Adell

actually extremely amused by Shigatake (from Vanillaware) spending years working on a remake of a shmup game released when he was in his teens

(I watched Terminator 2, c'est a joke)

in the interest of finding stuff to post here more often, here's an idea I've always had bouncing around the back of my mind:

There should be romhacks that merely add secrets to existing games. As in, someone strictly playing the critical path of the game, would find no differences between the original and the hack. But someone who poked around, would find things beneath the surface -- maybe small, maybe huge -- in all of the places that you expected something to be hidden as a kid, but that never panned out.

And in particular, the audience should be invited to play the hack, with the knowledge that new secrets exist, but without being told exactly where..... You'd get to play the game you love, but with an invitation to experiment again. To know that anything is possible, the way it was when you were playing it for the first time!

Maybe it's shallow nostalgia, but doesn't it sound like a fun project?

Somehow the idea of sitting down and just doing a single romhack like that in a vacuum feels silly or self-centered, but I've always been tempted to organize a game jam where everyone picks a different game to hack new secrets into, and then we all get to compare what sorts of things we each felt each game was missing.....

so there's a fun thing that isn't really this, but is kind of adjacent and this post reminded me-

This threatening sentence is a decently well known example of an anti-piracy message. In Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen, when you get to the SS Anne and tried to hand over a (likely) hacked in event ticket to go and catch a legendary Pokemon, if the game detects you're on a pirated copy, the ticket checker will append his spiel with this cheerful message.

Except well- that can't be true. Right? There's no way it is. Family friendly multi-million dollar juggernauts Nintendo and The Pokemon Company wouldn't risk telling an unsuspecting child to pay up or kick the bucket. But it was there. People swore up and down they saw it, a few codemonkeys even dug into the hex and it was right. there. So how did this slip by?

Well, it didn't! While this message was in "the rom", it wasn't in a clean rom. Turns out, internet pirates don't like paying for games somuch, and so people had been trading around the same handful of rom files dumped by some crackers of yore. "Buy it or die" had been slipped in by one of the original dumpers with a hex editor, who then shipped it out as a clean unaltered rom. This file got copied and shared across the internet and over time a subset of kids and nerds got threatened by everyone's favorite games company.

Your options for piracy rumors are either that or blatant mistranslations

Amusingly enough, the pt-br fan translation also had that line adulterated, which makes the rumor mongering international

Warframe continues to brazenly (pun!) forge ahead in the dispute to being the most subtly unsubtle kink game that also has good gameplay