In the news recently we have seen Nintendo cracking down on ROM distribution sites. This is unfortunate because without these sites preserving the history of gaming (either legally or not) we might not have improvements on those classics such as this HD enhancement pack for the original Nintendo NES. That would be a sad day.

Disclaimer – we do not condone illegal distribution of games. We do cover enhancements and other updates that fans have made available but we will never link to sites featuring ROMs illegally.

This update will not run on a real world Nintendo Entertainment System, nor will it run on the Nintendo NES Classic. You will have to download a new emulator for this hack but, come on, look at the improvements and tell me it is not worth it.

Increased resolution**

Scrolling backgrounds**

Updated sound effects and music**

File resources for alternate sound and graphics**

New title and ending screen**

Minimap

Animated environments

Beam stacking

Saving

Full health on startup

To take advantage of these features with the hack you will need version 0.9.6 of the Mesen emulator (Released on August 5^th, 2018).

The basic game was not changed all that much. You start with full health, have a minimap available now (who didn’t want that early on?), and an increased resolution with scrolling backgrounds. These improvements make the original Metroid almost feel like a new game. I wonder if this enhancement pack will work with level hacks and such?

There are other HD enhancement packs for other games which we will cover shortly. My question to you is, what game do you want to see get the HD enhancement pack treatment? Metroid was surely high on the list for most retro gaming fans.

That is a minor inconvenience for such a cool looking hack. The bigger hurdle is the difficulty in finding the original Metroid ROM file, which is required for the patch to work.

Grab the Metroid HD Enhancement pack from ROMHacking.net and play tonight.

Other NES HD Enhancement titles:
Castlevania

Carl Williams

It is time gaming journalism takes its rightful place as proper sources and not fanboys giving free advertising. If you wish to support writers like Carl please use the links below. https://www.paypal.me/WCW https://www.patreon.com/CarlWilliams