Today’s post is going to be a little bit random and nerdy but I ran across something that is simply too good not to share. In watching one of my favorite events - Games Done Quick - I ran across a speedrun of a particularly interesting game - or rather, a weird and inspired frankensteinian hack of two games from my childhood mixed together. I’ll put a link down near the bottom, but they were playing the Super Nintendo version of Zelda: A Link To The Past - except then they walked into one of the caves and my mind was blown because suddenly there were playing Super Metroid. At first, I honestly didn’t get what was happening. The title said they were playing a “randomizer”. Randomizers are weird enough; they take the code of a well-known game, such as Zelda, and then they scramble up all the items and sometimes other things and dump it back onto a playable ROM, so basically you have the original game, except that everything is in a different place. Then they try and play those games as fast as possible. It’s actually really hard and fun to watch. But this was even more amazing - this was a “combo randomizer”. As hard as this is to believe, this is a herculean effort on the part of some hackers that takes two games - in this case the SNES versions of Zelda and Metroid - and creates an impossible combination hack which makes you play through both games, jumping back and forth between them by using certain entrances in either game as basically warps to the other game. It also strews the items from both games randomly between them - so you might pick up Zelda bombs in Metroid, or the Ice Beam in a Zelda dungeon.

It blew my mind, so I went and found the code and everything. Not only is this an amazing technical feat, but it’s actually really fun. I found out that somebody had done the same thing for the NES versions of the games - which is more my speed - and after a bit of tinkering - it wasn’t even that hard - I have it working on my NES! It’s mind blowing. It seriously is like a whole new world has opened up to me. The thought of combining two games like this never even honestly occurred to me. The best I could think of prior to this was the NES competition carts, where you play some Super Mario Bros and then a timer expires and it warps you to F-Zero and then Tetris. But this is like the two games completely intermeshed. It reminds me of the idea of Chessboxing, where you play speed chess intermixed with actual pugilism.

Honestly, it’s awesome.

https://z1m1.info/