Your Dream Game Hackz

[Stevens]

hard mode for Grandia II: such a strategic battle system, but without a need for very much strategizing because it's so easy.

Just saw this. I love G2, but once you know what attributes (in boss fights) to attack shit is way too easy.

Spoiler

Always go after ACT first. Raise your parties to 3 or 4 and lower theirs to the same. Then go after ATK and DEF, then finish ACT +5/-5 and then sit back and watch the boss flail as you administer beatings.

[Shoryukev]

Castlevania 1 or Mega Man 3 on NES with the main character sprite hacked so that it looks like me

[emphatic]

Truxton (Arcade) with only the glowing pink P-pickups (instant level up on the weapons) and enemy health at 50%, aka Truxton - Sane Label.

[Mischief Maker]

Dragon's Dogma where:

1. They let you custom build all three of your pawns, not just a main one.

2. They let you switch between all four party members on the fly ala. Ys Seven or Lost Vikings.

[mycophobia]

I want an AC Shinobi that loops and gets harder infinitely.

I would also like a Tatsujin Ou where the enemies and bosses don't each have 1,000,000 HP

[llaoyllakcuf]

A hack that tightens up the jumping in Holy Diver. All that precise platforming can get quite frustrating thanks to the weird lag on the jumps.

A version of Turbo Force with a faster-moving car plus a meter that actually visualizes the shot level decrease like in Strikers 1945 II or 1999.

Lastly, an Eng. language patch for The Adventure of Little Ralph (despite being fully playable in Japanese). I'd just like to really know what's going on in the story

[JBC]

A massive hack of Ultraman: Towards The Future for SNES that brings the game up to Street Fighter II quality.

Just a total reworking of the whole thing using the base game as the engine, but now with as many stages and playable characters as could have fit in the largest SNES cart. Think Brutal Doom, but for a mediocre SNES game no one ever cared about. Extra frames of animation, fluid control, multiplayer, rich movesets, & every special effect available in the SNES arsenal. That would be hilarious.

[Immryr]

i'd love a hack of bloodborne that removes character levelling and rebalances the game around that.

[Sumez]

StarTropics 1 on the StarTropics 2 engine.

Oh yes.

StarTropics 1 is the one you play for the unique plot and setting while overlooking the rather cumbersome controls (manageable and enjoyable, but very antiquated), StarTropics 2 is the one with the forgettably gimmicky plot but that controls and plays silky smooth.

Two year old post, but what the hey.
StarTropics 2 on the StarTropics 1 engine, now that would be something I'd like to see.
ST2 just plays like a shitty Zelda clone (with terrible controls), while the first game has completely unique mechanics that makes the game stand out.

[M.Knight]

I completely agree.
While Startropics' controls are unconventionnal, they work pretty well with its level design and don't break your flow once you understand how they work. The enemies and tile-based jumping were also designed with that control scheme in mind.
Startropics 2 on the other hand feels very clunky, as if it wanted to find a middle ground between a more standard full control and the original Startropics controls. It makes moving and jumping pretty inaccurate, and that's really obvious during the platforming challenges.

I think the original game's atmosphere, music and setting were more pleasant too. Startropics 2 is a lot more varied but maybe too much, as the stages and chapters feel pretty disjointed overall.

[Sumez]

A few of my own - since this is a frequent request for brawlers, the first has probably been mentioned, but here we go:

Mighty Final Fight
Enemy count upped from 2 to 3. Allowing max 2 repeats of certain characters to avoid repetition.

I haven't looked into reverse engineering the game, but I wonder if the game engine actually allows for this without too much rewriting. Depending on how CHR is loaded, it might even be required to have two of the same enemy at all times, though.

Parasol Stars
Make scoring matter. Rremove tedious work like uncovering hidden score items, and remove the bonus score for remaining credits, which adds a huge "Bride of Pinbot" like score offset, invalidating any score that doesn't start out grinding for the 99 credit bonus (requires you playing more stages than are in a full game).
This hack should be extremely easy to make, but no one would play it, as no one is playing the game in the first place.

Tetris The Grand Master 2
This is already the best Tetris game in the world. It's flawless except from one thing: I'd like a sound indicating when you're approaching a level stop, like TGM3 does. That is all.


