Koopa Quest

Koopa Quest is an old graphical hack of Super Mario Bros. 2 that I started working on quite a few years during camp. It's made using NESticle, one of the older (and I mean WAY older) NES emulators, and the pictures here are emulated with Nestopia, another NES emulator. The reason for using NESticle is that it has a great interface for graphical editing of NES games, making hacks like this one all too easy.

The basic idea of this hack is that Mario and the gang have stolen Bowser (Koopa) and you must rescue him from their good clutches. You can play as a Koopa Troopa (=Mario), a Piranha Plant (=Luigi), a Goomba (=Toad), or a Lakitu (=Peach). A few of the enemies are edited, as you can see in the second picture (the Shy Guy is the Italian flag, more or less), and Birdo is (as you can see in the third picture) replaced with Mario. If you can get far enough you can see that Wart is a tiny Luigi in a huge bubble. Most of the game isn't edited, because SMB2 has an odd habit of using different 'sets' of sprites for each level, so you have to edit them all. The level front screens aren't done, either, they represent an older version where the landscape was more or less transparent. (Here you can see it says "Mario" over and over...)

The basic story is that I was at Impact, a really great camp which existed (note past tense) at Mercy College (not far from where I live), and I took a class in video game graphics design or something like that. Anyway, we all used NESticle and a copy of SMB2, and then we played until we were sort of good and after that took a crack at editing the GFX. One person did Construction World, some other people did some other stuff... I did Koopa Quest. The health bar used to be Ks for Koopa but the counselor told me I couldn't use that because when you get an extra health mushroom your health bar would say "KKK". Oh well.

Since this is a graphical hack the level designs are unchanged and the story is the same, but if that can be fixed maybe I'll fix it sometime. It doesn't look, however, like this is going to be completed. I simply have too many other things to do.

You might want the ROM, if you want to play it or edit it or something. You can read about my ROM policy in my Games FAQ page, but to make long stories (and believe me, there are plenty of them) short the ROM is at here. Be warned, it's 257KB.