In the huge number of games Mario appeared in, I never got the impression that he was anti-hippie. Good thing this game turned up and made me all the wiser.
I don’t really know why Mario has bottles full of microscopic hippies, or what’s in those mysterious capsules that’s making them die, but if I stopped to ask questions like that, I probably wouldn’t have kept playing this thing.
You’ll notice that I start falling apart toward the end of the second round. That’s because the bizarro symbols that the viruses have been metamorphosed into are harder to see than the single-colors that they used to be.
For this week’s walk on the Weird Side, instead of taking a look at a Mario game with other characters crowbarred into it, how about a non-Mario game with Mario characters crobarred into that? Mauntlet takes the Gauntlet game we’re all familiar with and inserts Mario, Link, Mega Man, and Bart Simpson (for some reason) into the mix.
The enemies and powerups are replaced with approximations of their Mario Universe equivalents, but since I was never able to beat regular Gauntlet, I don’t know how complete the transformation is.
It seems that the original Super Mario Bros. is a frequent target for ‘hacking’, and by ‘hacking’ I, of course, mean ‘replacing the sprites with weird stuff’. Like this one that crowbars in lots of shipping references. Mario turns into a UPS truck and has to contend with evil soldiers from the FedEx army.
I’m in the midst of moving all of my worldly possessions into a new house, and that means that I’m going to have to tide you over with a video this week, featuring papercraft and Mortal Kombat
Which makes me wonder why nobody’s combined these things before.
If you’ve never seen Mystery Science Theater 3000, you might not get much out of this post. Sorry about that.
But we continue our journey through the wilderness of unlicensed and bizarre Nintendo game hacks with Tom Servo. A game that takes the sprites of Mega Man 3 and replaces them with characters from the MST3K universe as well as a pretty big assortment of randomness.
I blow a lot of jumps in this video, mostly because Tom doesn’t have feet, so it’s kind of tough to determine how close he is to the edge of a platform. And I don’t know what Kenny from South Park has to do with Mystery Science Theater 3000.
But then I repeat to myself, “It’s just a video game, I should really just relax”.
What’s that I hear you say? Last week’s Super Riker hacked ROM wasn’t enough for you? Well how about a game where Wilford Brimley and his oatmeal take the place of Donkey Kong?
It’s kind of hard to see in the video above, but the barrels, jacks, and trouble bugs have been changed to bowls of oatmeal, the timer has been changed to ‘fiber’, the hammers appear to be spoons, and Pauline’s belongings have been replaced by foods.
I guess I haven’t been paying enough to the Old Game ROM Manipulation Scene, but it turns out that there is a group of people that are dedicated to taking old games, especially Super Mario Bros., slightly (and sometimes not so slightly) modifying them to create something… different?
Like Super Riker. I guess that someone somewhere thought that Mario sans hat looks kind of like Cmdr. Riker from Star Trek: TNG after he grew that sweet man-stache, so they decided to cram those two worlds together to get… Well, here’s a taste
Try to not pay too much attention to the oddly-spelled words. I think they add some charm.
Filed under: Potant Potables — Cameron @ 1:27 am August 4, 2010
This one comes from collegehumor.com ….but they wouldn’t let me embed their video so I embedded the one form another guys youtube page. I’m such a hacker.
I usually don’t like to give Collegehumor.com any publicity, but this is a classic so I’ll give them their props this time. I’m not sure you can beat a rapping Darth Vader and Princess Leia set to that Jay-Z song that the radio played way too much of a few months back. So enjoy!
No no, I’m not talking about Basscomm, I’m Talking about Beneath a Steel Sky, a game that time has forgotten about. If you came here today looking for greatness…you picked a good day to visit.
BASS was originally released in 1994 by those wacky Brits on the SCUMM engine and mixes humor, sci-fi story telling and a strong serving of cyberpunk. For those of you unfamiliar with cyberpunk go here for a wikipedia definition. It basically means that its a scenario where science and technology have progressed and futuristic devices exist but society has taken a turn for the worse, much like Blade Runner or maybe Borderlands. BASS is also know for its art work that was done by Dave Gibbons, more popularly know as the guy that did the ink work for the Watchmen as well as various other comic books of the time. The graphics, although dated by todays standards, are amazing. The worlds are cleverly designed and do a great deal to convey the atmosphere of the game.
The game is set in a future Australia where there has been a major fallout of one variety or another and most all of the land has been made unlivable. The story follows Robert Foster after he is adopted by Aboriginals in the outback after a helicopter crash when he was a small child that left him parentless and stranded in “The Gap”. The Gap is the barren wasteland between the two major factory cities. The opening movie shows that Robert Foster is being hunted down by soldiers from Union City that are being controlled by a computer named LINC. All of the opening is illustrated by Dave Gibbons and has full voice narration and voice acting. One thing that sets this game apart from some of the similar games of the time was that all of the characters had voices and almost every line was spoken out loud and with the added bonus of top notch art work made this game very easy on the senses.
So as I was saying, you control Robert foster and his sidekick Joey the robot that he built living with the natives of Australia. After being forced back to Union City the helicopter you were brought in on crashes, bringing your escape from custody and the start of the game. Your mission is to find out why the authorities are looking for you and what is really going on with the mysterious LINC computer system and eventually gain your freedom. The controls are a lot like other point and click SCUMM games. Left mouse controls where you go as well as using it to examine items. Your right mouse button controls actions like open and use and talk and so on. F5 brings up your menu to save and load and adjust game settings. Side note: I noticed when I saved my game to a slot nothing showed up as being there, so if this happens to you don’t worry, its there it just doesn’t show up.
I won’t spoil anymore of the games story, you’ll just have to play it yourself. Its is stuffed fully of funny dialogue and sight gags as well as a serious tale of corporate greed and oppression. In 2003 the game was declared freeware from its producers and is freely available from many sites on the web. You can get it from the SCUMMVM site or from Good old Games, which I highly recommend. Their site is much easier to navigate and you don’t need to download SCUMMVM to play it and its still 100% free and DRM free. Also at GOG you can get the manual and other artwork for the game as a separate download. They have a very good layout and many download options once the game is in your library. I could spend a whole article talking about how much i love GOG.com, but I’ll save it for another day, just go there and get the game and I promise you will be happy. So if you love point and click adventure games and cyberpunk post apocalyptic future dystopias with a sense of humor, then this game is for you. Its is also available on iPhone and Android for .99c with a few updates to the game play thrown in.
