Adventures in Vancouver, BC (In Depth Review)

Dear readers, I am no game hacker. I'll be the first one to tell you that. My superpowers are geared more towards banging four drunk, coked-up supermodels at a time, or fawning over my restraining order from Gillian Anderson. Between the supermodels and the fact that I've still got over 3000 games to go, there may be times when a game may not get the full attention it deserves. Add to that the fact that I started this project to find games I actually like, and I have to strike a deal with you. First off, I'll go ahead and put up a list of the games that I've enjoyed, the ones that I'll actually go back and play voluntarily. Just so I can prove that I'm not all bitterness, bile and venom. Second, if you feel I haven't given a game the attention it deserves, drop me a note and tell me so. Once I've finished cursing god and all that's holy because I have to go back and play that again, I'll sit down and do a (relatively) in-depth review. Such is the case today.

I always felt that The 99 Lives Project will have reached a sort of critical mass when I got a comment from one of the hackers or designers. I'm happy to say that we've reached that point. RyanVG is a ROM hacker from Canada (although we won't hold that against him) who recently provided some feedback on two hacks that I've recently reviewed. As he pointed out, I may have missed one or two things, so today I'll attempt to give an unbiased and complete review, free of my normal snide remarks and general misanthropy. Or I'll try to, at least. With that in mind, I'm going to go back to Adventures in Vancouver BC instead of the more recently played Back to the Future 4, since Back to the Future made me want to shove sharp pencils up my nose.
Overview
From the Wiki: the player controls a gay marital artist who fights crime for a living. When the evil homosexual Mafia boss known only as "B. Job" and his henchmen try to take over the city, it is up to Mr. P (our crime fighting hero) to save the day. It's a text hack of the Tatio game "Renegade", a side-scrolling beat-em-up released in 1988, in which only game text has been replaced.

Source Material: 2 out of 10
After playing more hacks than I care to think about just on this project so far, one of the things I've learned is the importance of your source material. Whether you want your hack to be subtle changes or dick and fart jokes, you want it to be accessible to your audience. While I'm not a big beat-em-up fan, there are several of the type on the NES that I enjoy, and tend to go back to. Renegade is not one of them. Which is a big part of the reason that I shot right past RyanVG's hacks in this case. I simply didn't care enough to play that far. Renegade is not an enjoyable game, and I picked it up long enough to see the text hacked at the beginning and play long enough to know that I didn't want to play any longer. This is doubly important in text hacks, where the main changes don't come up until playing for awhile.

Hack Complexity: 3 out of 10
ROM hacks come in several flavours. The most complex, such as Adventures of Bass, turn the game into a complete new experience. Levels, sprites and text are all modified into a completely new game. Others change only the sprites used, i.e. turning a dodge ball into a baby, but the game is otherwise unchanged. Text hacks are the most basic, and pose the lest amount of difficulty. Take a look. Here's a comparative hex dump of the RyanVG hack vs. the original (click for a readable size).
See all the information highlighted in red? That's the text that's been changed. That change results in in-game changes like this:
Which means that I can do my very own hack and change the game over message.
Hack content: 5 out of 10
Part of this goes back to the source material. If you're going to do a text hack, do one that gives you a little room to play with. Renegade has around a dozen lines total that you have to modify. What you can do with the hack is seriously limited, right there. Having said that, turning the game into a gay joke is mildly amusing at best. Considering the vast majority of my jokes here are either gay jokes, dick and fart jokes, or involve violence against small furry woodland animals, though, I'm certainly in no place to criticize.

Value Added: 3 out of 10
Bottom line is this: Adventures in Vancouver takes a completely useless games and succeeds in making it a useless game with gay jokes. The hack itself adds about as much time as it took me to pull open a hex editor and change it myself. Roughly 5 minutes. While it gets a passing nod as a spoof that doesn't catch my hair on fire, my feeling is that if you're not going to put more than an afternoon of work into it, don't bother. RyanVG's wikki tends to point to the fact that he takes these things about as seriously as I do, and since I think the issue was more with the source material in this case, I'm going to look forward to seeing bigger, better things.
It also looks like he's got some projects in progress. Haven't checked them out, but I've got some links in here pointing to him. Check him out when you get a chance.

