Battletoads will always be remembered for its vile difficulty. It's an 8-bit era classic, no doubt, but it's also the infamous cause of thousands of broken friendships. Remember, right? The game was already hard alone, almost impossible if you ask the less skilled, but in two-player mode... Ugh, two-player was a nightmare! The two "soon-to-be ex-friends" had to be experts in the game of muscular frogs, because if one of them lost all their lives.... both had to start the level over! From the beginning!
I never had a stable Battletoads partner in my life because they were short and violent relationships. Yes, violent. Because, to make matters worse, there was no option to disable the "friendly fire". That means your friend could hit you if you crossed his path (and vice versa). This was never a problem in the first level, a quite fun and simple beat'em up. The problem started in the second level, when the toads go down a hole in the ground and gain the power to perform an attack that -uncontrollably- travels across a large part of the screen. The anger! The insults given! The indignations! No friendship, no matter how strong, could withstand that.
And now they come with this! A Battletoads with support for four simultaneous players! I don't even have that many friends to fight with! But yes, that's what NakeuD2007, ROM hacker and user of the great site Romhacking.net, has done. And honestly, he did an excellent job. As you can see in the video, the game fully exploits the NES hardware, though at the cost of more "flickering" than usual. It was already irritating enough to play alone... I don't even want to imagine the torture of playing this with three more companions!
How to apply the patch to the ROM?
If you have enough enemies to try this mod, go ahead. You only need the Battletoads ROM and the patch created by NakeuD2007. To patch the game you must unzip both files (both the ROM and the patch). You'll see that the patch has a little red moon icon. Double-click on the little moon. And when it asks which ROM you want to patch, just choose the Battletoads one (whose extension must be ".nes") and click Open. Done!
Without a doubt, we'll soon see videos of people playing it with four players and getting through it without too many problems or conflicts. But until I see it, I don't believe it.
