Looking back at old ROM hacks -- Robertman 2, part 2

Last time I covered the first two levels, Numnum Falls and Kirb's Palace, including all the weird enemies and glitchy bits in those.  Now, it's on to the next level... Gomamon Forest.

Wait, Gomamon Forest?? That's an odd combination of critter and environment... an aquatic Digimon and a very much not-aquatic area.  Hmm.

 ...ah, that's why -- there are no actual Gomamons here at all, just Darno, a character I made up in 3rd/4th grade who wears a weird full-body cloak thing made of what looks like Gomamon fur (which actually had its "white with purple markings" pattern long before I ever knew about Digimon, interestingly enough... Darno's outfit was pretty much the same even in the original drawings of them from 1995 or so, which was before Digimon even existed in Japan.)


If I'm remembering right, in my old crappy OHRRPGCE game from the early 2000s (The Kirby Lands) Darno became annoyed by people comparing his appearance to a Gomamon, so I guess sticking him in a "Gomamon Forest" is a bit of a joke.

 A bit of glitchiness, caused by a giant robot dog appearing where a solid block was.  Whoops!

 Almost to Darno's room, and I'm preparing by switching to Kirby Dance, which can kill him in one hit for some reason (when fully charged, anyway.)

 And there it goes -- a giant Kirby-face-shaped energy blast headed straight for him, as blobs of Gomamon Goo rain from the sky (see my "looking back at Goma-Mario" post for a full explanation of Gomamon Goo.)  Apparently Darno's "looks kinda like a Gomamon" thing became his defining feature here, unlike in The Kirby Lands (and more recent game ideas) where he mostly fights using Kihlah.

Darno's sprites were apparently never finished, as when he's summoning a shield of Gomamon Goo in this fight he spontaneously turns back into Wood Man.  Also, he'd probably look a lot more Darno-like if I had switched the brown and the peach/flesh-tone type color around.

 Yep... Leaf Shield is replaced with Gomamon Goo.

 And now on to Stupid Tower, where the next boss is... a robotic version of my evil clone/twin Edwin.  His sprites are not as heavily edited as some of the previous bosses (Chef Eato in particular), and he'll sometimes glitch up and cause fragments of Crash Man to appear, but his intro pose works fine.

 This place is changed around a good bit -- colors are very different, music is different (it uses the first Dr. Wily castle theme), and the map arrangement is different too.  Also, there's floating Chiba Balls here just like in Kirb Man's level.

 This room is a bit odd, as that moving platform doesn't stay on the line and instead floats off to the left and then up and around.

 Using the Bugar Lift item to cheat my way through this one, rather than waiting for the other platform. XD

 And here's... a really odd-looking enemy that seems to be made up of a tower of awkward blocks, one of them with an eye in the middle.  I remember that in earlier versions of this hack, this enemy would fall apart if you shot it, but at some point that just stopped happening and I have no idea why.  The same was true of the "spider and fireball" enemies in Numnum Falls; for some reason their weird reaction to Robert's booger shots just randomly stopped happening at some point.

 And here the sky randomly gets less-dark.

 ...before getting dark (and starry) again later on, when you reach Edwin's room.

 Edwin doesn't actually fall down that pit in the middle, instead walking right over it as if it's not there.  It's only a hazard for Robert.

 Throwing a Stupidi Bomb, though unfortunately it's hard to see since I screenshot-ed it so early in the throwing process.  They've got "^_^" faces with buckteeth, though, as you might be able to see a little bit of here.

 And of course, with only a third of a lifebar I didn't quite manage to beat him that time, so I had to try again.  Here's also a really clear view of the "BOOGER POWER!" message you get when starting a level.

 Edwin is extremely weak against Chef Eato's Triple Fork technique, as you can see from this screenshot of his explodey-circles and one of the leftover forks. XD

Yay, now I can throw exploding balls of stupid, too! XD

I'm not sure why the letters on these screens (like "-C-" shown right here) never got replaced with the same symbols used in the weapon-select screen, or at least with appropriate letters.  Some of them still end up working (I noticed that Flash Man's "F" and Grakker's Banan-Freeze sort of matched up), but mostly it's just like "uh, why's that random letter there?"

