S U P E R M E T R O I D I N S A I T Y .. yeah. I'm not one for flashy titles. ----- Intro ----- 'Super Metroid: Insanity' is an idea I had sometime around the start of 2006. At the time, it was simply to throw as many random ideas into a hack as possible. It would be a game with lots of unusual twists, and bizarre easter eggs all over, and no coherent idea. Chances are pretty good it'd be possible to blow up Zebes within 10 minutes. But somehow, those random ideas started to form a coherent plan. There was a plot of sorts. At the same time though, several ideas got cut out. But Insanity was growing in a way I hadn't expected at first - new ideas were being inferred in between other ideas. Then I had a *really* crazy idea which just defied common sense in a way imagination liked. I could easily imagine people's minds just snapping when they ran into it. Naturally, I'm not going to tell you what it is. ;) In more general terms: Insanity is a drastic overhaul of Super Metroid. Everything is changed, from the map to the phsyics to the items to the map to common sense to bosses to music to the map. The gameplay will be, in general, similar to Super Metroid's. Explore the world, find items, master new tricks, kill bosses. The particulars are very different. The difficulty is slightly harder than the original Super Metroid (except for *one* little secret...). Mainly, the changes in difficulty will be because the game will be smarter and faster when it's trying to kill you - not stronger. If you've seen the small movie spoiler I've uploaded online, that's a good example. And to help a bit with the definition... The game makes sense. Insanity is not about not making sense, otherwise this hack would be called Super Metroid: Nonsense. Insanity is about defying *common* sense. --------------------- Useful Things to Know --------------------- First off, if you don't know how to patch ips files... You need a rom of the game, and either an ips patcher or an emulator that can auto-patch files. The rom, you have to supply yourself. Lunar IPS is a good IPS tool I like. Very small, straightforward, easy to use, and doesn't try to do anything beyond what an IPS tool should do. Alternatively, ZSNES will auto-patch the game. Just make sure that the Insanity ips and the Super Metroid rom share the same file name (i.e., Insanity.ips and Insanity.smc) I *think* snes9x can auto-patch too, but I don't know how. The in-game documentation is rather poor. I can't think of any way to elegantly put useful text in the game without taking lots of time programming, and there are easier alternatives. And so, you'll find a lot of interesting things in the game that are unexplained... in the game. To account for that, I went and put up several text files on the website. Each will document something interesting in the game, but will not be linked to externally: To access them, you must guess their filename from what you see in Insanity. To simplify this a good bit, I'm only going to use the symbols 0-9 and a-z. No uppercase. So if you found an item called 'A.T. Vehicle', you'd probably want to check atvehicle.txt Or you can probably bug me if you found something unusual but don't know what the text file is probably called. If something unusual happens, chances are it's supposed to. Many things have been changed - the original goal of Insanity still applies. That is, this game is designed to be unexpected and keep you off-balance. And I'm sorry about that one trap. It's evil, I know, but it was too good to resist. Save stations aren't just for show, you know. -------------------- Current Mental State -------------------- ----------------- For Other Hackers ----------------- I will almost assuredly NOT work on your hack or help you figure out how to hack. There are things I want to do myself, and my time is limited. I've put up a lot of documentation already, and Insanity's 'source code' will be released... as soon as every spoiler has been found. :) If you want similar features in your own hack, do what I did: Learn the engine and implement them yourself. If there is something in my documentation that is *unclear* though(as in, there are details missing in the documentation, not "I don't get it, explain it to me again"), feel free to ask me. --------- Thanks To --------- Ultima4701, deskjockey_, jman2050, and MathOnNapkins for helping me learn to hack. Jathys for SMILE. Ultima4701, deskjockey_, jman2050, and Jathys again, for much documentation of the game. Purple Lizard for help finding good sound instruments. Nintendo for the *coughglitchycough* game engine. ;) Everyone who contributed useful ideas. (What do you mean the N is missing? I made sure it's there this time! See? Just below the E in Metroid!)