And now it’s time for Silly Hacks with Polinym, the part of the forum where Polinym comes out and posts… a silly hack.
Back in the War of Heroes, when Prince, or rather, King Mars and his knights were off battling Emperor Hardin’s forces, two of his forgotten former allies were planning a scheme of their own to bring the war to an end. They were a pair of best friends, Thomas the archer and Jake the Ballistician. Thomas had heard the legend of a hidden temple deep in Wylar’s Woods where an orb resides with the power to travel through time. So, the two country boys set off to find it, and soon find themselves whisked away on a whirlwind adventure in…
Thomas and Jake once again empark on their Excellent Adventure in the brand-new Excellent Edition of Time For Tom!
Time For Tom is a hack that spends time to care about the characters that others pass over, the ones people neglect. It’s also funny. Like, really funny.
This new version of the game is a complete overhaul of the original Time For Tom using the latest version of my own Basilisk FE1 editor program (note: as of writing this, the public Basilisk is not up-to-date with the latest fixes I use privately). It’s also filled with new features, bug fixes, and rebalances! Notable changes include but are NOT limited to:
- Healers should no longer silently attack with staves!
- Units without Resistance can now gain permanent Resistance on level up!
- Item names no longer use abbreviated names (DrgnKill → Dragonkiller)!
- New cool graphics!
- New playable units!
- New recruitable units!
- More in-game hints!
- Even funnier dialogue!
- More secrets!
- More lore-accurate weapons!
- More reinforcements? Uh-oh!
- Alucard? I’m interested in this!
You can pick yourself up a ZIP file with the patch inside on this nifty Github repo!
Be sure to patch to the original Japanese ROM.
This version no longer includes a recruitment guide as the game now provides some hints, albeit not obvious, about what characters recruit other characters.
As another fun bonus, I’m also offering a prize for the first player who can submit proof of doing EITHER of the following things (in Excellent Edition, of course):
- Beating ALL 18 chapters of the game and the final boss.
- Recruiting ALL of the recruitable enemy units!
And what’s the prize? Well… gee, um… what do I have that I can give away…? Um, how about a free download code for my indie game on Steam, Octo Vinctum!
All other entries will receive a consolation prize of one NFT (Non-Fungable Tomth).
Also of note: Having knowledge about many Fire Emblem games is not required, but will greatly enhance your enjoyment of this hack. I have crammed this thing so full of elaborate references that no player will probably ever catch them all!
Special shoutout to user @BandanaSplitzzz for letting me watch him get tortured by the original Time For Tom and inspiring me to go back and make improvements to this hack! It wouldn’t have happened without you!
Are there bugs? Well, yeah. Probably. There’s definitely times where the screen may get messed up a little and make some tiles the wrong color, but it’s nothing that should hinder you from playing the game. If you do encounter a game-breaking bug, please bring it up as soon as possible so I can fix it.
I was going to playtest this hack, maybe make a trailer, do a bunch of polishing but… to be honest, I’d actually rather move on at this point. Making these crazy passion projects, tearing apart an old crusty Fire Emblem ROM, porting an obscure unlocalized Famicom game to PC, modding obscure characters into Smash, building weird EarthBound crossover fangames, these things aren’t really going anywhere. They’re basically useless for a resume. Right now I’m leaning towards spending time on making a new game that people will be interested in playing, hopefully buying so that I can make some money. I have some ideas on how to make a game that should be a lot more marketable to today’s gaming audience.