[Omnigamer]

Sanrio World Smash Ball, aka Hello Kitty Air Hockey, is a silly little game. It is amusing enough and easy to pick up, so it seems to end up as a side tournament at a lot of the recent gaming events I've been to. It has some pretty significant shortcomings if taken more seriously, however.

Primary issues:
-Can't select same character
-Character traits aren't obvious/scaled well
-Multiplayer stages generally suck
-Most powerups are overpowered

With that in mind, I put in a bit of time to rectify some of the issues. To my surprise, the game's data structures and menu systems are pretty amenable to easy tweaks. Changing only 6 bytes of the ROM, I enabled the following features:

-All stages accessible in multiplayer. This means the 30 single player stages are now included with the 20 multiplayer stages in stage selection, and even have previews.
-Each player can pick the same character.
-Enabled Boss Pig and Missingno as characters. Pig is a boss in single player, but is otherwise not accessible. Missingno is a dummy character, but has workable stats and is still easily accessible. Graphical glitches just add to the fun.

I also found the per-character statistics that can be used for balancing later on, but for now I'm not planning to touch them. Long story short, there are only 4 relevant statistics: Horizontal speed, vertical speed, shot speed, charge speed.

Features I'd like to get to eventually:
-Changing the random drops so only a full power drop is available. Should be simple enough, I just haven't gotten to it yet.
-Pressing up/down to scroll through the maps 10 at a time, or just reducing the mapset to the most playable maps. 50 maps is a lot to scroll through, especially when it has to draw up a compressed image of the map layout each time you swap.
-Balance tweaks. Not sure what I'd have in mind yet, but probably some things we can do here.
-Different color schemes for P2. This would take quite a bit of effort, and I'm not sure it would have that much benefit.
-Custom map editor (external tool). This would be quite an undertaking, but I'm not sure how much since I haven't gone through the exact structures of the maps yet. Would be a fun thing to get eventually, but it's pretty low on the list for now.
-Fixing up the stage numbering system so that it is centered properly. Should be another simple fix, but again is a low priority.

That's where things stand. The whole project is on the low end for my priority list, so don't expect updates to come frequently. I can release the changes I've made so far though if people want to play around with it.

[bazart]

Funny I've been playing this game this weekend.

I don't think that the color  schemes are essential since you can't be at the same place as P2 for most of the maps.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this and yes you should release the things you've done since the rest is like icing on the cake  .

[Omnigamer]

I managed to put in a last few things, including the up/down for easier map selection and fixing all powerups to be Full Power. With that, I think it's full enough for an initial release. I put it into processing here, and with any luck it will show up in a day or two.

[ArkthePieKing]

Oh this looks crazy interesting! I can't seem to find any info at all on the dummied character. Not even a Youtube video or TCRF article. Any info on how I might see this character in play in the vanilla rom, or do you have a video or article that mentions it I could peruse?

[Omnigamer]

You can do one better and try it yourself now: http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3031/

Don't get too excited about it the dummy character; I call him Missingno because it pulls in garbage graphics. It has reasonable, albeit above average, stats and otherwise seems to work fine. I only found it by expanding the character selection index bounds. Going any higher causes crashes.

Thus for right now I consider it a placeholder for giving it actual custom graphics and tweaking the stats a bit more.