SMB2 Hack: Mario's Gaming Dream

Our internet protection service wasn't working yesterday, so I couldn't access the internet to blog. Instead, I returned to my ROM hacking and dusted off the resulting project of my first venture in the hobby:

I wrote this plot (pretty much an excuse to change whatever I want) shortly after learning to text hack, but the work began over a year ago when I first laid a finger on ROM hacking tools. I had read a tutorial on NES graphics hacking that demonstrated the program with Final Fantasy's characters, then tried it myself. Grabbing the knight's various frames straight out of Final Fantasy, I stuck them where Mario's sprites went in Super Mario Bros. 2. The result excited me so much I decided to draw my own sprites for climbing ladders, ducking, and throwing, the only moves that ripped FF sprites didn't cover. I must have played that ROM for an hour, I was having so much fun.
Then the fighter (who grows up to be the knight) took small Mario's place, making things even more complete. Except for one problem: the knight and the fighter both take up the same amount of space in FF, so they didn't work for being big and small in SMB2. In fact, the knight was half a tile short to take big Mario's place, which was really bad for where the top of the character belonged.



Though it took a lot of work, I found the solution. I noticed how the small characters' heads are oversized for the rest of them in SMB2, so I took the head of the fighter and gave it a homemade, tiny body. I was amazed at my own work; I never expected I could do it so well, being such a lousy artist (I still don't think the knight's climbing sprite looks right...). The time I put into it certainly paid off. As for the knight, I just made his legs longer. = )



The verdict at that junction was to overhaul everything and make an SMB2-style Final Fantasy game, but that never saw the light of day because the other FF characters have too many colors. They get away with having one more color than can fit in SMB2 because the battle background in FF is black, allowing transparency to be used for what has to be black in SMB2. That said, the hack "collected dust" while an alternative goal was sought.

I hit upon the idea to use anything that would work some time ago, and later hacked the storyline to be something like what is shown above. Finally, the idea hit me yesterday to use Simon Belmont, from the Castlevania series, in place of Luigi. I'm nowhere near done with this change (he still has Luigi's colors...), but its completion will be a great feat, as Simon is rather sophisticated for an 8-bit figure. Hopefully people won't find it too weird how Simon flutters his legs in mid-air. Luigi did that, so what can I do? Changing such qualities falls under ASM (assembly) hacking, which is a rather advanced branch of the science (hobby? art? science?). Well, I'm using Simon's sprites (with some refinement) from Castlevania II, in which he actually fell rather slowly, so it works out in my opinion.