I wasn’t quite feeling it with the Aria hack but I like this recolor actually.
Even given the GBA’s lack of backlighting, Harmony’s garishness was off the charts. And the ROM hacker is more experienced at picking colors now too.
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The best thing about the recolor is how it makes decorative background elements actually show up. The stained glass in particular looks amazing.
Original fever-dream mode fits better with the soundtrack and overall weirdness of everything else, though.
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the recolor of a COWARD
am I missing the stained glass? there’s a window with a plant outside that just turns fucking black and white in the recolor that’s making me nuts though
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Yeah, the work done on this recolor isn’t that bad, per se (though there are plenty of places where I think they made wrong decisions) — it’s just that it feels kind of pointless to me. The game already looks fine for what it’s going for. My issue here is more with the universal, effusive praise I’m seeing for it — it’s extremely wearying.
Also, I take personal offense that they removed Juste’s blue aura.
In retrospect, while I’m more emotionally invested in HoD’s whole aesthetic, the Aria of Sorrow recolor patch was probably more destructive. The bright, airy, washed-out look of things helps sell the ideas of it being manifested from the ether, and of the world having moved on from Dracula’s terror. Darkening things so drastically results in a wildly different vibe.
Still probably gonna throw a fit when they redo HoD’s music.
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Aria was way more thoughtful with its visual style and what it all adds up to thematically yeah. Compare a Harmony vs an Aria saveroom (unhacked vanilla screenshots)
There’s more to this than the color palette choices: in HoD the entire background is the normal background of that zone, whereas in Aria only the walls are zone-themed and the saveroom interior is fixed. On hardware without a GPU, that’s required to have the possibility of natural-looking lighting. So HoD’s saverooms can’t be made as atmospheric as Aria just with a color palette hack (but at least there’s obvious potential to make a mild improvement to the contrast ratio).
Personally the two hills I’d die on is that Aria’s visual look can’t really be improved and HoD’s music can’t really be improved. But I have no objection to an HoD recoloring hack, just as I would have no objection to a hypothetical Aria music-remix hack
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The icosahedron in HoD’s save room is hilarious imo. I’m imagining something thinking “man the 3D coffin in SotN was so cool,” somebody else realizing a month later “wait this makes no thematic sense,” and replacing it with a temp asset, and in the end everybody was too busy with other things to get around to implementing the 3D effect.
(No idea if that’s what actually happened, but it makes me laugh every time.)
Though yeah, I agree that Aria’s save room is immaculately conceived.
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Totally agree on this.
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Don’t think we’ve really posted about the MSU projects here where nerds shove garage metal covers of songs into every game they can find without attribution for Genesis and SNES.
It sucks!
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wow this sucks
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i post too many links from twitter, but here: a completely necessary improvement to mega drive alien 3
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there was an ad for this game on a fansub tape i had long ago
i should play it, now that it too is a fansub tape
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hopefully this is fully properly translated unlike all of the machine translated mess from 2
had to double check that I didn’t have youtube playing at double speed when i started this
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following on some notes in the quick questions thread, here are some cool hacks that aim to improve final audio quality for GBA games
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This was very briefly mentioned in like the News thread when it first came out, but I recently started playing the 30th Anniversary Edition hack of Super Pitfall, a borderline unplayably unpleasant video game I’ve always been fascinated with, and it… rules?
Complete visual redesign (including a much more likeable new player sprite). The controls feel a lot more conventional and intentional (and therefore less frustrating) while still working with the world. Autosave features allow you to actually make progress without starting from zero. The bafflingly hidden items are now placed plainly in the world so you don’t have to jump into every single spot in the game to make progress. It rescues all the great ideas the game has buried within it from their initial execution.
I’m digging this quite a bit.
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