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!