We only have fractions of the Hylian legend ...

Wow. Ever since I saw a blurb on a Zelda fan site about the "Ocarina of Time Beta Project," I've been trying to find out more about it. At first I thought it was just some attempt to make a debug ROM playable or something, but when I read the blurb and saw that it was about the discovery of the graphic for a sword-beam (a classic ability never used in a 3D Zelda except for the Fierce Deity's Mask in Majora's Mask), I realized that there were some big possibilities hidden in the game's data. "But what exactly are these people chasing after?" I thought.

I can't be entirely sure, but I believe that this is the answer. The N64DD (see my previous post) would have been able to do some pretty unthinkable things had it not been a failure. A lot of the N64 games out there were initially being developed for it but were later moved to regular cartridge releases, including Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. In fact, the two Zelda titles were originally going to be a single one; and if you gathered all the stuff that got thrown out, you'd probably have a third game! I haven't been able to find much direct info on the "Beta Project," but it's probably an attempt to unearth everything buried in the ROM and eventually piece together the original Zelda game in its full awesomeness.

A couple of quick notes about the page I've linked to:

1. The writing is pretty bad as far as grammar goes. It's followable, but it looks like the person(s) who wrote it was either tired or slightly drunk.
2. At the end there are some tidbits about Master Quest, under the heading "Zelda: Master Quest on the GameCube." These are about Master Quest, NOT Ura Zelda (the original project), even though the writer says a couple of things like "I’m probably about 50% to 60% of the way through Ura Zelda, and to this point, the -only- changes are inside the dungeons. The overworld stuff is all exactly the same as in Ocarina of Time." Let's face it: he couldn't write well to begin with, so he could have gotten mixed-up pretty easily. With that in mind, there may be other areas where he got the two confused, but none jump out at me (perhaps the bit about Miyamoto commenting, in 2000, that "Ura Zelda has been completed for some time now," but that may very well be accurate).

N64 Add-on -- Changed plans

This sure explains things. Ever wonder why Ocarina of Time: Master Quest was made in the first place? Why the later Final Fantasy games went solely to the PlayStation? Why Metroid was never seen until the GameCube? Why Nintendo never pulled through with so many projects, now the objects of internet rumors or attempted fan recoveries? Take a peek at the list of intended games after reading the article.

By the way, I've made a small update to my arwing cameo post.

Update: I'm here, just pretty busy ...

It's been a while since I last posted, but I'm not just sitting around doing nothing. I finally got an opportunity to beat Megaman 9, and I have a long post on it waiting to happen, but I haven't had the time. The other day my dad asked me when I'd blog about something besides video games. I actually found non-game material that day and wanted to post on it, but I couldn't get on the computer, and I'm too preoccupied to do it now. I've had many ideas swirling through my head lately, between philosophy class, game ideas, an idea for another blog, and a piano piece I'm writing from an NES game called Shadowgate. I've felt that if I managed to snag enough time to post on even one of these things, it would sort of do an injustice to the others that I'd have to confine to my thoughts for longer; hence this general post.

Bad Megaman Art

Looks like the box art for the first Megaman game has finally met its match.

Why can't they draw Megaman as a robot? And Dr. Wily is not Dr. Weil (from the Megaman Zero series), but this will make fans go all over that idea again.

Ocarina of Time Cameo: Arwing

There are a good number of beta objects in a variety of games, and any video game fan should already know of the great abundance of cameos -- that is, appearances in a game of something, such as a character, from a different game. By far, though, this is the most intricate one I've ever seen. With a gameshark code (81242E66 000981242EF4 013B81242F02 0000) you can unveil the presence of a fully functional arwing that flies around and shoots at you. This may be a cameo that was never made use of in the final production (a beta object), but the thing that really raises questions is the fact that it's so complete. The level of interaction, the sound effects used nowhere else, and the special camera attention given when you enter the forest make this a cameo you'd never expect to see. (As a side note, what the code does is replace an existing object with the values for the arwing, which probably include the "instructions" for the camera coverage. The proof of this is a bush that you cannot cut, lift, or do anything to -- namely, the bush that a Kokiri child is trying to pick up. The kid is gone; guess where he went!)



While I'm talking about Ocarina of Time, I'll mention something else: Ocarina of Time: Master Quest, the more difficult and puzzling version released on the GameCube is still an N64 game. The Master Quest, as well as the GameCube ports of OoT and Majora's Mask, are technically emulated on the GameCube. As a result, Master Quest has been successfully dumped as an N64 ROM and is fully playable on an N64 emulator.

Ike's Suicidal Final Smash

It's a pity I can't post a pic or, better yet, the video I took of this on Super Smash Bros. Brawl (well, I could, but it wouldn't be worth the effort). I was wondering what would happen if you designed a stage with a wide enough gap in the middle that Ike has nothing to land on when he executes his final smash. So I built just that. I recorded a 1-stock battle of myself, as Ike, fighting a CPU Marth. I got the smash ball and hit Marth with the Great Aether; they soared up to the top of the center of the stage, Ike clobbered Marth, and then down they shot, straight to their deaths, at exactly the same time! This is one of the very few occasions (and definitely the easiest) in which you will ever get sudden death on stock mode.

Solar Jetman hack: Spaceman Spiff

This is a hack I am working on, as of a few days ago. I got the idea some time before, but never sat down to experiment with it. Now I have Spiff's graphics completed, including palette changes, and am working on his ship. It's very time-taking to redraw every frame of the ship turning 360 degrees and sort of flipping upside-down in the process (if you've played the game you will know what I'm talking about), especially with a saucer as opposed to the original egg shape of the pod. What's more, I can't get as 3D a look as I'd like, because the ship and the spaceman share the same color palette; having only 4 colors per sprite to work with in the first place, the ship can only have one color other than yellow, blue, or transparency, all of which are needed for Spiff. This means that the saucer must be a solid red instead of the 3D shading you can see in the screenshot.

This will take a long time to complete, especially since I won't be spending all my time working on it. Technical issues may arise and ideas for the game may change, but I don't intend to abandon this endeavor. Eventually this should join the ranks of fan creations as "Spaceman Spiff: The Hunt for the Flying Tiger!"

A Squared Circle - I'm a Nerd

My philosophy teacher likes to use circles and squares to illustrate contradictions in nature. There's no such thing as a square circle; the essence of a circle cannot be present in a square, and vice versa. Even God cannot square a circle, not because of a limitation on his part but because of the definitions of the two shapes.

When he answered somebody's question today he referenced the "squared circle" example. I doodled on my paper for two seconds and once again proved I'm a nerdy smart-aleck.

Jetman

Wow. I just found out that Solar Jetman, a neat game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, is the third in its series. The first game was Jetpac, the second was Lunar Jetman, and both of them were released for an 8-bit PC back in 1983. Judging by screenshots, the first two games look like platformers as opposed to the space-flight gameplay of Solar Jetman. All three games are by Rare, although Jetpac and Lunar Jetman were released back when Rare was known as Ultimate Play The Game. I never would have guessed.

Obama's Economic Plan

During the debate last night I thought I heard one of the candidates misspeak, swapping the vowels in "tax cuts." I suddenly got the idea for this picture:

Ah, the digital age of political cartoons... Don't worry, I do not intend for this to become a hobby. I just thought this would be funny. Feel free to spread this around; maybe by the end of the election the internet will be littered with it. I wonder how it feels to be responsible for for the mass presence of something like this...

Sims' City

If we have any freak hurricanes, floods, or monster attacks, I'll blame this guy for turning "disaster mode" on.

The Accuracy of 8-Digit Calculators

I just finished my last chemistry problem for this week's homework: find Avagadro's number using blah-blah-blah data about an 8-atom silicon cube. I wanted to get A's # as accurately as I could, so I decided to do the whole thing by hand. I thought, "My calculator can only work with 8 digits, so I'll do this with a pencil, take up a whole page, and get the answer as precise as possible!" The first step was converting X picometers to X centimeters cubed. When I finished multiplying 12-digit numbers, I went to the back of the book to check on my progress, get an idea of where I should be, and use the rounded numbers in the back of the book to see how precise the book's answer would be. I saw that I was 0.04 x 10 -22 off, but I figured that it was due to my superior decimal places. Wrong-o. My final calculation came to 6.10etc. instead of 6.02etc. I realized that my quantity of 0.000000000000000000000158151477991 cm3 was worse than a rounded 0.0000000000000000000001602 cm3. The extra precision I shot for was lost, probably to a single mistake, within the 12-digit multiplications that took me so long. Go figure.

