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
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).
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
posted by network_failure at 8:36 PM
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