I'm making a Ninja Gaiden: Asshole Edition hack.

[diaspora]

Basically, I'm going to take everything that anyone ever found frustrating about the game and turn it up to 11. Not to the point where you would need savestates to beat it, but to the point where you need to use savestates to maintain your sanity. And it'll be annoying as hell. I'm mostly just doing it for laughs, and for the fun of making it. After this hack is done, I might make a more reasonable one. The main focus is on changing enemy attack patterns to make them more difficult, and changing enemy placement.

The only thing I've done so far is to change the enemy spawn code to make them spawn much closer to Ryu, about halfway towards the center of the screen. This gives you much less reaction time, especially for fast-moving enemies. It makes no sense, and it's annoying. That's basically what I'm going for.

Some other changes I plan to make:
-Rooms with continuously spawning birds and bats. It won't matter where you're standing, they'll be flying at you constantly.
-More unpredictable bird AI.
-Projectile enemies throw/shoot their projectiles as soon as they spawn, leaving you with no grace period to kill them.
-Make the bosses harder. Not sure how, yet. Maybe I'll add some birds...
-Game overs always send you back to the beginning of the act
-Less ammo
-Make most enemies take multiple hits to defeat, if possible

Feel free to share any ideas you have for how to make the game harder and more evil.

[Chpexo]

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[keithisgood]

-More unpredictable bird AI

...just...eff. You evil genius, you.

[PresidentLeever]

Probably won't play it, but I would enjoy seeing someone else get mad at it.

[badinsults]

-More unpredictable bird AI

...just...eff. You evil genius, you.

I suggest you try Captain Novolin. The unpredictable donuts are maddening.

[SunGodPortal]

Why not just hack Silver Surfer? That game's even more of an asshole.

[dudejo]

Why not just hack Silver Surfer? That game's even more of an asshole.

Because Silver Surfer isn't hard by design, it's hard by BAD design.

[SunGodPortal]

Because Silver Surfer isn't hard by design, it's hard by BAD design.

Good point. At least both games have awesome music.

[RetroRain]

I usually don't play hacks of games when I haven't played the original version first.  But if this is supposed to be an Asshole Edition, you should add Troll faces throughout the game, and "U MAD BRO?" text.  I'd play it, just for laughs.  You should call it Trolling Edition! 

[Chpexo]

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[KiddoCabbusses]

Because Silver Surfer isn't hard by design, it's hard by BAD design.

On the note of "hard by BAD design", I would like to hope that the enemies spawning in the screen at least don't look or behave like a glitchy or immersion-breaking mess.

Anyway diaspora, typical advice for a "hell" hack; always search for new, unusual/unique and entertaining ways to kill the player enough to get them mad, but while giving them just a little bit more progress so they don't ragequit. It may be difficult figuring out how to tune Ninja Gaiden for this though, since the most major death threats are bottomless pits and the enemies that threaten to knock you into them. For the sake of making the hack seem a bit more ambitious; do you think you can figure out a way to make the bosses more like Xbox-era hard-as-nails Ninja Gaiden bosses, rather than the pansy post-level breathers they are?

[SunGodPortal]

You can thank Tim and Geoff Follin for the rad Silver Surfer soundtrack! They usually composed for bad and mediocre games making it a redeeming quality for many of them.

I just took notice of these two within the last year or so. Love the music to Wolverine.

[Chpexo]

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[SunGodPortal]

Ohhhhh yeah. I remember Plok. I was the only person I knew who had ever heard of that game. I remember hating it at first but these days I see it as another of the SNES's many hidden gems. I loved the power ups in that game.




Gets pretty tough once you make it back to Plok's home island. More people should know about this game.

Sorry if I hijacked the thread, but if someone mentions Plok I feel it is my duty to try and show my support.

[diaspora]

I usually don't play hacks of games when I haven't played the original version first.  But if this is supposed to be an Asshole Edition, you should add Troll faces throughout the game, and "U MAD BRO?" text.  I'd play it, just for laughs.  You should call it Trolling Edition! 

I don't think I'll make any graphical changes, or at least not yet. But it would be pretty hilarious to give Jacquio a Trollface. Maybe the Masked Devil, too. "He thinks only of trolling you!" 

Now I tweaked the spawn code a little more, and made the bird AI MUCH harder. In the original game, the birds moved at a constant rate on the y-axis, and accelerated at a constant rate on the x-axis. The result was that the birds tracked directly to Ryu's vertical position, but but would swoop horizontally back and forth. For the hack, I swap the behavior of the x and y axes every 4 seconds, so now they're much harder to hit and avoid. And now they always stay on-screen- the only way to get rid of them is to kill them. 4-2 is now practically a living hell to beat. It's barely doable, if you snag the timer and run like hell across the bridge to skip a few of the birds.

On the note of "hard by BAD design", I would like to hope that the enemies spawning in the screen at least don't look or behave like a glitchy or immersion-breaking mess.

Well, having enemies spawn in the middle of the screen does look a little janky, but you quickly get used to it. In the original game, the enemies also seem to materialize out of thin air, so it doesn't feel all that different. I also expanded the size of the spawn trigger zones, and that means that sometimes enemies spawn inside of walls or other places they aren't supposed to. It's only a problem for some enemies, so I might be able to selectively disable it for those enemies. Failing that, I'll just tone it down for the final product (I may need to do that anyway to balance the difficulty once I'm through making other changes).

For the sake of making the hack seem a bit more ambitious; do you think you can figure out a way to make the bosses more like Xbox-era hard-as-nails Ninja Gaiden bosses, rather than the pansy post-level breathers they are?

I'll try to make them tougher, but unless I add new animations (which seems extremely difficult), the options are pretty limited. The first two bosses just walk and swing their weapon. Maybe I could make them weave back and forth in a pseudo-random pattern.

I'll try to get a youtube video up pretty soon, then I'll make an official project thread.