Modded Console Games

[Bells]

I know a few of your here might download a PC game or two before choosing to buy it or not, or even making copies of your own console games to avoid damaging the original disks, and stuff like that...

In that vein, i just saw something today i didnt knew it was around, but i found it quite interesting.
People are modding console games. Now, i've seen these before. But only for soccer games. People would mod these games out here in Brazil so they could update the official teams, add and change teams and even changed the narrator of the game so it would be one a national one.

But today, i was reading up on this new thing where people were being able to acess a HDD via the Wii, and i found a "Tales of Symphonia Unddubed Edit - NTSC" thing.

Someone took the tales of Symphonia game (US version) and chaged all the voices and SFX back to the original Japanese version.

Here is the creator's disclaimer, just so you guys can see what he did

This is my undubbed edition of the Wii game "Tales of Symphonia - Dawn of a New World",
which name I changed back to the original one: "Tales of Symphonia - Knight of Ratatosk".

Things I did:

- replaced the Sound folder for complete japanese speech & SFX
- replaced the Movie folder for japanese videos: OP, ED and 2 in-game videos.
Yes, only 2 in-game videos because the NTSC-U ISO seems to be missing one.
- replaced Tpl>title.tpl for the japanese title screen
- replaced opening.bnr for the japanese banners
- renamed the game to "ToS: KoR"
- removed #001 protection
- patched all video modes to NTSC (a bit useless though...)
- brickblocked
- scrubbed

Issues:
- wrong timing on skits
- savegame unchanged... still the same banner and text
NEW: >_>
- will crash in Katz Village, sorry for this...

I was kinda of surprised that people were actually doing stuff like this now. I mean, I got Bleach Shattered Blade for the Wii, and the fact that there was only English voices was a turn down for me (aside from the fact that is sucked...) and i was just wondering how far could people take stuff like this, and how would the companies respond to that. I mean, it's not like someone could mod Megaman into Smash Bros, but i saw people discussing making new Costumes and Colors sets...

Any thoughts?

[Mirai Gen]

I mean, it's not like someone could mod Megaman into Smash Bros, but i saw people discussing making new Costumes and Colors sets...
Who says they can't?

The only thing preventing people from making Game A into Game B is quite simply the time and effort that would have to go into it. I can guarantee you if Brawl was for PC (Oh god that hurt to even think about) this sort of thing would be completely normal.

The most you have to work with is modded consoles with lots and lots of homebrew work, and then you'd be investing time and energy into something almost nobody will see and more than likely Nintendo would be working to shut you down anyway.

Everyone takes the Source engine and makes mods with it - Perfect Dark Source and Goldeneye Source, for example - but that's just because Valve made their engine easily accessed and handed out pretty much the entire guts of Half Life 2.

[Kim]

I would have sex with anyone who put Mega Man into Brawl. I'd even call them the next day. Bonus points if they made a Giygas assist trophy that Game Over'd everyone.

[Mirai Gen]

Honestly I'd be happy with them making the game not horribly unbalanced, but Mega Man would be appreciated.

I know it's silly to say that modders need to fix the game after it gets released but good god, some of the main characters to the Nintendo world like Samus or Link or Captain Falcon are just trash.

Dammit Sakurai, why you always gotta make me hit you?

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Just to say there is a pretty large brawl modding community which modify the game pretty significantly.
Most of them spend their time basically remaking melee (removing tripping, putting in wave dashing etc).

[Seil]

Tell me when someone mods Oblivion. Ugh - I bought the game for PS3 while visiting a friend after playing it at a different friend's house, and took it home. I absolutely loved it - there was epic storylins, great quests fun characters (especially in the Shivering Isles expansion) and I had a blast.

However, the game often crashed, or froze and sometimes I had trouble with the quests, such as an NPC not realizing that I'd finished the quest, or a quest not realizing that I'd finished an objective. Twice I had to look up fixes, and while I could usually find workarounds, sometimes I was completely stuck. For instance, I've managed to work my way through all the story quests and beat them, save for the Thieves guild - the "Independent Thievery" (a quest that's there at the beginning of the Thieves Guild, prompting you to steal a bit, and sell your loot off to a fence) won't trigger. Grey Fox won't leave the house.

I'd read that there was a patch released for the computer version, which fixed a lot of these issues, but there's no work around for the console versions.

[Mirai Gen]

Tell me when someone mods Oblivion.
Okay. (http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?id=41&view=Articles.Detail)

[Seil]

But do all those work for PS3? And how?

[Mirai Gen]

Naw it's just good incentive to not buy Bethesda games for consoles. They come ready-made with bugs and glitches.

What's weird is I'm not even really mad at them for it.

[The Wizard Who Did It]

Just to say there is a pretty large brawl modding community which modify the game pretty significantly.
Most of them spend their time basically remaking melee (removing tripping, putting in wave dashing etc).
And who's central mentality is that it's the only way to make the game skill based and competitive in any way. In their defense though, removing tripping is completely justified.

But yeah, I've heard a lot about modding consoles now that I'm in the dorm, but most people don't do it because it seems to have a risk of wrecking your console (and when these things are much more than a $100, that's a pretty bad risk). So I feel I should ask, is the risk really that bad for modding consoles? Or is that descendant from someone who has a moral high ground and started a rumor?