 Speaking of Grakker, here he is! Well... sort of.  His name is there, but the picture is clearly just plain ol' Flash Man.  I know I did edit Grakker's sprites into the game at some point, but apparently that was in a later version than the one I still have.

 Banana Land is really weird.  Everything constantly flashes between pitch-black, black with blue outlines, and bright yellow.  You can kinda tell where the actual gaps are, but it's a little tricky at times.  Thankfully there are few (if any) bottomless pits in this level.

 Using a Stupidi Bomb to blow up that weird pink bubble wall thing.  Sadly, Robert's Stupidi Bombs are just Crash Bombs with an S on them, rather than the bucktoothed ^_^ face that Edwin's version had.

 And Grakker's room is very weirdly designed, with a ^ formed from single blocks and a tiny platform in between (which you'll usually slip off of into the pit if you end up standing on it.)  Speaking of pits, Grakker can fall into the pit here... but it just sends him back to the top of the screen, weirdly enough.

 Yep... down the pit, then back to the top of the glowing banana block pyramid.

 Speaking of bananas, dancing ones appear over the screen whenever he activates his Banan-Freeze.  They're actually a Nummorrian fruit known as Grappuyo (which were introduced to the Guraoo homeworld by K'hyurbhi explorers a long time ago), but they look like bananas.

Speaking of looking like bananas, Grakker himself would look a bit like a giant green banana if I had actually changed his sprites.  He's actually a Guraoo like Darno, though, the difference being he wears a green guraleaf cloak rather than a furry one.

 A few fully-charged Kirby Dance hits later, Grakker is dead...

 ...and I can get equipped with Banan-Freeze.  Yep, now Robert can also summon the dancing bananas to freeze everything around him.

 Also appearing at this point: the third and final of the little support items, the Bugar Climber.

 And now it's time for Cruncho, the cyborg Barney-like thing who I completely forgot I had actually edited the sprites for.  He's pretty much completely unrecognizable as a Metal Man edit, too.

 His level is the Kickme Fake Animal Parts factory.  Apparently making fake kitty ears (including the radioactive ones) involves a whole lot of gigantic gears and conveyor belts?

BOOGER POWER.

 Some very odd sprites here.  The big spiked squishers appear to be... a long stick with spearheads or something tied to it chandelier-style.  Weird.

 Also, their chains stick up through the bottom of the screen when they're positioned too high up.  Whoops! XD

 The drill things that used to come poking up through the floor here are replaced with tiny orange Kirbys, which attack with their tiny little spears.  I think these would've been a bit more appropriate in Kirb Man's level, but... oh well.

 Formerly little jester-looking guys, these are now Puckerthoos -- basically pink/purple Pikachus with lipstick, which appeared in all of the various versions of my Pokémon ROM hack Dopémon.  (Maybe I'll do one of these posts on that one someday...)

 Rolling Num seems to be the only thing that works on those bucktoothed things, so there's Robert blasting one with a glowing red-orange Numnum.

 And here's Cruncho!

 He does a weird disco pose before the fight, of course.

 It only takes a couple hits with fully-charged Kirby Dance to kill him if I remember right... unfortunately, it's very hard to actually hit him with it because he jumps up and down non-stop.  Also, the sawblade type weapons he originally used are now drills... unfortunately awkward-parallelogram-looking drills, but still.  And looking at this screenshot, I notice there is one fragment of Metal Man's original sprite still unedited... oops!

 Triple Fork doesn't work on him at all -- the forks shatter on impact.

 Gomamon Goo also doesn't do squat to him.  So... pretty much the only way to beat him reliably is to use the regular ol' rapid-fire booger shots.

 ...which actually finish him off fairly quickly.

