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“Over Horizon – The Arcade Game”,
a ROM hack for the NES

(December the 30th, 2024)

Description

Screenshot 1

This is a ROM hack of the NES game “Over Horizon”.
The fictitous backstory for the hack is that “Over Horizon” was originally an arcade game. And this arcade game later got an NES port with extended contents. (Similar to “Rush’n Attack” whose NES version has a new soundtrack, two new levels and a different plot.) Our hack restores the game to its arcade form, or rather to an NES game that’s a straight port.
In reality, I like this game very much since it’s a shoot’em up that is not unforgivingly hard. But the last two stages just drag on too much and especially the stage 5 boss is very frustrating and unfair. That’s why I decided to cut the game down to a more digestable experience.

The ROM analysis, the technical work of finding out how the game functions, was done by kandowontu.
The design choices (which levels to cut, what other alterations to do) were decided by me.

Source NES ROM file: “Over Horizon (J).nes”
Intended output file name: “Over Horizon - The Arcade Game (J) [h].nes”

For the hack, we cut out stage 5 completely:
With the sub boss in the middle, the gameplay drags on for much too long. And the final boss is incredibly unfair, especially after such a long level.

In stage 6, we did the following:

We removed the edit mode since it’s not very arcade-like.
And all those configurations cannot be changed between levels. After the start of the game, they are fixed. Unless you get a game over. Hence, story-wise, there’s only one canon configuration anyway. And that one is obviously the default configuration.

The speed selection is a pretty stupidly-implemented feature:
You never need speed 1 or 2. There are no passages in the game that require such a fine control. But the slow speeds can severely hinder you. And speed 5 is only really required in stage 5 in the water, which we cut out. Speed 4 is useless as well. So, most of the time, you use the default speed of 3 anyway.
And if you went faster, going back to the default speed is stupid button mashing: You have to go from 5 to 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3. Because if you just go from 5 to 3, then next time you press the button, your ship gets slower. But next time, you most likely want to get faster again. So, you better make sure that your last speed change was from 2 to 3, not from 4 to 3. Which means you have to press the button six times to get back to the default.
In conclusion, we simply removed the speed selection completely. Let’s play this arcade game with two buttons only.

We removed the post-credit scene where an alien baby appears and says it will be back.
That was mostly a personal decision by me to have a more definite ending. Also, that scene appears 30 seconds after the final score screen. It’s a nice easter egg when you leave the console on for that long. Especially since you don’t expect it. But it doesn’t really fit an arcade game.

Screenshot 2 Screenshot 3 Screenshot 4 Screenshot 5

Download and links

Since I don’t own the copyright to the game, I cannot provide the ROM file that you need to play the hack on an NES emulator. But the download contains an IPS file. With this file and with the program Lunar IPS, you can create the hack if you have the original ROM.

Likewise, the download contains a text file that has two purposes:
Just like the IPS file, it is equally a patch with which you can build the hack, this time with the tool BinCmp.
And it also contains a detailed documentation of how we changed the contents of the original game to create the hack. So, if you’re interested in what exactly was changed and how some of the internals of the game work, then this file could be of interest for you.

The hack is also hosted on Romhack Plaza, under kandowontu’s account.

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