[Mirai Gen]

And who's central mentality is that it's the only way to make the game skill based and competitive in any way.
I'm actually neutral on the subject, as I think Smash is a fantastic game with terrible design philosophy.

[Mike McC]

The design philosophy is that it's a party game.

[Mirai Gen]

And yet it shares all of its other traits with fighting games, except when it comes to the crucial stuff like character balance.

Or is that descendant from someone who has a moral high ground and started a rumor?
From what I understand? It's actually pretty tricky, yeah. It's like installing Linux on a Dell pre-built.

[Mike McC]

But it's design philosophy was that of a party game.

[Mirai Gen]

I'm not going to argue about this.

[Kim]

Much though wasn't put into the character balance because it's a party game where you all get together and have Samus beat the shit out of Luigi. That's not to say they shouldn't have put more effort into character balance. Character balance would not have hurt the game, and would've made it more appealing to types like Mirai. I can see why they didn't, but there's really no reason to not have worked on that better.

That said, I still love the game just so I can kick everyone's ass as Kirby. I don't play fighting games very much, and I never thought of Smash Bros. as being the same to them, so the lack of character balance never stood out too much to me.

[Mirai Gen]

On the subject of modding; lots of the stuff done to modding Brawl is due to Pro Action Replay, and they have all sorts of different types such as SHFFLing and S-Cancel (which are actually totally different). Obviously you can't include a character into the game because modifying code is different from a whole new set of code, abilities, particle effects, animations, wireframes, and skins and that would require actual hardwiring to a computer and designing it yourself.

[Mike McC]

From what I understand? It's actually pretty tricky, yeah. It's like installing Linux on a Dell pre-built.That's a pretty bad analogy, as installing Linux on any computer is no more easy or difficult as any other computer. But really, some of this homebrew console modding, it starts coming down to the possibility that it might be easier to just program your own engine and build your own game. The stuff Bellsouth was talking about is simple replacement.It's relatively easy to swap out data in a game. However, the brawl argument, this isn't simple data replacement, this is adding entirely new elements to the game. And this is very difficult to do without comprimising the stability of the game.

As for modding harming consoles, it is possible. The current generation is a fair bit more delicate than previous generations, and unless they know exactly what they are doing, the application of mod chips could result in very bad things happening (RROD).

Really, the best thing to do if you want a game moddable is to either hope the developers allow the console version to apply mods, or get the PC version.

[Mirai Gen]

From what I have understood once you install a custom firmware over the core operating system on 360s or Wii the game just kind of lays on it's back and rolls over (At least as far as pirating games anyway, not sure about custom coding). I'm not sure about PS3.

The rest of it, yeah, as I said.

[Mike McC]

Pirating is also far simpler than data addition. All you're doing is instructing the hardware to not preform a specific check, or installing hardware to force that check to be skipped.

[corronchilejano]

Usually it takes WAY too long for people to mod a console game since most of it is reverse engineering. Hell, take a look on how long it took the people of Zelda Cohalition (almost 8 years) to mod Ocarina of Time, and that was an N64 game.

[Bells]

uuh guys...?

Not to step on anyone's toes... but here's what i can tell you about modding consoles:

PS3- No group so far got pass the "play Ps2 backups on your PS3"
Xbox- Easy, albeit risky. Not for the console itself, but for the fact that people get banned out of xbox-live if MS finds a Modchip in your console (which they do)

Wii- So easy it's not even funny. you dont even need to solder anything anymore, and a Wii can be Modded to play Homebrew and Wii games in under 20 minutes (if you never done it before. it's less if you know your way around), and from the mod scene itself, it is said that the oldest mod chips will work with the latest Wii updates without a hint of a problem. You only get in trouble if you try to play a PAL or JP game in a NTSC console (or any other mix of these 3) without proper preparation (as there are bypasses for those too)

As far as i heard there is not even a blip on the radar about Modding making your console go bad (as in Hardware failure). Unless you do a poor job or if you didnt get the right products (which arent all that expensive anyways...)

Now, the bitch here is that on the 360 Backups are easy to make, but it's a gamble with the console. On the Wii, it's the other way around. You need a small group of expecific software tools and it's only 90% sure to work if you have the right LG DVD Writing drive so it's pretty expecific stuff.

Ofcourse, im refering to the procedure that it takes for you to Backup your own games...

But, as far as actually modding games on Consoles... well, let's just say that you can have your own custom version of Guitar Hero ( "Anime Hero" is a good example of that one) at least on the PS2 (although im pretty sure the 360 has it's version too... and now probably the Wii )

I also saw the Bleach : Shattered Blade Undubbed (there are Youtube videos of it) which is basicly the US game with JP audio.

[Mike McC]

Actually, we are talking about playing MODs of existing console games, something significantly more complicated than homebrew, out of region, or pirated software, which is the modding you are refering to. They are two entirely different things, and applying MODs to existing games on a console is an extremely arduois and time consuming task, especially since with many of them you have to completely reverse engineer the game engines. Unless you are doing simple data swapping, which is what those 'undubbed' audio mods are, in which case all you have to do is make a front-end which replaces calls to the original sound directory with the new one.

And modding, WHEN DONE RIGHT, doesn't cause problems. However, if the person who mods it isn't the most experienced, well, problems arise. Take a guess how many jackasses think they can do it well.