I might as well add one that I actually made, too:

NES Tetris [Nintendo]
TGM2 style invisible Tetris. This is such a simple hack that you can implement it with a game genie code:
OXYOUO
VNIPZN
VNTPYN

[mycophobia]

Tetris The Grand Master 2
This is already the best Tetris game in the world. It's flawless except from one thing: I'd like a sound indicating when you're approaching a level stop, like TGM3 does. That is all.

I would also fix the combo bug and music bug while we're at it

[Sumez]

The music bug is super annoying at times, but I actually like the combo bug. Getting two Tetrises in a row is way too dependent on luck, and makes scoring super uneven in TGM1, where it works as advertised.

[Obscura]

Mentioned this in another thread, but, hey, why not:

Castlevania 3 with the Sinking Atlantis level on the top route.

Also, now that I'm thinking of it, Dracula XX with every level on one "mega-route", with Death on the clock tower.

[Jonny2x4]

Final Fight TRIO - Basically the CPS version of Final Fight, but with 3-player support, so you can have all three good guys (Guy, Cody and Haggar) fighting the Mad Gear Gang at the same time. The title is a play on Muscle Bomber DUO, the tag team-only version of the Muscle Bomber and the various console ports of the game like Final Fight GUY and Final Fight ONE. You don't have to change the BGs and character sprites, but you can make the playing area wider to accommodate the presence of a third player (like they did with Wild GUNS Reloaded). It would make a fine 30th anniversary tribute to the original game.

[BrianC]

Sunset Riders SNES with the Native American level restored.

[M.Knight]

Here's how I would change Karous. It is more of a big rebalancing than a small hack, but well :

-Have all three weapons at level 100 right from the get-go so you can focus on quick-killing waves with the sword or the shot depending on the wave instead of having to babysit the weakass default shot so it becomes less crappy
-As a result, the exp boosting property of the bomb becomes irrelevant, and so does the "kill the glowing enemy first" mechanic. The latter being super awkward IMO, that would for the better.
-Also, the exp boosting items are useless now, so have the item carriers drop auto-shields like in Radirgy or something
-Instantly have your ship at max speed, or put pre-game speed choice options à la Radirgy instead of relying on the power-ups that make you too slow for almost the entire first stage
-Remove the bullet converter item to focus the scoring on the quick-killing and remove the luck-based item milking against some bosses
-Remove the boxmen that can only be defeated with the shield. It takes too long to destroy one compared to the other boxmen as you have to stay still on top of them for a second and a half
-Losing a life only spawns the bomb recharge item so you don't have to kill all of your lives but one on purpose against the TLB to get some bonus points from the generated items
-Decrease the health of the Milestone logos spots in Stage 4 and 5 so you don't have to put the shield on them for ages before they appear. Unlike the shot or sword spots in the earlier stages, here you really have to move away from the wave quick-killing to get the logos.

Maybe all that would make the game lose some of the things that made it special, but I would be really curious to see how such a version of Karous plays.

[Skykid]

Sunset Riders SNES with the Native American level restored.

Wait, what? That stage isn't in the US/EU versions of the game?

[mycophobia]

Sunset Riders SNES with the Native American level restored.

Wait, what? That stage isn't in the US/EU versions of the game?

it's there but the indians aren't. aside from Chief Wigwam nee Scalpem of course. Also instead of the lift at the end of the stage it's just a horizontal rope.

[Jonny2x4]

Another one: a decent port of the original Metal Gear on the NES. Snake's Revenge brought back features from the first MSX2 game that were cut out from the NES port, like higher alert phases, ration/ammo drops from punching enemies and proper checkpoints, so their omissions in the first NES game were likely due to either, the developers' inability to port those features over or the crappy mapper they used (which was apparently a factor as to why the Metal Gear mech itself was cut from the game). There's two possible approaches for this:

1. *Make it as accurate to the MSX2 version as possible, with the same level designs and same item/enemy placements. Take out the Jungle area in the beginning, bring back the courtyard in the middle of Building No. 1 Floor 1 and make Buildings No. 4 and 5 into a basement floor once again. The tricky part would be code back the parachute item into the game, which is required to land into the courtyard in order to reach Dr. Pettrovich's cell.
   *Keep the arranged level design, but fix some of the cheap enemy/trap placement, so that you're no longer immediately spotted from simply exiting truck or entering a screen from the wrong side. Take out the two maze segments or at least add in a codec call from Diane or Schneider giving you the solution. Place the items in locations where they make more sense (e.g. move the Bomb Blast Suit to Building No. 1 Floor 2, the enemy uniform to the rooftop, switching them with mine detector and iron glove to Building No. 4). Fix the placement of the codec calls that were no change to accommodate the different level designs.