School subjects make for fun conversations.

I was at a late start-of-the-school-year homeschool picnic all day -- the one that was scheduled for the day hurricane Ike hit. I ate my fill, played volleyball and cornhole a bit, and overall had a good time. What I enjoyed most, though, was chatting with some other teens -- about school. We discussed science (one girl was working on biology homework at the time), teachers, languages, etc. When the topic of Latin classes came up, and we were complaining about the memorization of what declensions do what, I was able to share the creation of the phrase "Latina avibus est," which translates to "Latin is for the birds." (I gave up on learning Latin shortly after my dad came up with that.) I talked a bit about Mr. H's classes (theology, logic, philosophy, and ethics) and how they come together, the past knowledge getting better and clearer when you take the next course. For the laughs, I mentioned how I gave him the answer for something once and he asked how I knew it was true, to which I replied, "You told me." His response was, "Oho! This is philosophy class; that won't work any more!!" That led to the discussion of teachers, their personalities, and so forth. So many people don't enjoy school, but I find it to be a great subject for ice-breaking conversations.

I think too much.

My brother and I watched some behind-the-scenes features for Raiders of the Lost Ark lately. The movie-makers encountered some difficulty filming the scenes with the snakes in the Well of Souls, because the snakes didn't behave the way they wanted. There was a clip of Spielberg holding a snake and talking to it, saying, "You like fire? You love fire... In the script you're supposed to hate fire. Why do you like fire? You're ruining my movie!"

I thought, "Well, yeah, they're cold-blooded. Fire would be a source of heat." Then I started thinking about the probability of the situation in the first place. Here we have a temple that's been buried for hundreds or thousands of years, and it's filled with snakes. Why would it be filled with snakes? Being cold-blooded, the Well of Souls would not be an ideal place to live. It's underground, providing insulation from the heat of the desert. When Sallah looked into it, his line should not have been "Why does the floor move?" If there were any snakes there, they would not have been moving. The temple would have been a hibernation ground, or something.

"You're thinking!" my brother said. "You're thinking! Stop thinking!" Hey, at least I don't think this much when I'm actually watching a movie, or I wouldn't enjoy movies.

Zelda meets Peter Pan

*All of the following screenshots are results of using the levitation code*

They'll never find me up here.

Aw, how did you know?

Pick me up, mommy!

Uh, that thing had better not be my spirit...

Ah, garden baths.

That would be a figment of your imagination.

Um, Zelda? Ganondorf's sent half the castle to the fifth dimension. What now?

Any fries with that?

Spider Link, Spider Link...

The king sure is acting odd these days...

Me, scared of Ganondorf? Don't be silly. Um, is it safe to come down?

I feel like I'm in the clouds...

Rockman 2 Hacks

Somehow, I was able to play Wii but not get on the computer last Saturday, so I started MM9 and reached Wily's fortress. Then I wasn't allowed to play Wii Sunday or during the school week, so I managed to snag enough free time to get on the computer Wednesday night and finish a Rockman 2 hack, but had to wait until today to blog about it. I am enjoying golf lessons, but together with doctor appointments on the same days, they sure take up a large block of time. Anyway, I have the time now, so I'm going to do a post on two great hacks of Rockman 2, the Japanese equivalent of MM2.

