It was two days until I parted with my parent's residence and started building my own existence. I had lived under their roof for a fifth of my life, and now finally I was off to uni. As exciting as the prospect of getting a worthless degree in sociology and then ending up jobless on the streets was, the preparation for moving out was roughly ten times worse. Over my eighteen years of life I had accumulated an overwhelming collection of crap; multitudes of empty pens and broken pencils, swarms of papers, things I don't even know what they were yet I kept, games with pieces missing and god knows how many books. I even had my lego, which for years I had sworn to myself that I would sell them at some point yet never got round to dumping them on eBay. And now everything lay in boxes, waiting for their final judgement. Which objects will be deemed worthy and given new life? Taken on the fabulous adventure known as education?
And which will face the horrors of the dump? Ready to face the flaming infernos of the hell-fire incinerators?
I honestly couldn't care less.
It was amongst the multitude of crap that I found my old gameboy advance. I didn't know I still had it, its existence had been wiped from my memory at some point in time while it had sat hidden in the dark void known as my cupboard. This small purple object with pathetically small buttons had been my life when I had been, like, twelve or something. I remember the days I ran through the dreams of some pado eating plumber to save his imaginary "princess", the thrill of commanding my mutant creatures to body slam other creatures thus breaking their backs and leaving my opponents paralysed, and of course the many hours spent sending cute clueless soldiers to their doom in Advance Wars. That game had been the bomb when my moustache still consisted of fuzzy wisps even a peach could put to shame (which for some reason I at the time was incredibly proud of). The colourful over-complicated chess turn-based strategy game had agreed with my brains receptors more than any other.
There are many things people don't know about my life, and one of those things is that I was a serious hardcore Advance Wars geek. After a few weeks of playing it I soon found myself on an Advance Wars forum (yes, there is such thing) debating about which custom character would be the best addition to the game. It didn't end there. It was there I learned to hack and modify gameboy games. No longer would I have to live with a gaping hole in my heart only custom characters could fill, I could now put them in the game I owned.
And boy did I.
Good times.
It was while I stood still looking rather stupid staring at my ancient purple electronic brick from the past whilst having nostalgic memories that the idea plopped into my head to refresh my gameboy hacking skills and create a showdown between my favourite characters from my favourite gameboy games. Mix that with mafia (my current obsession to waste time with) and I'd have one hell of a gameboy abomination.
Now, you may be wondering "who the heck spontaneously decides to create a gameboy game based on a massive crossover and mafia?".
However you have to understand I truly hate organising and sorting with a passion.
There's literally nothing else I'd like to do less than that trash. Hence my brain sought to escape its responsibilities by any means. Even if that requires becoming a child again.
So without further ado I googled the old forum where all the notes and guides to gameboy hacking were (I wasn't surprised to see it had a little life, although it's joined the dark-side of the net. Who knew organised crime was selling bagels via national television?) and started to read up on ARM7 assembly, hex editors, pointers, graphics, you name it, although you likely don't have a clue what in the world those things mean. After a few hours I felt like I was ready to start the project, so I created an empty gameboy ROM and started coding away.
Fourteen caffeinated-high-filled-hours and various anger-filled-outbursts-caused-by-bugs later I finished my project. Now it's your task to play-test my baby and relive the same nostalgic memories that caused me to shirk my responsibilities, and I would say it was worth it! I do hope you enjoy my creation, and may the best faction win!