Great Video Game Hacks

Recently I've been seeing more and more flash devices show up on the market. This is probably for two reasons, 1: nobody cares if you play illegal copies of games on a system that's 10+ years old, 2: The technology is fairly easy to develope and saves a lot of money when compared to buying all the games separately. Being a collector myself at first I avoided purchasing flash carts because I saw them only useful for people who couldn't afford to collect the actual cartridges. One of my early clients was nice enough to mail me his nes powerpak so I could play around with getting it running on a rgb modified system. After trying out the powerpak I quickly realized that these devices can be used for more than just saving money on collecting real carts. Flash carts are great for keeping all my save games until the mmc or whatever flash card fails and gets replaced. Real carts the battery eventually dies and needs replacing and this becomes a royal pain when you have to replace batteries in 70 or so cartridges. But probably one of the coolest features of using a flash cart is I can play rom hacks and homebrew games instantly on the real hardware.

Unfortunately tracking down a good rom hack is very difficult. Since most rom hacks were mostly made between 2004 to now they didn't get nearly as much attention as the original games. Also for certain games with custom rom hacking tools there's so many romhacks out there it can take a very long time to find out which hacks are actually well made. The "rom hack market" is just over-saturated with bad or so-so hacks. Searching for good rom hacks can be difficult. I recently came across one such "diamond in the rough" and I'd like to get the ball rolling by sharing it. This hack is....brutal mario:



Don't let the title fool you, really thing hack doesn't feel "brutal" at all. So far I've cleared the first four worlds and it really wasn't that terrible. What makes this rom stand out is that the actual GAME programming has been highly altered. Most mario world hacks (and most romhacks in general) just use common mario world hacking tools to change stage layouts, graphics and music. Brutal mario has a severely altered game engine with a lot of new things that were never in mario world. The bosses in this hack are probably the biggest use of custom programming but the regular stages also have a good amount of custom additions that really add to the game. So many things have been added that this rom hack really does feel like a new and improved version of the classic mario world.

Also what really made this rom hack shine is that it's not annoyingly difficult. Sure the game can be challenging but whenever it gets challenging it's always in a fun way that keeps me wanting to come back for more. Also in comparison to a lot of other hacks out there brutal mario is quite playable. So combining the playable difficulty with the amazing new additions that add so much variety to the game I HIGHLY recommend brutal mario. It's rare that you find a rom hack where the game engine has been so heavily modified as doing so is the most difficult form of rom hacking.

The author of this personally messaged me about it. Apparently the person knows who I am.



This seriously owns.

A New Year Walk is a good Mario hack which does more than just change the level layout. I made a video of it a while back, hope you don't mind me sharing.



There is also another one where the whole mario game is played as 1 long level, can't remember the name of it though, it's been a while.

And yup, I bought the Mega EverDrive as well despite owning 200+ games, it's just convenient to have every game ever on one cart. Certainly saves a lot of space. However I haven't bought a new game since buying it so it's certainly had a negative effect on my interest in collecting games which is a shame.

Also bought the Super EverDrive (or whatever the Snes equivalent is) but this is because I enjoy the snes but have no interest in collecting the real games.

I also do a spot of rom hacking now and then and it's great to see hack running on the real hardware.

Hoping to get back into this soon so will post up any good hacks I play.

I would never work on a romhack without some way to test it on real hardware. All my romhack projects started after I built or bought a device that let me test it on the real thing.