 And now I get equipped with Crunch Drill.  I know it says the much more generic-sounding "Drill-Shot" on there, but I'm pretty sure that's only because I didn't want the words to run together (like CRUNCHDRILL) on the screen -- the attack's name is and always has been Crunch Drill, not Drill-Shot.

Next time -- the last of the "regular" bosses, and then on to the Dr. Willy... err, I mean Dr. Dragonite... stages at the end of the game!

Looking back at old ROM hacks -- Robertman 2, part 1

Previously, I went over all of the many Mario hacks that I'd made back in the early 2000s (mostly -- that Ninja Mario Bros. one was from 2007.)  Now, I'm going to a different one -- a hack of Megaman 2, with Megaman replaced with Robert Yellek the Booger Fighter who appeared in several of my games.  The title of the hack, of course, is Robertman 2.

 For some reason I changed the names but didn't change the dates... so Capcom becomes "Crapcom" (Capcom USA becoming "Crapcom B.S.") and Nintendo of America became "DBlubber of Nummorro."

I'm pretty sure the hack was made somewhere in the range of 2001-2002, though, despite the fact that the dates here still say 1988.

 The year being 200X rather than 199X doesn't narrow things down much, either. XD

 Mr. Bugar, the Master of Boogers! Who also makes booger-powered robots, apparently.

 Dr. Wily's name is changed to... Dr. Dragonite.  This was actually a reference to a certain obnoxious forum user waaaaay back in 1998-2000ish when I was still active on a certain AOL Pokémon forum, whose username was either just "Dragonite" or Dragonite with a bunch of random numbers tacked on afterward (I can't remember which.)  I also don't remember much about this guy, except that he was a complete douche.  Douchey enough to become the villain in one of my games, apparently.

 

 ...and those robots, as you'll see in a bit, are apparently mostly based on villains from one of my awful old OHRRPGCE games.  Well, they aren't just from that game, I made those guys up years before I made either this hack or that game, but still.

 Apparently I never changed the "MEGA MAN" part of the title to say the actual title of the hack.  I did, however, add in "By Dark Blubber" and some random pillars and Japanese letters... and change the difficulty settings from Normal/Hard to Hard/Friggin' Hard. XD

Also, Megaman is still Megaman on the title screen, not Robert.  Whoops.

 And here's the stage select screen... with only two of the pictures actually changed, though the overall layout has been altered a bit.  The colors, for one thing... but also, the text shows the names of the levels rather than the names of the bosses at the end of them.  Numnum Falls, McDonald's, Dark World, Kirb's Palace, Gomamon Forest, Kickme Factory, Banana Land, and Stupid Tower.

A couple of these (Kickme Factory, Dark World) are references to various other games/comics I made around this time; the rest are pretty much random.

 First, we're off to Numnum Falls, home of... Numnum Man.  who is basically Bubble Man with a Numnum head edited on.

 I changed the small frog robots into tiny green Numnums, but the big one is unchanged.  Megaman's sprites are thoroughly edited into something vaguely similar to Robert, though.

 These blocks are really awkwardly hard to see.

 Also, for some bizarre reason the hermit crab robots are replaced with Zelda 2 spiders with fireballs hovering behind them.  I don't know why.

 This big fish that spits up shrimp is unchanged, however.  Robert's method of attack is changed, though -- rather than single shots, he can rapid-fire up to three with one button press.  Also, apparently I messed up slightly when making the shooting sprite, so part of his shirt vanishes randomly.

 This looks a little odd...

 ...yep, you end up passing through those spikeballs, completely unharmed somehow!  Not sure how that works, but it does.

 I'm not sure what those glitchy enemies falling from the screen are, but I think I see the letters "AOL" on one.  AOL CDs as enemies, maybe?

 And here's Numnum Man! His room is a bit different than the original.

 He mainly attacks by shooting a couple of bouncing Numnum outlines while jumping/swimming around.

 He also looks a bit glitchy sometimes.

 And this screenshot was accidentally taken exactly as both Robert and Numnum Man got hit by something, but it also shows the little black Num Power symbols that he shoots whenever you're in a line with him while he's jumping/swimming.

