Watch Out For Fuzzy!

April 1, 2017 4:08 PM

Yoshi the Dinosaur in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (YouTube link), an unfinished, but still amazing, romhack from 2010 that recently surfaced.

Basically, this is a reimplementation of much of the gameplay from brilliant SNES game Yoshi's Island on the Genesis/Mega Drive. The Genesis Sonic games had famously complex engines, and Yoshi's Island had a Super FX chip in the cart to provide some effects, so this is a very technically impressive hack!

Among the changes:

• Yoshi can't roll into a ball at will like Sonic can, but has a bit more traction and acceleration on foot, and so can make it up slopes and around loops with a shorter runway.
• Yoshi doesn't have Sonic's much-loved quick dash move, but has his flutter kick (helpfully, you get much more height in water!) and ground pound moves. Ground pounding on a very steep slope can cause you to gain a lot of speed!
• Yoshi's signature move, swallowing enemies to make eggs you can throw, is also here, pretty much as it was in Yoshi's Island! Some monitors contains eggs too! Eggs will bounce off of some solid walls, but this seems to be situational. Also, a few enemies can be jumped on, although many cannot.
• Because rolling into a ball, Sonic's traditional way of dealing out hurt, cannot be done at will, some bosses have been adjusted. You'll have to ground pound the first boss, and there are enemies introduced into the second and third bosses so you can get eggs to throw at him. I gave up at the 4th boss, but there might be a way to beat it too.
• The damage and failure model is adapted from Yoshi's Island. Getting hit causes Sonic to fall off your back and make you lose rings very quickly until you get him back. The last 10 are lost at one second each. Hitting zero causes Metal Sonic to show up and grab Sonic, causing you to lose a life.
• There are hidden red rings and flowers throughout the maps, although their purposes aren't known.
• Entirely new special stages! Pretty hard and rely on memorization a lot. In Sonic 2 it's possible to get all the emeralds in the first zone. Don't know if that can be done here yet, or what would happen if you did.
• There are other minor touches throughout. See what you can spot! Of particular note, watch for Yoshi's infamous hallucinogenic "Fuzzy" enemies in the first level.... (Note, in this video, the Fuzzy effect distorted the music in the Special Stage!)

Notes:

• A similar post was made a couple of days ago, but the person who linked the video made it private, and the post was deleted. This is an approved-by-the-mods replacement.
• The original video had a download link in description that was also removed. Although those with the hack confirm that it's mostly playable through to the end (although difficult in places, and with chances of game crashing once or twice), there is no "official" way to obtain it. It is thought that the person who made it, Xenowhirl, just disappeared from the scene one day, and it's showing up now only because someone leaked it.

posted by JHarris (12 comments total)

The people who are sharing the file on the internet are doing it with the filename "s2yoshiwip.bin". A search for that might reward the interested... or it might not.
posted by JHarris at 4:09 PM on April 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

One thing I just noticed in this video: Yoshi can eat the animals he's rescuing.
posted by JHarris at 4:21 PM on April 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

Yeah, yeah, but your romhackers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.
posted by radwolf76 at 4:24 PM on April 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

The first video I saw of this, I legitimately wasn't sure which of the games this was a romhack of. This seems like an impossible feat and I'm in awe.
posted by NMcCoy at 4:52 PM on April 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'd like to remind everyone of important prior art in this field.
posted by JHarris at 5:18 PM on April 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

Bah, call me when they use a total takeover glitch to write the hack directly to memory with controller inputs.

(Just kidding, this is fantastic)
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:13 PM on April 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Bah, call me when they use a total takeover glitch to write the hack directly to memory with controller inputs.

Apropos of that, I think you'll be very interested to see the TAS of Pokemon Yellow published today...
posted by NMcCoy at 7:41 PM on April 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

Best part about this is that the music is from Chronotrigger. Super ultimate famicom mashup.
posted by dis_integration at 9:08 PM on April 1, 2017

What, what? What Chrono Trigger music?
posted by JHarris at 9:44 PM on April 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Wow, they even managed to transmute the Genesis' sound chip into an SPC700! It's a miracle!
posted by jakejake at 12:58 AM on April 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

How did I know this would be a JHarris post without looking at the poster?
posted by Samizdata at 10:59 AM on April 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is incredible.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:59 PM on April 3, 2017