MONSTER PARTY: LET'S GO AGAIN!



UPDATE: December 12, 2015 - New version 1.5 now available.

UPDATE: June 13, 2014 - In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the release of MONSTER PARTY and Friday the 13th, MONSTER PARTY: LET'S GO AGAIN is now available!

MONSTER PARTY is an NES game that was released by Bandai in 1989. The game is somewhat notorious for its premise, involving a kid who gets whisked away to fight monsters on another planet; its odd assortment of enemies, which include umbrellas, fried shrimp, and living pants; and its rather high level (for an NES game) of morbidity and gore.

Because it is so strange and unique, MONSTER PARTY has a special place on the shelf as one of my favorite video games. Unfortunately, it's also a very flawed game that never really lived up to its potential. A lot of the graphics are poorly detailed and bland, most of the levels are rather unchallenging, and the gameplay overall is fairly tedious. You spend most of the game walking from left to right, swinging your bat at monsters, and entering doors to fight bosses (though most of the doors simply lead to empty rooms, adding to the tedium factor).

In mid-2010, I became aware of a project to restore MONSTER PARTY to its prototype state, as shown in some Japanese prerelease screenshots of the game. I offered some help with searching the game's data for unused graphics*, and doing some minor graphical work. In the process, I started becoming very interested in the inner workings of the game, and started finding ways to make some minor improvements. This led me to start my own MONSTER PARTY editing project. Not long afterward, a level editor was released for the game, and the possibilities for changing the game exploded. What was initially going to be a simple project composed of a few minor adjustments ballooned into a major overhaul of the entire game.

The resulting project, the MONSTER PARTY OVERHAUL PROJECT, led to the development of a new ROM hack called MONSTER PARTY: LET'S GO AGAIN! This hack was initially released on June 13, 2014, in order to coincide with the 25th anniversary of MONSTER PARTY's release, as well as Friday the 13th. It's available for download on Baddesthacks.net (formerly Badderhacks.net).


Special thanks to Jomb and Dr. Floppy of Badderhacks.net, for the huge amount of help and advice they've provided over the course of this project. Jomb created a level editor for Monster Party that is a must for anyone who wants to edit the game. Thanks also go out to Cubivore10, whose own ongoing project - The Monster Party Beta Restoration Project - helped inspire me to take a crack at making my own version of the game. He also penned some interesting articles about the game, particularly about the game's unused graphics.


* - Speaking of unused graphics, I found this little guy tucked away in the same data bank as the background graphics for Level 4's rooms. He looks kinda like a toy soldier in a Mega Man-style helmet sitting with his legs crossed. He might've been an unused boss. As far as I know, no one had ever seen this character aside from the game's designers, so I'm kinda proud of this discovery! (You can find him in Round 1 of MPLGA, if you know where to look!)

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