Free Roam (Mod) - Godzilla: Save The Earth (PS2)
90(I put way too much effort into this. I went through the effort of converting a challenge into free roam, but it turns out all you have to do is change a single line in a .txt file to enable the camera in regular destruction mode 🙃)
It's GTA: Godzilla! "Godzilla wanders around [...] but mostly he's just exploring the world, destroying stuff. That's the GTA-model. It really doesn't work well for Godzilla, because nothing except another monster is any threat to you, and thus the exploration is boring."
MechanicOrga had suggested to me in a comment to see if I could mod the game and create a free roam mod, and I think I've finally accomplished it. It was a bit more of a challenge than I thought it'd be. I had initially attempted to simply remove the second/third/fourth players from Destruction mode and force the game into the City Select screen after Player 1 selects a character, but I was met with no success. My next attempt was to simply replace the stages used by the Demolition challenge, and while the game seemed to successfully load into the stage, I was immediately booted to the PS2 memory card screen. The next thing I tried was to revive the game's WalkAbout mode (under the assumption that it was a free roam mode), and I actually got pretty close to getting the game to load the script thanks to the debug executable giving me some useful error information. Unfortunately, I ended up hitting a roadblock when I was hit with a "Assertion failed at line 198 in file: .\DResLoader.cpp." error. I don't have access to the source code, so I have no idea what the hell the game is looking for, so I had to drop the project there.
In the end, I went back to my second attempt and realized what was causing the issues I had encountered. The challenge script was looking for specific objects that did not exist in the Tokyo stage but did in the Demolition stage. Once I realized this, it was fairly simple to modify the script and get the challenge working. Afterwards, I simply removed the stage barriers, extended the time limit, and voila! A free roam mode was born!
I was always disappointed by the lack of a single player destruction mode in Godzilla: Save The Earth, so this has got to be one of my favorite mods I've made so far. I don't disagree with Simon Strange that the mode can be boring. It's true that hardly anything poses a threat to you (except for falling buildings... and the tanks could probably kill you if you stay close to an area where they spawn), and there's really nothing to do once you've destroyed everything. However, I still quite enjoyed being able to wreak havoc without being interrupted by an enemy kaiju. I only really started to feel bored once there wasn't anything left to destroy. Simon Strange had mentioned that the official version of this would have included some other goals to accomplish alongside being able to simply explore the world, so I figure that probably would have helped break up the monotony somewhat.
I might end up releasing this mod once I add the rest of the cities to the mode (or as many as I can). Right now, I've only got this one city in place of the default San Francisco from the Demolition challenge. My goal would be to replace all of the challenges with different cities to roam around in and all without any boundaries, but I'm not sure if there are enough challenges to replace, and I also have to be wary of the difference in name lengths of each challenge due to certain limitations with hex editing.
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