs noted, there were some hacks I hadn’t played with before preloaded on the KinHank device. I added them to my standing backlog.
Final Fantasy Legend: Chaoseum (Game Boy, Played on RG350) – An overhaul of the game that proposes to add a bunch of randomization to it. They’re a mixed bag: The randomized monster transformations mean that every piece of meat is a crapshoot; you can’t even reliably retrace a sequence. I actually ended up dumping my monster in the Ocean World and grabbing a second mutant from the guild, because he dropped to a 20 HP Earwig in a single transformation and was generally useless before that anyway. (As a note, I think this is the first time I’ve ever dropped a party member in 30+ years of playing this game! And the hack messed up dialogue from that character for the rest of the game by naming them OOOO.) The randomized treasure chests are…mostly pointless? There aren’t actually a lot of treasure chests in this game—fewer than half a dozen in any world except maybe the Ruins. The new font is fine and the new translation is on par with the Wonderswan fan translation. While the capping of human HP by tower level is a little annoying (and can make several of the Tower climbs more harrowing), the addition of Body-X potions (functionally ten normal Body potions in one go) is very convenient and I wish they added Power-X and Speed-X, too. Mutant abilities apparently were further randomized from the original, but I didn’t notice too much change—they were still a crapshoot. The revised graphics are generally unobtrusive. There’s a new coliseum in the Sky World, but the monsters there are much too strong for when you first arrive, even if you have humans with 99 stats already. Renaming and rearranging equipment meant that it wasn’t clear which items gave you which immunities. As a final bit, they put the credits back, which had been removed from the NA release of the original game. Overall, I think this made the game a bit harder, a bit more nerve-wracking, but not actually particularly better.
Earthbound: Arn’s Winter Quest (SNES, Played on SNES-9X) – This is super-goofy and self-referential; the plot is nominally about trying to go to the moon to meet Santa Claus, but they don’t really keep track of that. This was a hack made by Toby Fox (creator of Undertale) that I appreciate for its originality but the teenage randomness gets old quickly. There are a series of dungeons accessible from the original town level, each blocked by “plot device” billboards before you finish the previous one. There’s a modified Brick Road’s dungeon, then the mall with a caves side area, then the volcano, then the pyramid. After the pyramid you warp to the moon, which is a randomly strung-together series of areas with increasingly-difficult battles and an obtuse a secret ending. (I got to the “normal” final boss and had enough after about three hours, using cheats.) If you die and try to keep going, you arrive in a glitchy moon area with unchanged NPCs, old boss battles, and swarms of enemies. (So, really, you need to reset to your last save.)
Legend of Zelda ALttP – The Omega Hack (SNES, Played on RG552) – I love a good Link to the Past hack, and this one is pretty decent, if up to the usual standards for irritating difficulty. It feels like someone testing out the possibilities of hacking with the hopes of doing something bigger later; and it only goes through the light world section and the Agahnim fight. It doesn’t remake the map, but it condenses all the accessible areas down so that it doesn’t matter. The first dungeon has a clever trick where you need to walk in a specific area to spawn stalfos, then kill them to unlock a secret. You need to buy the flippers to reach the second dungeon, which is mildly annoying because it means you need to grind rupees (they should have dropped the price or provided a few more rupee chests). Death Mountain and the third dungeon need to be reached by dash-bouncing in a spot that’s easy to forget about; and you need to use the hammer or bombs to fight the boss because your sword isn’t strong enough to hurt it. The upper part of the castle was changed to a boss rush tower (that gets you a few extra hearts, and gives you items just before you need hem to fight bosses—and I hope you didn’t miss the extra bottle and magic doubler on the mountain, or Trinexx will be basically impossible). Overall, it was a couple of clever ideas and I’m glad it didn’t overstay its welcome.
Final Fantasy ++ World of Chaos (NES, Played on RG552) – I mentioned playing the first Final Fantasy ++ hack recently, and I went ahead and copied my save file over to this. This is mostly an “expansion pack” of that; everywhere you go the battles are difficult even for a max-level, best-equipment FF++ party. The hacking job is very, very impressive: You can fly around the world with the airship and access Narshe, Zozo, Daryll’s Tomb, Fanatic’s Tower, the Lunar Bahamut’s Lair, Mount Ordeals (maybe? A fancy mountain), a castle full of treasures, a Shogun’s castle full of treasures, and at least a few other places I didn’t find. The problem is that you’re basically just searching all the setpieces for slightly-more-overpowered equipment and beating up giant piles of HP to do so. (Even if those piles are excellent demakes of Odin, Gilgamesh, Dullahan, behemoths, zombie dragons, etc.) Apparently there is a “final” area, but given that your characters can barely get stronger and there’s very little plot involved—just fanservice—after a bit of exploring I declined to be thorough.
