Hydlide

$It\'s the shrieking eels!$

In 1984, T&E Soft made one of the first action-RPGs of all time, Hydlide. Unfortunately, the game was incredibly crippled by the hardware of the time, and even the 1986 Nintendo release, Hydlide Special, suffered.

The graphics were not quite terrible, about the same as Dragon Warrior I, but the music was simply horrendous.

A few weeks ago I stumbled on a Windows 95 remake of Hydlide released by T&E Soft in 1999. Unfortunately, the install required a password, and T&E’s homepage was dead so you couldn’t purchase it even if you wanted to.

I got Nightwolve to help with cracking the installer, and after taking a look at the game, it seemed easy enough to translate. This proved true since I finished the entire translation in 4 hours.

Victoly!

If you didn’t play Hydlide, the story is the same. Once upon a time, Fairyland was protected by three jewels that shone brilliantly. But one was stolen by greedy humans, breaking the balance and releasing the demon Varalys. The demon used its magic to break Princess Ann into three faeries, which his minions hid throughout the land.

A young hero, Jim has journeyed to Fairyland to investigate these stories and try to restore light to Fairyland.

The patch includes a tool to let you swap out the background music in the game. If you’re using the patch edition, you should copy WAVofield.wav to the Music folder first so you always have a backup. The binary takes care of this already, and includes tracks from Hydlide 3: The Space Memories.

I wish you sincere luck in finding the game though, they quit net selling it a long time ago and T&E Soft’s webpage is gone. You might be able to find it with the English patch on BitTorrent (hint hint).

Files

English Patch
This is the patch to convert your existing Hydlide (Download Edition) installation to English. Instructions are included in the Readme file, but it should apply seamlessly over any fresh installation.
Music Switcher
A utility to let you change your Hydlide (Download Edition) background music. Two songs from Hydlide III are included.