Cheats/remakes/source ports that fixed or improved upon games

[Product Intervention]

My friend and I play a lot of Mario Kart 8/Deluxe and so we are very good at this point. Something that is very fun and challenging is to run 12 or 16 races (we usually do 16, which amounts to four GPs) and set the game to team race (same team) with normal items, karts only and hard AI. Running karts only seems to make the game more challenging on top of hard AI. And you want a challenge after all.

Here's the key: both players throw the first three races. You still have to finish, but make sure you both come in last. That should handicap the AI enough to make it a real game to get first place. I wish they let you handicap opponents naturally but this works too and makes a very fun but somewhat easy game much more challenging.

 

[Stasi]

I recently played through GTA Vice City using reVC, and I think that's the best way to play it nowadays. It adds features from several mods, including better camera and movement controls, full widescreen support, and SkyGFX (which adds all of the extra graphical effects from the PS2 version). Unfortunately, those faggots at Take Two decided to take it down since it works far better than their new "remaster".

Was going to mention this. Unless you are playing on a PS2, the definitive way to play VC and San Andreas is with a handful of mod on PC which R* are hell bent in burying to push their broken cash grab re-release. I had the original pc releases and have all of the mods installed for both games and R* can suck my dick.

 

[Kurtis Trent]

not matter what PS1 purists say, classic Tomb Raider games (except Chronicles) are much better on PC if only for quicksave/quickload and large variety of mods

 

[HeyYou]

I cannot shill Daggerfall Unity enough. It's not possible to be purist with Daggerfall because it means playing a game that barely works, even with the final patch. Several skills and status effects like poison are broken and don't work. Daggerfall Unity makes the game actually function as intended and then some.

 

[BrunoMattei]

On the subject of rom hacks there's these for Megaman X5 and X6.

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3711/

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4035/

Biggest highlight for me is that YOU CAN DISABLE THE GOD DAMN OBVIOUS HINTS THAT CONSTANTLY INTERRUPT THE GAMEPLAY. Fuck Inafune.

 

[JektheDumbass]

I like this Breath of Fire 2 hack:

http://www.jeffludwig.com/bof2/

Other than the cleaned-up translation taking my favorite line away I think the rebalance is interesting.

 

[Kurtis Trent]

modders (except for that bugger who loves taking credit for other people's work) did such a wonderful job with the PC port of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness it can now be considered the definitive version. The most essential fix was restoring the camera relative controls from the PS2 version and fixing Lara's speed, making her movements much faster and responsive (the original PC port used ps1 tank controls because the devs didn't know how to map the camera to the mouse properly). Not to mention the innumerable graphical fixes, adding back dual pistols and restoring unused dialogues.

 

[Overcast]

Black Mesa’s Xen was a massive improvement over HL1’s Xen. No contest.

 

[Tism the Return]

The Long War is the obvious answer for nuCOM 1 and 2 mods, makes the games harder and adds a lot of additional stuff to fuck around with.

 

[Product Intervention]

The Long War is the obvious answer for nuCOM 1 and 2 mods, makes the games harder and adds a lot of additional stuff to fuck around with.

Yeah this is an excellent suggestion.

Sadly, Long War does not make nuCOM 2 good. It makes nuCOM Enemy Within fucking great though.

CHOO CHOO MOTHERFUCKERS

 

[Captain Syrup]

Shadowrun (Genesis/Mega Drive) was good for its time, but Joshua was written to be a flat, boring character so the game wouldn’t invalidate the player’s build. Null sweat, chummers: Perhaps you should play as a blacksploitation character? woman instead of Michael's beefcake brother.

DISABLE THE GOD DAMN OBVIOUS HINTS THAT CONSTANTLY INTERRUPT THE GAMEPLAY. Fuck Inafune.

 

[byuu]

Shadowrun (Genesis/Mega Drive) was good for its time, but Joshua was written to be a flat, boring character so the game wouldn’t invalidate the player’s build. Null sweat, chummers: Perhaps you should play as a blacksploitation character? woman instead of Michael's beefcake brother.

Give me a translation of the Mega CD Shadowrun game instead.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Everyone hates Gau on their first playthrough. The solution is to use a guide.

But the better solution is to not bother with Gau at all, because he requires a lot of soul-sucking grinding (just to buff a character you have no control over), and you can spend hours on the Veldt after Terra rejoins and not have the goddamn Litwor Chicken show up to learn its Rage. This patch requires much less investment, plus there are loads of guides to assist you in sorting through his bazillion Rages. Seriously, you don't even need to use Leap.

 

[Calandrino]

Do regional differences count?, some games in Japan were easier compared to the US/EU release, like Contra: Hard Corps adding a life bar, Ninja Gaiden 3 having continues, and Battletoads being easier overall.

Contra with a life bar is pretty haram, but this is a better way to play Hard Corps: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/450/

Among other QoL improvements it allows you to skip mission briefings or advance text more quickly so that you can return to the killing faster.

 

[BrunoMattei]

Contra with a life bar is pretty haram, but this is a better way to play Hard Corps: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/450/

Among other QoL improvements it allows you to skip mission briefings or advance text more quickly so that you can return to the killing faster.

The Jap version had a life bar. Hard Corps is easily my favorite Contra.

 

[Quintex96]

The Turok games on the N64 have pseudo wireframe cheats that actually make the game look better.

 

[Mr. Duck]

Dark Forces has a source port in development, and it's almost complete.

The author has plans to add support for Outlaws in the future.

 

[Fictional Character]

I cannot shill Daggerfall Unity enough. It's not possible to be purist with Daggerfall because it means playing a game that barely works, even with the final patch. Several skills and status effects like poison are broken and don't work. Daggerfall Unity makes the game actually function as intended and then some.

While true, Daggerfall Unity making guild reputation decay work as intended makes the game worse. I haven't checked for a while, so maybe they added a toggle for that or maybe there's mod for it. (For the uninitiated, you lose reputation with guilds with the passage of time. In the original, it's no big deal since the only effect is that you get kicked out of the guild once it goes low enough and you can just do a bunch of quests for one guild at once to get some buffer. Unity makes you actually lose ranks in the guild as your reputation goes down which makes it harder to build a buffer.) Not a big deal if you just want to finish the game, since the Mages Guild has all the important services and is the easiest guild to build reputation with, but annoying if you want to do silly stuff like getting a house for free.

 

[Two Dollars]

The Super Mario 64 decompilation port is great; it supports any resolution and aspect ratio natively, fixes slowdown and texture issues that were in the original game, and still has a somewhat active modding community. It’s also been ported to a few systems that otherwise can’t emulate N64, which is nice if you ever wanted to play SM64 on a PS2 (or an incomplete Dreamcast port). If you don’t want to bother with installing mods, one of the forks, SM64 Plus, adds a bunch of new features and QoL fixes that can be toggled on/off. In particular, being able to stay in a level after getting a star is a game changer.

There’s also two different Ocarina of Time decomp ports being worked on that also have support for any resolution: Ship of Harkinian, and OpenOcarina. The former is further along, but they both have planned enhancements (like 60 FPS support) that haven’t been finished yet.

 

[BrunoMattei]

Dark Forces has a source port in development, and it's almost complete.

The author has plans to add support for Outlaws in the future.

Oh, that guy is still working on it? He fucked off a million years ago without updating anyone. I'll believe it when I see it if it finally happens.