A new ROM hack has just been released for Konami's 1993 Game Boy title Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Montana's Movie Madness that aims to bring the US/European versions of the game more in line with its less challenging Japanese counterpart.
As was typically the case with a bunch of games released in the early 90s, the Konami platformer (which was inspired by the classic Warner Brothers' animated TV show) featured a bunch of notable regional differences between the US/European versions of the game and the Japanese release when it was originally launched.
The Western version of the game, for instance, was made to be much more difficult than its Japanese counterpart, removing the game's password system and making several tweaks to the bosses and minigames, with the leading theory as to why this happened being that Konami was trying to prevent loss sales from people renting the game and beating it too quickly.
Created by the programmer/hacker Marc Robledo (who notably created a bunch of colourization hacks for Mega Man 4, Mega Man III, and Mega Man V), the brand new hack, therefore, sets out to provide a more balanced experience overall, with the ultimate goal being to introduce more players to the often-overlooked and forgotten Game Boy title.
Here are some of the features that are introduced with the hack:
- password function
- unlimited continues
- earn an extra life after winning a minigame
- earn an extra life after reaching 2000 points (instead of 3000)
- bosses health points reduced by one
According to Robledo, on the hack's GitHub page, there were several reasons why he wanted to take on this project. These included his own experiences of trying to beat the "unfair" game as a child, his later discovery that the Japanese market had actually been treated to a much more balanced version of the title back when it was originally released, and our very own John Szczepaniak's Tiny Toon restoration hack that aimed to restore password functionality and other difficulty tweaks similarly removed from the 1992/1993 SNES game.
As he goes on to state, however, the project proved to be particularly challenging, with the password feature not being coded into the Western versions of the title, meaning he had to port the feature over himself. In addition to this, there wasn't much ROM space available to make these changes, meaning he had to optimize any changes he made to stay within the original 128kb of memory:
"It sounded easy at first, but due to how the Game Boy ROM banks work, there wasn't enough space. So I decided to just translate the Japanese game into English, which sounded easier too, but...
The English texts were much longer than the Japanese ones, so they didn't fit unless I doubled the ROM size. I also toyed with the idea of adding SRAM support (thus saving features) with a stage select option, but these also required some extra space.
But I love challenges! So I finally went for the hardest route: restoring the password feature in the English ROM while keeping the game size below the original 128kb.
Long story short: I achieved it. But it was hard as hell. The free space is quite limited and I had to rearrange things and do heavy optimizations to the original code to save some space and make room for the new code."
If you're interested in giving the game a try with these changes, you can grab the patch here.