The Rat Race - NeoRHDN

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The Rat Race

Hack of EarthBound

Description

This game, which you might think of as EarthBound for girls, is a project that took several years and a lot of work with JHack and Hex Workshop to complete. Most of what I’ve changed is character names and the text, although I’ve also thrown in a few changes in the graphics I hope you’ll find to your liking. There is no “adult” content in this game unless you count a few items I’ve de-censored from Mother 2 that might get a mention on an Internet Movie Data Base parental guide but wouldn’t earn any movie so much as a PG rating (i.e. references to dating, death, and drugs).

This was originally a birthday gift for a young relative of mine who is about the same age as the protagonist and even looks a bit like her. While the game story will likely seem rather familiar from EarthBound, I’ve added several twists and put my own spin on things as you’ll see when you play it. While Shigesato Itoi’s affectionate parody of America ca. 1995 has aged remarkably well in the past 16 years, there’s always been room to augment and improve upon some of the story’s themes.

One recurrent problem I’ve seen in a lot of other hacks based on EarthBound is that altering the maps in any way that requires them to be moved into an expansion area of the ROM will invariably screw up the bus rides and sometimes the teleportation system. As such, I’ve done everything I could to keep those maps from moving in this hack. The slight increase in the hacked ROM’s size comes from one of the new opening splash screens which simply could not be compressed enough to fit where it originally belonged and therefore had to be moved into the dead space at the end.

Since several valid versions of EarthBound are floating around online, I’ve included several different patches and instructions on how to use them in this file. Since I have played this hack of the game all the way through twice to check for errors, no game-breakingly major bugs should remain. As this project was done entirely solo, however, a few minor glitches I simply failed to spot may remain.

Title

The Rat Race

Game

EarthBound

Released By

The Author