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Jul - General Game/ROM Hacking - Licensed Romhacks? New poll - New thread - New reply
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Sarcose
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Posted on 07-25-12 08:37:07 AM Link | Quote
I've been recently updating my ROM collection and was playing through some games when I found "Baby T-Rex (Beta)" for SNES, quickly learning it was Radical Rex, one of my favorite games from childhood. Then, looking through my gameboy roms later I found "Baby T-Rex" again, for gby, only to realize it was strikingly similar to another game I used to own... then it dawned on me that I had bought "We're Back! A Dinosaur Story" for gameboy, which was a licensed, packaged, and sold Romhack of a game nearly identical to one of my favorite SNES games... no wonder I used to like "We're Back!" so much.

So, other than Doki Doki Panic ==> Super Mario Bros. 2, does anyone know of any other games that were sold in retail that were essentially romhacks? Was this done often? I would imagine it to be a pretty big temptation to romhack a game that didn't do well and use it to push a license, since licensed games in those days were known for their rush budgets...
Aaendi
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Posted on 07-25-12 02:34:32 PM Link | Quote
SMB2 Lost Levels, hack of SMB.
DKC for GBC, hack of DKL.
Metal Slug X, hack of Metal Slug 2.
Sonic and Knuckles, hack of Sonic 3.
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Posted on 07-25-12 03:58:26 PM Link | Quote
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Yeah, it's not unusual for a company to reuse their own engines, or even sell their engines for other companies to use. There may be little to no changes, and basically just new graphics and levels.

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Posted on 07-25-12 09:48:56 PM Link | Quote



It's hard not to think about the Mario Party games where 2 and 3 was built off the first one and had the same main debug menu, as well ass 5,6,7,8 being built of the 4th game and shared that main debug menu.

And then the 9th installment killed the tradition

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Posted on 07-25-12 09:57:55 PM Link | Quote
Originally posted by Aaendi
Sonic and Knuckles, hack of Sonic 3.
Not really. It's just one half of the "true" Sonic 3 with a title screen added.

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Posted on 07-25-12 10:36:37 PM Link | Quote
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Originally posted by BMF54123
Originally posted by Aaendi
Sonic and Knuckles, hack of Sonic 3.
Not really. It's just one half of the "true" Sonic 3 with a title screen added.

I think that was the point.

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Posted on 07-25-12 11:44:02 PM Link | Quote
I don't think I'd necessarily consider a company re-using their own engines and assets for a different game to be a romhack. At least, not if we're defining situations like Mario Parties 2 and 3, Majora's Mask, and others.

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Sarcose
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Posted on 07-26-12 05:27:41 AM Link | Quote
I would agree there. It's still interesting nonetheless when you have instances like SMB and SMB: Lost Levels, which is pretty blatantly low-effort in terms of coding newness (not the levels themselves obviously). But I was in my OP referring primarily to things that try to seem like new without acknowledging the engine it came from. The SMB example is obviously more like an expansion, whereas SMB2 is pretty much a hacked doki doki panic passed off as designed from wholecloth (not that it's not a great game, however). The Baby T-Rex/We're Back hack really surprised me to see. It was essentially a rebranding of a game; I'd imagine maybe BTR didn't sell well so the rights to it were cheap for Universal or whoever to buy for the license of their game and just slap in a few alternate sprites and cutscene graphics. Easy swap.
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Posted on 07-26-12 06:33:23 AM Link | Quote
Some other examples:

- Solbrain (Famicom), a mostly graphical hack of Shatterhand based on a TV series
- Power Blade (NES), an extensive hack of Power Blazer (only the music and basic gameplay elements were left untouched)
- Yo Noid! (NES), a graphics and music hack of Kamen no Ninja - Hanamaru
- the Probotector series (Europe), graphical hacks of Contra games

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Sarcose
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Posted on 07-26-12 11:47:39 AM Link | Quote
Note: Probotector is an unlockable character in Contra 4 for DS. So in other words, Konami either hacked or later endorsed a hack of their own game for European audiences.
Sarcose
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Posted on 07-26-12 11:49:17 AM Link | Quote
Originally posted by Sarcose
Note: Probotector is an unlockable character in Contra 4 for DS. So in other words, Konami either hacked or later endorsed a hack of their own game for European audiences.


"In Europe and Oceania, the NES version of Contra was retitled Probotector, and the player characters, as well as some of the enemy soldiers, were replaced with robotic counterparts.[11] This was done to circumvent the BPjM's censorship laws in Germany, which prohibits the sales of violent video games to minors. Subsequent Contra games for the NES, Game Boy, Super NES, and Mega Drive followed suit, all being released in the PAL region under the Probotector title and featuring similar modifications. The Contra series would later retain the Contra title and characters in Europe beginning with Contra: Legacy of War."

I feel like a moron now.
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Posted on 07-26-12 03:09:30 PM Link | Quote
You may also note that game developers reused engines and/or parts of code from their previous creations.

The game engines for Rockman and Rockman 2 were largely identical, for example. The sound engine in particular in Rockman 2 is identical to that in Rockman 1 almost down to instruction. They did improve a few instructions. But the same sound engine (which takes up a 16 kB memory page including the songs) was a stock one: It was used in a few other CAPCOM games, I gather (though I have not studied it in detail).
It had features that were not used in Rockman 1 or 2, such as fading the song volume.

Curiously, they rewrote the engine from scratch for Rockman 3, adding pitch slide support among other things. (Rockman 1 and 2 had pitch slides only in the form of selectable preset vibratos.)
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Posted on 07-27-12 06:00:13 PM Link | Quote
You can easily identify games that use the old Capcom sound engine: entering any Game Genie code (using the original GG ROM) will cause the music to be horribly distorted. It expects the pAPU to be in a certain "default" configuration when powered on (bad practice on the NES!), and thus doesn't bother to reset it after the GG uses it.

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Posted on 09-12-12 07:30:52 PM Link | Quote
Some of the best examples are the oldest. Ms. Pacman and Pacman Jr. were both romhacks sold back to Atari. Ditto goes to the less-redundant version of Tempest. In fact, in at least one of their PC rereleases Atari went into depth on who hacked what and when they purchased it from them.

If you include patching, then you can include some of the wiiware rereleased games. They set up a system in the emulators to allow swapping resources around, usually with something a bit touched up.

Another interesting instance involves the x-band. The way they enabled multiplayer for games that weren't designed for the thing was to apply a patch to the game, usually one they had to RE themselves. So, it officially was hacking games to enable multi across the network. Cool gizmo really.
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Jul - General Game/ROM Hacking - Licensed Romhacks? New poll - New thread - New reply


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