CrunchGear

I love retro games, and although part of what I love about them is the nostalgia, going through the same worlds, thinking “oh yeah, I remember when my brother beat that guy for the first time,” all that. But another part is the simply classic nature of the 2D gameplay, in which level design was everything and the graphics were simple enough that you could fit a 30-hour game on a 24 megabit cartridge - that’s about 3 megabytes of data, people.

Well, some people have gone beyond wishing that there were a few more levels to Sonic 2 or Super Mario World and have just gone and made them. After all, the guts of the consoles and the cartridges are public knowledge now and the tools to edit them are there. Some of these ROM hackers have put together truly amazing full conversions and hacks, and if you’re at all into retro gaming, you owe it to yourself you check them out. This amazing forum thread over at NeoGAF highlights some of the best and craziest hacks out there. I personally am going to be checking these out tonight.

Plus, one of the forum guys there has a sweet Sega CD setup that I had to put up. Click below to check it out, and for links to all the games mentioned in the forum thread. [via Reddit]

Here are the links, scrounged up by a commenter:

Brutal Mario

Legend of Zelda - Parallel Worlds

Second Reality Project

Super Metroid Redesign

Mario Adventure

And here’s that SegaCD setup, running one of the hacks:

How awesome is that? Usually these consoles are in some damp den, couched in a nest of sticky cables. Notice he has the Dreamcast there as well; smart man.