(It also looks like he has quite possibly matured past the gay jokes. Rock on. Now lets hope that I do.)

Back to the Future (4)

I think we all remember Back to the Future, the late 80's blockbuster starring Christopher "Never mention Suburban Commando again" Lloyd and Michael J. "If this van's arockin, it's probably the Parkinsons" Fox. (Yea, I know I'm going to hell for that one. Just wait till I get to a Superman game)

I have no idea what the difference between the original and the hack are, so they get lumped together here, by the way. Now, as I remember from the last time I swam out of a drunken haze to watch the movie, as it was being foist upon me by a rather overeager friend who collects DVDs like some people collect toenail clippings, here's the story. Michael J Fox goes back in time and, like some bizarre Oedipan fantasy, accidentally causes his mother to fall in love with him, thus negating his existence. He then has to convince his mother to fall in love with his father. Things happen, there is a depressing lack of gratuitous nudity and violence, and he saves the day or something.


How do you translate that to a video game? No, wait, check that. How do you translate that to a video game if you've got a budget of $14.52 and a programmer who's stuck one too many forks in the electrical socket? I'll tell you, since you asked (and I know you did). You have your hero run down a street, collecting clocks, while being assaulted by girls with hula hoops, bees, and an ambiguously gay man who throws bowling balls at you.
At some point, you have to beat people away by hitting them with ice cream sodas or something, but that was boring, so I didn't take a screenshot. A little while later, though, you're faced with a challenge where you have to deflect the incestuous love of your mother with a book. That was boring too, but here, take a look.
I think I found Amelia Earhart.

Baby Dodge Ball

The dust is finally starting to settle. New job, new place, and a much bigger paycheck. Life is good and the future's so bright, I gotta wear shades (if you don't remember that song, leave. Now. You're either too young or too old to be here. If you remember the song and will now be humming it for the next 15 minutes, then you can truly count yourself a child of the 80's) With so much that's right, naturally, I turn once again to the 99 Lives Project for the recreational equivalent of plucking nasal hair. It's disgusting, it hurts, but once you start, you just can't stop. Or maybe that's just me. To get back into the swing of things, we have another hack. Baby Dodge Ball. Hacked by Sum Gie from Super Dodge Ball because, as we all know, pelting each other with giggling infants beats the hell out of nailing your penis to a wall. Nailing your penis to the wall, of course, beats the hell out of playing yet another SMB hack, but again, maybe that's just me. Despite the fact that "Pope Hentai" apparently had something to do with this hack, there is a grand total of no anime tits in this game. Plus none if you win a game. In order to discover the answer, I sent an email to whoever's at the other end of that email address so kindly provided on the title screen. "Who the hell is Pope Hentai and why are there no tits in Baby Dodge Ball?" I asked. Well, kind of. Since I was incredibly bored, I decided to run it through babelfish a couple of times first. If I've got to work to enjoy this game, he's sure as hell going to have to work to enjoy my email, god damnit. After being bounced from english to dutch to german to god knows what, it came back appropriately mangled. "I just got finished playing Baby Dodge Ball. I saw your email address on it, and wanted to ask you something. Who the hell is Pope Hentai and why are there no tits in this game?" somehow this became "were kept exactly final, in order to play the ball of the detour of the baby. I have, since its E-Mail ADDRESS above, which I eat, wanted to ask, and he you for something. Hell will be a Pope Yuentai why there and none of mésanges in this play?"

Somewhat unsuprisingly, I got no answer. Oh, and everybody has green eyes. See what you get for throwing babies?

For all my faithful readers, or nonfaithful readers, or people who are just passing by to amuse themselves with my pain and suffering --

Possibly no updates for awhile. In the process of moving. I hate moving. Hate it with the burning passion of a thousand dying stars. Therefore your amusement will have to wait.

We expect to resume normal bitching and moaning sometime later, when I've figured out how to put my fucking computer desk back together.