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'Randomizers' Are Breathing New Life Into Old Games
Like a longtime partner or a favorite pair of socks, there's comfort to be found in revisiting a familiar game from your youth. There's a sense of ease knowing what lies inside each treasure chest, which bush an enemy will spring from, or the secret tactic that vanquishes a foe with ease. That calming intimacy makes games like these an easy nostalgic choice when you just want to take a load off.
But what if you want to add some spice back to that familiar experience? After playing a classic game to the point of memorization, how do you recapture the sense of adventure and discovery you experienced the first time you played it? A small but growing community in the retro emulation scene is aiming to answer those questions with a class of mods and hacks called "randomizers."
At their most basic level, randomizer mods shuffle the data in a game's ROM so that each run becomes a new and unpredictable experience. So The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past randomizer could change which items you find in which chests, alter the rewards from dungeon quests, and even replace Link's sprite for one of the numerous fan-created options (the Mega Man X sprite is a personal favorite). And you can go even further than that, changing the exit locations for various in-game doors or even scattering the boss keys for specific dungeons throughout the world (rather than in the dungeons themselves)!
What started as a small niche has now evolved into its own retrogaming genre. The BIG List of Video Game Randomizers website, started back in 2016, now lists hundreds of randomization mods for games from Metroid Prime, Golden Sun, and Earthbound to Faxanadu, Adventure Island, and Doom. The list is still updated weekly with new titles, so if your favorite isn't listed yet, it may be soon.
Different randomizer mods allow for different levels of randomization, but the idea of mixing up locations of items or discovered skills and abilities is rather standard. Some retain the title's intended structure but change the rewards and items you find on your journey. Others completely alter the way the game is played.
[...]Randomizers add near-infinite replayability to tired-old games, with fresh challenges for players to overcome with each playthrough. They test the player's skill and knowledge of the game instead of simply the muscle memory gained from years of experience. By limiting the player's ability to rely on their autopilot memory, the focus turns instead to quick adaptation and problem solving.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:24AM (2 children)
Well, there are hosted versions and standalone versions. I'd expect some of the hosted ones to get C&Ds, despite their claim that they aren't actually distributing ROMs. They are, technically, making a new copy of the ROM as part of the way it runs and that is sent back to the user. But if it weren't for the lawyers already on retainer they'd probably leave them alone compared to actual ROM websites.
The standalone ones are on better ground. They don't distribute any ROMs, they aren't emulating firmware, they are purely reverse-engineered, they don't directly violate copyright if they make the changes in-place, and they are moving data in an purely algorithmic manner. Additionally, considering the largest ROM hacking websites are still around under the same not-technically-infringment theory, I'd say they are probably OK. However, a randomizer might be considered to be using an anti-circumvention bypass in its execution, but that would be ROM-specific depending on the anti-circumvention measures used in it that need to be bypassed (e.g. checksums or dual-purpose code).
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:29AM
There has been upgrade kits and ROM-"hacks" available for arcade machines for many decades now. Sometimes they just fixed bugs and sometimes they added completely new things (such as new mazes for Pacman). A fairly common one was "speedup" chips that made the game run faster, as in the game became harder as enemies moved faster and fired faster etc. I guess a "randomizer" would fit in somewhere here.
It's not that like arcade makers always liked these things either, but they seem to have been in large at least tolerated them. In part probably since they still required the original machines and they in some way extended the life of the machines in the arcades, still they might have preferred if the arcades bought new games but this was still probably an ok second best option.
(Score: 4, Informative) by kazzie on Monday December 09 2019, @05:30AM
Quite.
In my experience, standalone randomizers require you to provide the ROM, they just shuffle bits around and patch it with random vectors etc.