Extending/randomising early 90s games

[Seymour Clufley]

I know nothing at all about this subject so please forgive me if the answers are obvious.

My favourite games are old Sega classics on the Game Gear and Genesis/Megadrive. In particular I like Alien 3 and Robocop vs Terminator. While it's nice to go back to these games every so often, it does get boring given that I know the levels inside-out!

So it occurred to me that it would be great if somebody somewhere found a way to redesign the level maps in these games, so that you could go through new variants of familiar themes. If we take as an example the prison setting in Alien 3, the first three levels have a common visual look. (This is replaced with a new look in levels 4-6, 7-9, etc.) Basically I'd like more levels with the same look but new layouts to challenge me.

I asked somebody about this and he said the phrase was "map generation" or even "random map generation" so that it would be different every time. Does anyone know if this has been done? Are there any links or phrases I should google? (I've already tried, but didn't find anything.)

Thanks,
Seymour.

[Pyriel]

It's an interesting idea, but it would be a pretty extensive rewrite for any game that doesn't already support it. And with Genesis games, and games from other systems of that generation, they were usually already making use of almost every available resource. You'd have better luck trying to find ROM hacks where people have manually redesigned the levels, because I have a feeling that randomly generating anything, let alone anything playable, in those games would vary between massive undertaking and virtually impossible.

Now, I suppose someone could write a PC tool that would generate random levels and inject them into a ROM. That would fall in the neighborhood of massive undertaking as well, but it's more likely to be possible. I don't think you're likely to find that anyone has done that, or is in any special hurry to start working on it, though.