Retro VS Future

Let’s take a brief walk down memory lane one more time… to a time where people started creating new title screens for their favorite game of the time, A Link To The Past. But first let’s have a look at the original trademark title screen we all have come to known and like:

We can say the title is very well made, you can see it matched Nintendo standards of the time. I’ve made countless titles attempts overtime and witness some made by others aswell and few match the same quality. Let’s look at some custom-made title screen.

^^ Here in Legend of Iced Hyrule, the author managed to add new tiles, removed the ”Zelda” altogether and make some colors changes. And that was in 2001… Something to be considered good considering this was the first real attempt at hacking Zelda 3 to be released.

^^ The first hack of Zelda 3 which caught my attention. The demo was great even though falling short. It’s a shame it vanished as it was only one of two hacks with serious potential, the other being Quest for Calatia which the wait has been eternal.

Feeling the world needed a second coming, I gave a shot at Hyrule Magic and see where it could lead me. On my own and with nowhere to go, I first started gathering information and notes on many forums, message boards compiling every bit of information I could come across and find useful in further HM uses and crammed the things into one big and handy file…. Orochimaru’s Perfect Guide to Hyrule Magic v1.3 Having created an immortal pdf file worth of good info of Hyrule Magic inner workings, bugs and what to avoid, it provided me with a good start at actually trying to make a hack myself..

^^ Previously named Gates of Time, Gates of Darkness can be considered my first real attempt at creating a full fledge hack of Zelda 3. Being abandoned and useless to my own purposes I decided to release it along two other unfinished hacks. It was picked up again as a project by PuzzleDude, a fellow Z3 romhacker who could be best described as a the best thing to have happened to the Zelda community since bread and butter. He’s a completionist I mean… having debugged two of my unfinished hacks already I wonder what he’ll come up with next and I sure hope it isn’t the last we see from him.

^^ Eventually while learning new tricks up my sleeve in terms of tweaking overworld graphics I decided it was about time to create another new Zelda 3 from scratch. And so, Lyra Islands was born. Consisting of multiple islands you could visit with much of the overworld map covered in water, a volcano and a splendid forest, it had all the needs for a successful and promising hack. Ghillie a fellow individual helped in the process with story, gave me a good map of where everything should be… with too many projects at once and with still barely any dungeons expertise under my sleeve, I simply abandoned it over time.

^^ Started as a hack for an old TEKHacks.Net romhacking contest, the project went into a beta phase which simply never ended. Having created the overworlds and some dungeon rooms, the hack also featured dungeons created by Dude Man that were meant to be used in Dark Prophecy at some point in time before they were removed in favor of much better dungeons. Omega45889 oversaw the whole project giving me a good detailed map of the locales in the game. Despite being severely unfinished I still decided to release it before it just fade away like the rest of my Zelda 3 hacks relics. To my surprise, someone actually took the time to actually finish it, expand the gameplay, fixed bugs and made the whole thing actually both playable and enjoyable. Re-dubbed as Goddess of Wisdom, PuzzleDude surely made sure the gameplay was as if we played an original Nintendo game… which can be a good way right?

^^ Because teamwork is the real key to complete a project of this sort and the fact I seem to have a never-ending craving to hack this game, I offered my services to Euclid… a deal to overhaul his overworld graphics of his then near complete hack he had released a demo off.. Tower Of The Triforce it was. With this gradually renewed partnership lasting years, many things were changed along the way. At one point it became too much different and we decided to change the name of the hack to a more suitable Parallel Worlds.

^^ With a new name now all we needed was a background change. It wasn’t until 2006 close to the release that I decided to create a new title screen showing a snowy landscape instead.

^^ The final title screen of Parallel Worlds from version 1.1 released in 2007. A much welcomed change to the barren mountains seen in the older betas.

^^ My take on a title screen I made for Omega45889 and Dude Man for their Dark Prophecy hack (Keep notice the picture is blurry because it comes from one of the two youtube vids they posted, as I no longer have access to any Dark Prophecy roms). I had the privilege to actually play the game, edit many graphics, play an almost complete version, but to avoid any leaks and according to Omega45889′s wishes I deleted all my ”Dark Prophecy work edits” a long time ago. Fortunately it resides in my memory and you can see two videos of the hack (minor the custom graphics by Bit-Blade) on youtube. At one point it was even the much advanced Zelda 3 you could find. Joining forces were the great uncontested king of documenting/understanding the ins and outs of the Zelda 3 with his out-of-this-world knowledge… MathOnNapkins! And on the other side none other than a very talented custom graphics spriter, Bit-Blade!

Just for nostalgia let’s look at some awesome pics of Bit-Blade’s custom graphics.

I’m seriously hopping Dark Prophecy gets released sometime as it was very close to playing an original sequel to Zelda 3.

^^ Coming relatively out of nowhere, Spane sure knows how to edit Zelda 3 graphics the right way! Some custom graphics were ripped straight from Parallel Worlds and the new added ones change the gameplay to an extend that even I like it. His pyramid entrance is ingenious, I mean it! It fits the style perfectly. Let’s hope he doesn’t abandon it because there’s serious potential in that project!

^^ 2009, with the yet similar yearly idea to go back working on yet another Zelda 3 hack I cooked this mockup in order to get a better idea at what it could actually look like.

However… now were in 2012 right? I still wasn’t happy enough. Why should it take you three years to insert a title screen? Other then the fact you know you will eventually change it? Well I had to do something about it… rules have changed, those black bars at the top and bottom of the screen had to go or at least change in any way possible. And so this new title screen below was born… one I actually took the time to edit, insert and even change my resolution to 800×600 due to the crappy title screen editor HyruleMagic gave birth to, but yeah managed to cook something much more satisfying for a ”Parallel Universes: Chapter I of II.

^^ The start of a new Era. 20XX because we obviously never truly know when a Zelda 3 hack is done to satisfaction. Also I haven’t taken the time to fix the glitched triforce in background and have yet to fix the green ”Link” overlay as it’s missing some tiles on the edges and HM won’t let me add new BG2 tiles… but I’ll get around those glitches another day.. with a good part of yesterday and today figuring out how to get so much custom gfx in one space is enough work for one week! …next up I’ll go back to the overworlds for some serious glitches fixing and also the rift remains to be done (the blueprints have been created, all it remains is for me to actually get up on my feet and do some more work)… but hey! Title screen is done! One thing less to think >_>

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