TTFN tORP

All good things come to an end. Except this was never a good thing, and it hasn't technically come to an end. Fan favourite The Obscure Research Project, founded in 2006-ish by myself... isn't going to get any bigger, though you might have guessed this already. It's reached the end of its natural life and I probably won't be updating it anymore. I don't know if it did its job but hey, rest in peace you badly named mess. Keep reading for the autopsy.

ASDER 20-in-1

An update to The Obscure Research Project? Madness.

I'm not all that sure what posessed me to play through this pirate NES compilation, but I did, and and here's the page to prove it. Unlike most compilations it's not just a bunch of stolen games tied to a menu, but is, in fact, 20 completely original titles... well okay some are hacks... but still, not many people will have played these games before.

I don't know Nintendo's history as well as Sega's so chances are there might be a few more hacks included in this compilation. I spotted Crush Roller (or Make Trax) but there might be others so you might have to take this with a pinch of salt and I'll update it at a later date.

Pokémon 4-in-1

Time for a tORP update.

Just a small one for The Obscure Research Project this time. Pokémon 4-in-1. It was a compilation I was going to do a while back but never bothered. Nowadays I have a lot more time on my hands so I can flush some stuff out. It's also the reason this blog is seeing more activity.

As far as pirate originals go, this one isn't too shabby, though it does have some stupid additions.

I should probably give tORP a better name since I've started to filter the non-pirate stuff into this blog these days. For now though, live with it.

tORP Update

More of a catch-up if anything

I give you one updated Pocket Monster NES page and one updated Super Mario Land 4 page. The reason for a lack tORP activity is due to a lack of interesting pirates emerging on the net, or obscure games that require more than a blog post of discussion.

There's likely more work to be done but I'm sure it can wait. Still fairly certain one day a wiki-like site will emerge sometime in the future and put my efforts to shame anyway. They are more efficient after all.

Sharpen up

The tORP Super Mario Bros. Special page has been updated. I may have to do a similar thing with Punch Ball Mario Bros. in the future, but that probably won't be quite as interesting.

Jump Around 2: Hopping Mad

And now I've covered the sequel, Pocket Monster II, also for the Mega Drive. If I'd known I could have got this done so quickly I'd have bundled it with the last post. Speaking of which, I've managed to match up the second level of that game with the fourth from Mr. Nutz. So I guess this is the first squirrel-related post on Blog Squirrel.

Jump Around

I have a tORP update for you

Yet another Pokémon pirate homebrew, this time it's "Pocket Monsters" on the Mega Drive. I just can't wait to see what the deformed platforming Pikachu turns up in next! This particular pirate wound up on the Super Nintendo as well, and later scored a sequel, "Pocket Monsters II" (though I've yet to cover that). It's not particularly new, but coverage has been so poor that people have been labeling it as public domain for some bizarre reason. Make sure you're not one of them I guess.

tORP 3.0

It was my Birthday two days ago, and I was going to post this closer to that date but sadly 110mb's servers thought it would be fun to break. Again. But now that it's not being stupid...

tORP 3.0: Now with 100% more CSS positioning

The Obscure Research Project now has a fancy new layout (well, "fancy enough" anyway - I wasn't attempting to win any web designer awards). Could be worth a look, though not so much if your browser isn't a fan of web standards. Lots of pages have been re-written and there's been a heap of fixes HTML/CSS wise too. I've also saved about a megabyte of space by optimising images. Hurrah.

Articles such as Sonic Jam 6 now have a lot more meat on the bones. Back when that article was first written the only Mega Drive emulators that would support its brother, Super 1998 Mario 2, were crazy ones like HazeMD, but since Kega Fusion took it under its wing, we can start making baseless theories about timelines and whether Mario protects the tube stopper in Hidden Palace Zone.