Final Fantasy Legend: Chaoseum (Game Boy, Played on RG350) – An overhaul of the game that proposes to add a bunch of randomization to it. They’re a mixed bag: The randomized monster transformations mean that every piece of meat is a crapshoot; you can’t even reliably retrace a sequence. I actually ended up dumping my monster in the Ocean World and grabbing a second mutant from the guild, because he dropped to a 20 HP Earwig in a single transformation and was generally useless before that anyway. (As a note, I think this is the first time I’ve ever dropped a party member in 30+ years of playing this game! And the hack messed up dialogue from that character for the rest of the game by naming them OOOO.) The randomized treasure chests are…mostly pointless? There aren’t actually a lot of treasure chests in this game—fewer than half a dozen in any world except maybe the Ruins. The new font is fine and the new translation is on par with the Wonderswan fan translation. While the capping of human HP by tower level is a little annoying (and can make several of the Tower climbs more harrowing), the addition of Body-X potions (functionally ten normal Body potions in one go) is very convenient and I wish they added Power-X and Speed-X, too. Mutant abilities apparently were further randomized from the original, but I didn’t notice too much change—they were still a crapshoot. The revised graphics are generally unobtrusive. There’s a new coliseum in the Sky World, but the monsters there are much too strong for when you first arrive, even if you have humans with 99 stats already. Renaming and rearranging equipment meant that it wasn’t clear which items gave you which immunities. As a final bit, they put the credits back, which had been removed from the NA release of the original game. Overall, I think this made the game a bit harder, a bit more nerve-wracking, but not actually particularly better.
Earthbound: Arn’s Winter Quest (SNES, Played on SNES-9X) – This is super-goofy and self-referential; the plot is nominally about trying to go to the moon to meet Santa Claus, but they don’t really keep track of that. This was a hack made by Toby Fox (creator of Undertale) that I appreciate for its originality but the teenage randomness gets old quickly. There are a series of dungeons accessible from the original town level, each blocked by “plot device” billboards before you finish the previous one. There’s a modified Brick Road’s dungeon, then the mall with a caves side area, then the volcano, then the pyramid. After the pyramid you warp to the moon, which is a randomly strung-together series of areas with increasingly-difficult battles and an obtuse a secret ending. (I got to the “normal” final boss and had enough after about three hours, using cheats.) If you die and try to keep going, you arrive in a glitchy moon area with unchanged NPCs, old boss battles, and swarms of enemies. (So, really, you need to reset to your last save.)
Legend of Zelda ALttP – The Omega Hack (SNES, Played on RG552) – I love a good Link to the Past hack, and this one is pretty decent, if up to the usual standards for irritating difficulty. It feels like someone testing out the possibilities of hacking with the hopes of doing something bigger later; and it only goes through the light world section and the Agahnim fight. It doesn’t remake the map, but it condenses all the accessible areas down so that it doesn’t matter. The first dungeon has a clever trick where you need to walk in a specific area to spawn stalfos, then kill them to unlock a secret. You need to buy the flippers to reach the second dungeon, which is mildly annoying because it means you need to grind rupees (they should have dropped the price or provided a few more rupee chests). Death Mountain and the third dungeon need to be reached by dash-bouncing in a spot that’s easy to forget about; and you need to use the hammer or bombs to fight the boss because your sword isn’t strong enough to hurt it. The upper part of the castle was changed to a boss rush tower (that gets you a few extra hearts, and gives you items just before you need hem to fight bosses—and I hope you didn’t miss the extra bottle and magic doubler on the mountain, or Trinexx will be basically impossible). Overall, it was a couple of clever ideas and I’m glad it didn’t overstay its welcome.
Final Fantasy ++ World of Chaos (NES, Played on RG552) – I mentioned playing the first Final Fantasy ++ hack recently, and I went ahead and copied my save file over to this. This is mostly an “expansion pack” of that; everywhere you go the battles are difficult even for a max-level, best-equipment FF++ party. The hacking job is very, very impressive: You can fly around the world with the airship and access Narshe, Zozo, Daryll’s Tomb, Fanatic’s Tower, the Lunar Bahamut’s Lair, Mount Ordeals (maybe? A fancy mountain), a castle full of treasures, a Shogun’s castle full of treasures, and at least a few other places I didn’t find. The problem is that you’re basically just searching all the setpieces for slightly-more-overpowered equipment and beating up giant piles of HP to do so. (Even if those piles are excellent demakes of Odin, Gilgamesh, Dullahan, behemoths, zombie dragons, etc.) Apparently there is a “final” area, but given that your characters can barely get stronger and there’s very little plot involved—just fanservice—after a bit of exploring I declined to be thorough.
