Fan Games/Rom Hacks

[Chris Miller]

I played a really great Mega Man 4 hack called Rockman 4 Minus Infinity. It's hard as heck, but if you're a really good Mega Man player, you can't go wrong. I don't think anyone's ever added this much to a rom hack before and made it all work so seamlessly.

[4matsy]

Speaking of Doom engine mods and Mega Man games, here's another one that falls into both categories: Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch. It's basically your standard first-person shooter, but with Mega Man weapons and support items instead. (It's also a complete conversion, a standalone game, so you don't need to have the original Doom games to play MM8BDM.) So far, weapons and items from the classic and Game Boy Mega Man series (up to Mega Man & Bass chronologically) have been implemented into the game. There's also several mods downloadable off the cutstuff.net forums such as a co-op mission mode, roboenza (zombies) mode, classes mode, and an expansion that adds weapons and maps from the popular Rockman 2 ROM hack Rockman no Constancy. It's a pretty cool game if you like FPSes. Or Mega Man. Or both. :p

Another Metroid 2 Remake: This one is also quite good. It's, as the name implies, a remake of Metroid 2: Return of Samus, except done in the style of the Game Boy Advance Metroid games. It's not complete yet, but about 1/3 of the game has been done in the current demo (up to area 4). It's got some nice new stuff: shiny new control scheme, new boss fights, areas Samus scans when initially entering that you can read up on...good stuff. :3

The guys over at http://toppler.sourceforge.net/ have made a rather nice remake of Tower Toppler/Nebulus/Castelian, which was an old game involving a frog-like dude climbing up a rotating tower (or, at least, rotating from the player's perspective) while avoiding and/or kicking balls at various blocks, bigger balls, robots, and other weird floaty dudes. It's even got a full-featured level editor so you can make your own levels and level packs, though said editor's features all work by keyboard input, so you'll be consulting that keyboard shortcut help menu quite a lot at first. :p

The Bub's Brothers: Okay. So...imagine if Bubble Bobble was programmed in Python, ran a server from your web browser which supported 10 players over the internet, and had loads of strange items with weird effects (from rewinding time to creating a kajillion clones of yourself to turning you into a sheep at the end of the level and making you lose all the points you got during that level). You get this game. It's great fun. :3 (Though I have been getting this weird glitch ever since running it on my new computer, where it randomly closes itself. Wonder if Windows 8.1 doesn't like it or something...:s)

Pac-Man Tribute Project: This guy has created a quite accurate HTML5 rendition of Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Crazy Otto, and a new variant called Cookie-Man, which plays like Ms. Pac, but uses randomly generated mazes, instead of the tired old four. The only things missing are sound and compatibility with patterns, and those will probably never be added, the former because it'd probably summon the Kopyrite Kops from Namco, and the latter because it would require actually using the original game's code to seed the random number generator. There are also a few added features, such as a mode where you can learn how the ghosts behave (complete with markers to show where their targets are located), the famous speedup hack, and a new practice mode where you can select your starting level (with no apparent upper limit...seriously, I checked to see if 65535 was the limit, and when I saw that it wasn't, I quit while I was ahead D:) and use various cheats, such as half-speed and invincibility (explained on the page the initial link of this paragraph goes to). All in all, it's a pretty fun time.