Despite claiming that I probably wouldn't cover this game, I've gone ahead and made a Pocket Monsters Red NES article. I went about as far as I can go without having to teach a Pokémon gardening skills, but comparing this thing to the Game Boy classics is a job for more "intense" Pocket Monster fans. At the end of the day, if devoting Wiki pages to LM4 is deemed acceptable by the Pokémon community, I can't see how tearing this NES game apart isn't.

tORP is also the first site to have a nice comparison between both versions of Pocket Monsters: Go! Go! Go!!. Awkward naming schemes both on the Pikachu and the Smurfs sides of things has meant this game has been documented quite badly by the internet. But hey, I made the same mistakes too, hence why I've re-wrote it.

V.R. Fighter vs Taken2 is now a lot more presentable. Dunno what was up with me a year or two ago but I was really writing some tripe. It's looking like a decent meal now. There's plenty of other re-written pages as well, including Rocman X/Thunder Blast Man and Sonic the Hedgehog 4 and of course the promised Tiny Toon Adventures 6, which I've matched up with its Game Boy counterpart.

Some pages aren't going to be brought to the new world of tORP however. I saw no reason to keep the outdated Mortal Kombat II for NES, nor any reason to keep the StarFox 2 SNES/Sonic Crackers articles when other sites are doing a much better job at covering those games.

So, have fun with this I guess and feel free to post feedback (though don't expect fixes for old browsers). If your browser can pass The Acid2 Test you should be fine, and all the main browsers do.

Coming soon

I've been doing quite a lot of CSS work at MFGG, experimenting with the wonders of the preliminary border-radius attribute, among other things. It's amazing what you can do, and also amazing what Internet Explorer can't do.

However, The Obscure Ripping Project is mess when it comes to things like CSS, hence it's getting a makeover that's both easier on the eyes and easier for me to maintain. It's also got a new logo, and a slightly new name to reflect the shift from sprite ripping to game research. It's tORP-riffic.

What I can't guarantee is whether it'll work properly in browsers such as Internet Explorer 6, so I'm not going to. As with most things, I'm recommending Mozilla Firefox 3.5 for the full experience, but you should be fine with Safari/Chrome and well... anything that's more advanced than IE6 really. If there are massive problems, at least this time it'll be an easy fix, but I'm not going out on a limb to support outdated browsers, so if you're using that relic, it might be a good time to upgrade.

On the plus side it's given me an excuse to bring the older pages up to spec. You know how it is when you're young - you think you're the second coming of Shakespeare, but then you realise Shakespeare wouldn't be playing Punch Ball Mario Bros. on the PC88 - he'd be writting sonnets about women above his average or something... I dunno. Initially these articles were supposed to be brief, hence the short length of some of them, but that doesn't help anyone and lengthening them takes time.

Of course I endorse Firefox now, but I've seen the plans for the 3.7 UI redesign and it doesn't look pretty!

TABLELAND

Just finished uploading an article on Char's 100-in-1 GBA pirate onto tORP. 21% of the compilation was noteworthy for being pirates, hacks or homebrews. I haven't gone into a massive amount of detail this time around, because there's not much that can be said for graphic hacks and games I've already covered, but check it out sometime.

I am somewhat inspired to make a separate article on Sachen's "Pyramid" which appears in this compilation. As I said in the above page, the idea is good but the execution is lousy. However in this day and age I can't see why someone couldn't do a better job.

I one you a favour

Still other things to be done but for now, Final Fight 3 on the NES. Yet another Hummer Team NES port which actually holds up pretty well... as long as you don't mind a bit of sprite flickering and some typos. Not as good as the real thing, which in turn isn't as good as Streets of Rage, even if Haggar is one of the best mayors ever.

You sure can get a lot done when you're not spending hours on end monitoring MFGG.

Expect the unexpected

because Tiny Toon Adventures (6) is about to start.

For ages I thought this was just another hack of Konami's Tiny Toon Adventures NES game. Turns out it's a completely original title, and for a pirate, isn't too bad. It needs a bit of a polish but compared to some of ths stuff I've played, this is a god.

In other news I re-wrote the article on Harry Potter's NES adventure and found some chickens. Like many early tORP pages it was hideously out of date and didn't really explain a lot. Now it does.

Squiggly's Extras

I set up The Obscure Ripping Project back in late 2007. It should probably be called "The Obscure Research Project" now since the focus has shifted quite a bit over time, but there are a few notable games that probably won't get massive articles, or if they do, it won't be for a while. Here's a few of them, to show you what I haven't forgotten.