Rockman No Constancy

This was done by an expert Japanese hacker who had such talent that all the changes make for what could almost be an alternate MM2. There are totally new stages, and various enemies act differently (the crabs have shells that explode in a line across the screen!). All of the weapons have new looks and/or behaviors, and for those that are used the same way, things are still quite different because energy use, firepower, and enemy weaknesses are totally overhauled. The 8 robot masters are whole new monsters, with altered attack patterns at least (at most, you have Quickman turn into a little flame and bound around the room shooting eruptive fire all over the place). To top it off, the music is all different and feels like it was meant to be there. Besides these and a quickened buster, the game's mechanics are pretty much the same. The normal difficulty level is higher than hard mode in MM2. I think a fair comparison would be with MM9's stage difficulty; a bit harder in enemies and definitely in bosses. Now, if you use the patch for the hard version, Megaman has no post-hit invincibility time, the enemies take many more shots, etc. The hack's appearance is very cool, different, and coherent all at the same time. Some of the stages are meant to resemble environments from other games, but don't look out of place at all. Not one tune is unchanged, having been adapted from other games. While any hack might give a game a new look, few of them are as smoothly connected as this: from a specific standpoint, the tunes suit their stages; from a broad standpoint, the different stages and weapons complement each other. In fact, the hack's sole fault lies in two boss doors that simply sit as edges to the walls of their stages, blocked off and purposeless. Whether these were left in accidentally, due to ease of hacking, or by a telltale result of imperfection in the patching, I don't know. What I do know is they don't stick out too much and in the long term an esthetic view of the hack dismisses them, as they are of a less esthetic nature than a technical one and don't disrupt anything in the latter regard.

In conclusion, this is an awesome hack that achieves one of the greatest feats in the world of ROM hacking: everything is new, yet it feels like more of the same stuff. A Mega Man fan could almost forget it's is not an official game. I highly appreciate this completeness.

Rockman Deus Ex Machina

This hack changes more than Rockman No Constancy. A different hacker concocted this, but the music is remade by the creator of RNC. Like the previous hack, this one has everything from new weapons and stages to altered enemies, as well as stuff you've never seen before, like a room that reverses the boss's position when you set foot in it's half of the screen.

There are several different patches, and after a brief analysis, here are the differences I could find just by entering a stage:

• Rockman-Deus Ex Machina- -- This is obviously the "normal" patch. This is the one I played and am reviewing.


• Rockman-DEM-(easy) -- I couldn't distinguish this from the previous patch.


• Rockman-DEM-(hard) -- This makes the stages worse than ever, with added pits and such. To compensate, when Megaman gets hit, he hurts/destroys the enemy, and there's no recoil.


• Rockman-DEM-(static) -- I'm not sure what this one does compared to the "normal" one other than leave your buster unchanged; all of the above patches hack the buster so that it moves a bit slower and 4 shots can be on the screen at once.


• hard-body -- This one gives Megaman the bodily attributes he has in the hard version, and can be applied to the original game / most other hacks without problems.


• FW;DEM -- I don't know what this does other than add "FW DEM" to the title screen.

The difficulty level is sky-high, particularly through treacherous stage designs. The 8 robot masters behave more closely to their originals than they do in RNC, although that doesn't make them easy. More of the weapons have been altered in bigger ways (with the exception of Quickman's, which RNC entirely redid), including the three items, which now make you "fly" and turn invincible. Some of the enemies are changed a lot, and a couple of the bosses in Wily's fortress are fought in conditions you'll never forget. The final boss is a fast, deadly terror with no particular weakness, and you may run through half your weapons by the time you blow him up. For the record, it is possible to beat him without the turbo-button; but success via button mashing requires you to shoot about as fast as the turbo anyway, so go ahead and "cheat" rather than get carpal-tunnel.

(As a side note, Mega Man X fans will appreciate the final boss. I'll say this much: if the final boss wasn't a hologram [I don't think anyone's bothered changing that] and Megaman was destroyed by it, this game could be the bridge between the MM and MMX series. I don't know what the storyline to the hack actually is, because I can't read Japanese!)

The only thing this hack lacks is that feeling of coherency. Between a happy-feeling, music-note-throwing Metalman here and an NES-quality rendition of FF6's boss theme there, the diversity of this hack's contents seems a bit like mixing LEGOs with Lincoln Logs.

If you're an old-school Mega Man fan, you should definitely try these. Rockman No Constancy is a quality hack that anyone who wants a Mega Man 10 already should check out. I don't recommend Rockman DEM if you found MM9 difficult, but if you're up for a challenge, go for it!