All's Fair: Coming to SNES in the year 200X...?

When I decided to spice up Max Palmer's troublesome teen years with some supernatural nonsense, my brain listed the same 6 things it always does:

1. Dinosaurs
2. Robots
3. Zombies
4. Aliens
5. Bigfoot/Nessie/Mothman/etc
6. All possible combinations of the above

Aliens were the most logical thing to face off against Max. I realized immediately that I already HAD a group of aliens from a project I had given up on because it hated me that I could fit in quite nicely. That project being a failed hack of Earthbound (one of my favorite games of all time that actually includes 98% of the above-listed sillyness) I had tried to make called 'Invasion of The Space Slobs'.

What does all of that gibberish mean. Well. Earthbound was released in 1995 for the Super Nintendo, and collected a cult following, despite poor sales in its day. The gentlefolk over at http://starmen.net/ have kept the fan fervor alive since the internets were still a babby with annual festivals of fandom, unofficial merchandise, and the biggest whopper I've seen them put out, a full translation of Earthbound's Japan-only sequel: Mother 3. One of the particularly neat things those guys have put together is a little tool called PK Hack, a program in Java that allows one to edit a rom image of Earthbound, allowing them to create their own adventure in Earthbound's engine. Well, within certain constraints... which is something I didn't realize when I started using it.

I dreamed up a story in the spirit of Earthbound that starred, surprise, my friends and myself facing off against of bunch of sloppy aliens trying to conquer Earth. I had the entire progression of the game planned out, walking along the same line as Earthbound for the most part, just changing the appearance of most things like enemies and towns. It didn't work out. I kind of just expected it to work, and while PK Hack is capable of a lot of neat things, it just couldn't do what I wanted it to and kept breaking my rom, so I kind of gave up. It sucked, because I did a LOT of concept and sprite work for it...