First, "Mortal Combat 5" on the Sega MegaDrive:

GamesMonkey sent me this terrible excuse for a game months ago, and though I've tried having a decent stab at it, it just can't be tamed. MC5 is a pirate attempt to bring Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero to the MegaDrive, but the result is quite possibly the worst MegaDrive game ever spawned. Love kicking Kano recolours in the shins? This is the game for you. Without savestates there is no way you could play this game without enduring massive amounts of trial and error, and you will often find yourself fighting enemies that not only refuse to die, clearly cheat and all look the same. It has got some of the worst typos I've ever seen in a video game and is a horrible experience from beginning to end.

Next, "Pokémon Red" on the NES

I covered Pokémon Gold a while back but that was before I started reviewing past the first five minutes of play. Truth is, Pokémon takes a long time to finish, even with guides, and as these both cut all the non-essentials and are in Chinese, it's a challenge to review these two properly, especially if you were going to into any sort of detail. Also you can only give them a go in small doses before you feel the need to rip out your PC's speakers.

"Super Mario Bros. 3 Special" for the Game Boy Colour

Actually truth is there's no reason why I can't cover this one, it's just that there's not a lot to cover. It's a gimped, broken Mario platformer that's not "special" in the slightest. It's just not very interesting and there's not much to learn from it.

"Toy Story", "Tom & Jerry 3" and "Aladdin II" for the NES

I've grouped these three together because they're all practically unplayable generic pirate games with no redeeming qualities. Toy Story is a broken platformer where all Woody's friends are out to kill him and Tom & Jerry 3 is just stupid (though it's worth noting that Tom is a chain smoker). As for Aladdin II, it's much like Aladdin 3 except that it tries to give the NES Virgin's Aladdin game instead of Capcom's. Problems with that are a) the NES already got Virgin's game officially (though it's not the best port ever) and b) Aladdin II has some of the worst graphics and gameplay I've ever encountered within a NES ROM. There was a reason this system was being phased out by 1993 people!

"King of Fighters 96/97/98/99" for the NES

Another common pirate fighting game that had numerous revisions. There's also a couple of Samurai Shodown games that use the same engine. It'll be worth checking out at some point, but having already messed with those Mortal Kombat pirates recently, it's safe to say I'm a little tired of fighting games for the NES. One day though. One day it'll be done.

Besides, I do like to talk about games that aren't pirates every once in a while. There's plenty of obscure games that weren't made by people living in run-down garages in gloomy alleyways. Though I suppose I'm starting to cover those in this blog instead. Not much to research when these games's histories are widely known.

You ain't never had a friend never had a friend

Time to meet Somari's good friend Aladdin 3, also known as "Aladdin 4", "Aladdin" and "Popeye II: Travels in Persia".

Yes the NES gets yet another SNES game. This time it's Capcom's version of Aladdin, ported by pirates in an attempt to make a quick buck. There's actually quite a few NES Aladdin pirates - I guess the official game (based off the MegaDrive version I might add) wasn't good enough, so they had to make a few rubbish Aladdin games to make it stand out a bit more.

However saying that, this one isn't too bad. I mean the SNES game was a bit generic compared to Virgin's legend of a game, but with a quick fix up this could be alright. Of course then again, if it's taken fourteen years for someone to cover this pirate in depth I can't imagine the game being torn apart any time soon.

The real question is what possessed these people to stick Popeye in there?

EDIT: It appears that I am dense, having taken a screenshot of the elusive Hummer Team logo yet failing to talk about it. So I've updated the article, made another "shocking" discovery, and are now anxiously awaiting the arrival of "Aladdin III Special" or a similar name. Thanks again to KingPepe for the tip, and "Anonymous". See, they don't all go out attacking churches of scientology after all.

Toasty

Well, here you go.

I've been slaving over this garbage for the best part of this week. Thirteen Mortal Kombat NES pirates, all covered in one place.

The original task I set myself was to find out who made Kart Fighter but my results were inconclusive. There's just not enough evidence to say "Hummer Team made it" and call it a day, regardless of what you may have been told.