And after you beat him, you get his special move: the Rolling Num.  Which is basically like the bouncing Numnum outline attack he used in his fight, but rolling along the surface rather than bouncing.  Hence the name.

 And here's Chef Eato, the robot boss guy in charge of... um, McDonald's apparently.  Chef Eato (unlike Numnum Man) was a boss from one of my old crappy games.  I may actually end up re-using his blue color scheme from this game even if that's not what he originally had, though I don't think I'll give him a yellowish chef hat rather than a white one.

The decorations here are little demon faces with gagging faces, with "McD's" along the sides of them.

Oh, and the "READY" message now says "BOOGER POWER" instead.

 Giant cloud-haired demon heads and... birds that fly by and drop burgers.  Those burgers explode into a cloud of flying roaches whenever they hit a solid surface.

 Also, the big ol' demon heads spawn floating burger monsters that chase after you.

 These guys now throw forks at you rather than lightning bolts.

 As I mentioned earlier -- the burgers dropped by the birds explode into a cloud of roaches.  Also, fat guy robots don't actually change, even though I vaguely remember making them into some kind of fat sumo guys... I guess I lost the most recent copy of this hack, so those edits are missing?  I do remember one of the bosses is partially edited and another one that was edited at some point now isn't, also due to the loss of that most recent edited version.

 Chef Eato takes his hat off and does an "Evil French Chef" laugh at the beginning of the fight.

And he attacks by sending a storm of spinning forks at you, of course.  He also has the most heavily edited graphics of all the bosses in this game, with all the rest either being barely-changed or with glitchy bits here and there.

I missed getting a screenshot of "GET EQUIPPED WITH TRIPLE FORK," but... since I just said that, you know what it would've said.  Apparently Robert is not capable of quite as strong chef-fu techniques as Eato, so he only gets three forks rather than six.  Oh well.

 

 I may have missed the announcement for Triple Fork, but I did not miss the one that happened after that.

 Next level: Kirb's Palace, home of... Kirb Man.  Who is basically just Kurb, but with a weird Zippo lighter shaped robot suit built around him.

 And Kirb's Palace is... this seizure-inducing monstrosity, with blue/white shimmering background and pictures of Aqua in the background.  "Aqua" being someone else's character from around that time period, who was a blue Kirby-type thing with purple hair, who became the target of Kurb's pervy tendencies for some reason.  Also, the main enemies here are floating blue/white Chiba Ball things that... for some reason float out from behind the Aqua posters on the wall.

 

 Here's some weird bucktoothed robot things that sproing up at you if you get too close.

 And here's what some of the weapons are shown as on the menu screen now -- rather than letters (except for B = Booger and E = Energy Tank), they have little symbols -- a fork for Triple Fork and a Num Power symbol for Rolling Num, for example.

 Also, like literally everyone else who ever played Megaman 2, I'm using the jet item to get through here rather than messing around with those appearing/disappearing blocks.  BUGAR JET, AWAY!

 Yep.  There it is -- Bugar Jet.  Also, a 1-up which I will ignore.

 And here's Kirb Man, powering up his Kihlah energy for the upcoming fight.

 And those are Kirby-faced fireballs he's just thrown out, of course.

 A Rolling Num heading his way, while three tiny Kirby-face fireballs heading toward Robert.

 Sadly, this screenshot did not capture the Kirby-face fireballs he changes into in order to fly across the room, instead only getting the unedited in-between frame.  D'oh.

 GET EQUIPPED WITH KIRBY DANCE.  Kurb actually does still have a Kihlah technique called "K'hyurbhi Dance," which is based pretty closely on the attack from this game.

Also, another one of those sometimes-useful little utility type items, which I have edited to have eyes for some reason (as you can see in the Bugar Jet screenshot up above.)

And... typing so much on my laptop's tiny built-in keyboard doesn't work so well for my wrists, so that's all for now.  Part 2 coming soon, when I get back to my apartment and have access to the usual plugged-in keyboard again.