I know there's one hack of the NES version that tries to replace the Supercomputer boss at the end with the actual Metal Gear, but I'm not sure if it's a sprite swap or if they went through the effort to actually make the battle just like the MSX2 version.

[Sumez]

Mappers aren't really magical hardware enhancers or anything. they just allow for bigger amounts of data to be stored on the cartridges. Of course, the instant switching of data banks can be used for some nice visual effects, too, such as animated backgrounds.
Of course a huge full size image of a mech would require at least one extra 8k bank of graphics data by itself. But there's no real reason the NES couldn't implement any of the logic that the MSX version had.

[BrianC]

Sunset Riders SNES with the Native American level restored.

Wait, what? That stage isn't in the US/EU versions of the game?

It's there, but in heavily censored form. The usual enemies instead of the Indians and no lift at the end of the stage.

[Skykid]

Why on earth would they make that edit?

[Sumez]

Something about being offensive towards native americans?
It's a reverse Whomp'em.

[Skykid]

Something about being offensive towards native americans?

In a cartoon western themed game about cowboys that seems like a bit of a reach.

[BIL]

Maybe it was a ROM space thing?

Not that I'd discount censorship entirely, but that sounds more now than then.

STAGE 6 OF GUN.SMOKE MADE ME RACIST (■｀W´■)

[Sumez]

SNES carts have tons of ROM space.

In a cartoon western themed game about cowboys that seems like a bit of a reach.

Nevertheless it's a type of censorship often seen in American releases.

[BIL]

What are some examples? Genuinely curious. I could've swore I murdered a whole lotta injuns in Konami's own The Lone Ranger, but now I see they were, in fact... Mexicans!



BROS 4 LIFE / VOW 2 THE GUN

If the stage ends with you blasting the chief anyway, it makes censorship seem a bit less likely. SFC Combatribes does similar with Chief Windwalker, though IIRC, even in the arcade version his gang was a buncha whities. Skinheads even! Most progressive! Although I guess with his stage being a baseball stadium, it is in fact racist after all. FML!

[BryanM]

ROM sizes on the SNES were not that big. And they always pushed for the smallest ones possible to maximize profit margins.

Besides censorship, also observe that it requires work and therefore money to add more stuff to a game. It's not like they could just plop over the source from the arcade as-is back then.

That they'd do stuff like cut an entire character out of Final Fight for these reasons was super ass.

To be honest, I don't know which is worse. Censoring to improve profit, or censoring just to censor (and thus decreasing profit).

[gameoverDude]

The Ninjawarriors Again - Taito/Natsume's SFC game with 2-3 player modes & widescreen added. Don't use the censored SNES version. Put it on PS4 & XB1, like Wild Guns Reloaded. Have the Blaster do less damage if 2 or 3 players are in the game.

NBA Hangtime & Jam TE - CPU assistance toned down like this:
1) You don't suffer any sort of nerf for being in the lead. I notice your accuracy takes a real dive when you're ahead, proportionally to how bad you're beating the other team. Your shot should be blocked by the defender, not the RNG.
2) CPU drones on the losing team play more aggressively, as usual. Losing team should be buffed slightly, just not so much that they're sinking treys without fail. Just give them a slight ACC bonus of 5-7% and +1 on their steal & block stats.
3) Full court shots get an even lower chance of making it into the basket.

Parasol Stars
Make scoring matter. Rremove tedious work like uncovering hidden score items, and remove the bonus score for remaining credits, which adds a huge "Bride of Pinbot" like score offset, invalidating any score that doesn't start out grinding for the 99 credit bonus (requires you playing more stages than are in a full game).
This hack should be extremely easy to make, but no one would play it, as no one is playing the game in the first place.

I agree about that 99 credit bonus being ridiculous. Maybe have the end game bonus start out at a fixed amount like 20,000,000, then dock something from it for each continue used.

Lords of the Fallen (PS4 Pro & Xbox One X) - An official patch that adds a "performance mode" targeting 60 FPS like The Surge. Dark Souls III has an unlocked framerate for PS4P that runs 60 FPS when it can, but it sometimes falls closer to 45-50.
Bloodborne (PS4P) - As above. I think PS4P could do this at 60 FPS.