Remember kids; the Nintendo Entertainment System and the fighting genre don't mix!

Pirate Hunt

What can I say, I was in the mood for some pirate research. Big pirates that have been around for years include "Somari", "Kart Fighter" and "Super Mario World (NES)", but their origins are still somewhat in the dark. I traced Super Mario World's origins a while back and found that it was the lovechild of a group known only as "Hummer Team". Since then, word got out about the little Hummer Team logo and many other games have since been matched up with authors.

But that's only one third of the great pirate mysteries. For some reason "Somari Team" isn't widely accepted as a group name, and there's been links between Somari and its siblings to Aladdin ports to the NES. That mystery is still unsolved.

But we're incredibly close to finding the truth about Kart Fighter. Its graphics have been matched (almost) with sections of Super Mario World NES. Its engine (dubbed by myself as "the Kart Fighter Engine") has been used in TEN Mortal Kombat clones, some by Hummer Team, it's also been matched to beat-em-ups by Hummer Team, and... Tekken 2... also by Hummer Team. Whoever that team are, they sure liked Kart Fighter's engine, but sadly, there's still not much to say where Kart Fighter came from, because though some of these Mortal Kombat games have Hummer Team's mark, some have other peoples' marks.

Furthermore World Heroes 2's engine has been spotted in the form of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat clones. It just goes to show that these fighting engines were widely distributed in the 90s.

Either way I just thought I'd mention it because coming soon will be a MASSIVE tORP page comparing THIRTEEN Mortal Kombat clones. All we need is some romantic music and we can make a night of it.

Multi Kill

Something's not right, Squirrel hasn't updated three days in a row since... this blog was first opened!

Gots you some Poké Tetris in article form. This page was made months ago, got to a state of near completion, but never got uploaded. UNTIL NOW. As far as pirate Tetris clones go, this is as good as they're going to get.

Also I've got that big article on the Super Boy Series up. It's missing a grand total of ONE screenshot because I couldn't be bothered to hunt down the MSX ROM of Super Boy 1 again. Aside from the platformers it also covers games such as "Brother Adventure", "Dr. Hello" and "Super Bio Man 4" - all Mario MSX clones of some description from South Korea. Good brain rotting fun.

Of course I won't be able to check if these pages are up and working properly until people stop DDoS-ing 110mb's servers!

Bubblin and Bobblin

Another one? Has hell frozen over once again? Just got the Super Bubble Bobble article on tORP. Some may find it interesting. Some may find the fact that Kega Fusion 3.6 and up will run it more interesting. Some may not find it interesting at all.

tORP Update?

Say what?

Got an article up about Harry Potter's fantastic MegaDrive adventure. A terrible Pac-Man clone which was also released under the imaginative name of "Pokémon II". Might get a video up eventually too. EXCITING.

Currently working on getting a massive article done on the Super Boy Series - a bunch of Mario clones for the MSX and SG-1000/SG-3000 consoles. Should be both painful and soul destroying. There's also a Super Bubble Bobble page to come, but I haven't been inspired to take more screenshots as of yet.

I've had Super Boy 2 and 3 rips on MFGG and the like for ages. Tackled Super Boy 4 recently so if you're actually interested in the rips that my little site promises but never delievers, head on over to that Galaxy of Mario Fan Games.

!!!

What's this? A blog post?!

Yeah following some rather nifty pirate discoveries I shifted The Obscure Ripping Project to 100MB.com. It's not the best idea in the history of man, but it's a better one than leaving it on fateback because FTP services there suck.

Now at least I can update things quickly.

NEW ADDRESS:

http://torp.110mb.com/

Let the word of Squirrel be spread far and wide. Though not too far - there are bandwidth limits.


As for other things... well NCFC came and went, I never actually did anything dispite saying I would and adminship at MFGG is more time consuming than I had originally planned. But no matter.

Oh and I did update tORP a bit. SMW NES, Somari and Super Donkey Kong 2 got added to. In fact I uploaded my entire tORP folder so there might actually be a load of minor updates too, possibly some unfinished. Exciting!