Tag: Zelda

I’ve been trying to keep myself amused during the COVID-19 shutdown, and as such have been trying a number of new things. One new thing I decided to look into is playing hacked NES ROMs. It turns out there are a great number of ROM hacks out there, with the website ROMhacking.net listing over 4,600 hacked ROMs as of this writing.

While looking into hacked ROMs, I quickly learned that ROM hacks fall into one of 3 main categories: “really good”, “really bad”, and “joke”. I spent some time looking around, and found one particular ROM which I found in the “really good” category: Zelda II: New Adventure of Link, created by someone named HollowShadow. So I downloaded OpenEmu, grabbed the ROM hack, bought a USB NES controller, and got to playing!

Being a big fan of Zelda 2, I had no problem playing through the vast majority of the ROM. It’s when I got to the final palace is when the game became quite difficult, and quickly got lost.

What I needed was a map, but because this was a ROM hack, there wasn’t a whole lot available to me in the way of resources.

So I decided to make a map.