Hello an welcome to something a bit different! This is a small project I worked on last Summer. The story behind it is pretty simple: I had broken my arm and was bored. I decided to give NES hacking a go since I know a lot about it already from working with the SNES. I decided to put the "2" in Zelda 2.
So! What does that mean? Take a look at this
Enter Lonk, the almost perfect orangered clone of Link! He's controlled by the second controller and fully compatible with everything in the game. Some enemies have been reprogrammed too, to let them target him. Unfortunately Zelda 2 was programmed in a language called Spaghetti++ and it's pretty hard to mess with. I wasn't able to fix all enemies, but some of the major ones, and bosses, will be able to see Lonk properly. My only real regret is that the final boss totally gets bodied by Lonk due to not being able to see him, but I digress.
The two players share HP and levels, but despite this the game is quite a bit easier with two players. That's not a bad thing if you know Zelda 2, but I added a difficulty selection to make it more versatile. Difficulty is tied to file selection. File 1 is normal/unchanged. File 2 is Easy Mode which halves enemy damage. File 3 is Hard Mode which doubles enemy damage.
What else? Not really anything. This is version 1.1, which fixes a ton of bugs present in the original unreleased version. See the readme for a few more details!
Didn't expect a Zelda 2 hack. Especially not a co-op Zelda 2. The idea is quite interesting, if I only wasn't so afraid of 100 hours of wasted childhood for the original game.
Perfect for people who want to dump it to a cart and play with friends and family on an NES or Famiclone instead of one playing and the others spectating. It leads to tons of replay value, laughs, tears, controllers broken together (Cheers!) - it breathes new life into old games. Hacks like this are always awesome because of that.
I think it's quite fine that both players run off the same HP and levels because it rewards hard work and punishes slack for the team rather than completely letting one person carry while the other gets beat up.
Just look above you... If it's something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it!
Never thought I would see this. It definitely would be fun to watch others play. I'm sure if the levels could be edited, there would be some awesome scenarios played out then. Great work!
Good, twice the Link/Lonk, double the damage. Co-Op Zelda 2 is not something I thought I would see at all, much less on SMWCentral. Sure goes to show that there is quite a wide pool of talent here!
That's some nice stuff. Of all things, I never thought I would see a Zelda II hack with two links. Seems pretty fun, I'll test it later. Great job with this one.
This and Breath of the Wild are the only Zelda games I have played.
I feel like the shared health will make for some fun and frustrating moments depending on who is playing with who. To me though that sounds perfect as I always like games with co-op that make the players share resources be it health etc.
I can only imagine how bad the spaghetti coding was and the fact you have managed to make this is really impressive.
ECS.98 Wild Piranha Plant
Posts: 239/265
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Location: Brazil
Oh, that's cool! It's always nice to see people sharing their hacking experiences with new games, we're so used to see only SMW around here.
I gotta say, if you told me Zelda 2 hacking was a thing, the last thing i would have expected to come out of it was to have it become a 2 player game. That's pretty wild!
That's some nice stuff. Of all things, I never thought I would see a Zelda II hack with two links. Seems pretty fun, I'll test it later. Great job with this one.
If you do test it, please report if you find any bugs. I believe I fixed almost all of them but there might still be a few floating around.
Originally posted by ECS.98
Oh, that's cool! It's always nice to see people sharing their hacking experiences with new games, we're so used to see only SMW around here.
I gotta say, if you told me Zelda 2 hacking was a thing, the last thing i would have expected to come out of it was to have it become a 2 player game. That's pretty wild!
I don’t know if Zelda 2 hacking is a thing, exactly. I mean I guess it’s a thing as long as someone is doing it, but I mostly just did this on my own. There was a RAM map which was a huge help, but it also wasn’t super accurate. You really get spoiled hacking SMW because the game is so documented lol. Fun fact is that I actually made this hack entirely in-emulator. There’s a super good NES emulator called Mesen which is like the god emperor of debuggers. It has all the features you would expect but also lets you rewrite code and data in real time and save it to the ROM. It’s everything a hacker could dream of!
Sometimes, I'm in Lonk's shoes... under appreciated, always helping out the star. I am only glad that Lonk finally gets his debut after all these years of being hidden away in the back.
Good efforts as usual, Von.
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