This was a small and fun side-project: a simple hack for Wario Land 3, a Game Boy Color game.

Index

Wario Land 3

I'm such a big fan of this game. I've played it so many times. I'm obviously biased, but I do think it's objectively civilization’s greatest achievement¹ one of the best games ever created. What follows is something between a brief analysis from a game-design perspective and a fan's love letter.

Mechanics

Wario Land 3 is similar to Metroid: you collect items and skills that allow you to progress to new areas. Jump around, defeat enemies, solve puzzles.

You can also enter in temporary states that behave like skills, in a way. For example: if Wario catches on fire, he'll be able to destroy fire blocks. As a vampire, he can transform into a bat and fly around. There are many of these "forms", and they are always temporary: fire extinguishes on its own after a few seconds, but you can put it out immediately by jumping into water; vampire and zombie modes end when you "touch" light (coming from a window, for example) or water, etc.

I just love the formula. It's so fun and addictive, and very few games get it so right.

Curiously, this entry is unlike others in the Wario franchise, which are much more similar to Mario. I even suspect Wario Land 4 didn't follow this recipe because Nintendo didn't want one of their own games to compete with Metroid.²

But there's one mechanic that absolutely stands out: you can't die. There's no "Game Over" screen. Let that sink in. How many games do you know that do that? Even Monkey Island lets you die.

David Cage³ said it best:

Wario Land 3, instead, distills the essence of the Game Over screen: You did something wrong. Try again, from the start; and accomplishes the same effect without introducing a screen that abruptly breaks the immersion of the game.

This is extremely hard to do from a game design perspective!

Soundtrack

The music and sound effects of Wario Land 3 stand above most of that era.

Composed by Kozue Ishikawa —who also composed the music of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, EarthBound and other jewels⁴—, it is mostly a simple, catchy theme, with ingenious variations throughout. YouTube channel 8-Bit Music Theory published not one, but two videos on Wario Land 3's music: Turn one bar of melody into a whole soundtrack. WAAH! and Wario Land 3's Soundtrack Secret.

Check out this banger from the first level:

The variations are in fact so well done that many of us didn't even notice the common theme throughout the soundtrack until we watched these videos.

The entire soundtrack is available in the Chip Player JS.

I'm not sure whether it's on the level of Zelda and Pokémon, but it's definitely close.

The Hack

My hack introduces a simple "debug" menu, inspired by Metroid Fusion's debug menu hack⁵.

It's a simple (and pretty ugly, tbh) menu that allows you to switch forms anytime, immediately, on the spot; set which powers you have obtained, turn invisible (or back to normal) with a toggle (the invisibility you get from being by a scientist's potion), or auto-complete the golf minigame.

To play it, you can download and apply the ips patch with a tool like RomPatcher.js or flips.

Here's the repo: https://github.com/lautarodragan/warioland3/. Compiling the game from source is pretty straight forward. There's also a lot more information about the project in the repo's README.md.

I played the hack through-and-through on a real Game Boy Color, with an EverDrive. Flying around where I normally couldn't, going through floors as a zombie in places you normally wouldn't be able to, etc; was a lot of fun.

Emulators

I used gearboy to test and debug the hack, and mgba to record these little videos. Both seem to work perfectly well. Of course, if you can get your hands on an EverDrive GB, that'll be by far the best experience.

Enjoy!

That's it. I hope you enjoy the hack (: