Sequence Breaking in Metroid Fusion (Or, how I spent my Quarantine)

[Kazuto]

Well, I meant to have this uploaded in time for April Fool's, but I spent the better part of the day repairing some things that I had broken earlier in the day.

Still, this is a preview of what I've been working on over the past few months. The project actually started back in 2017, when I first started getting into GBA hacking. I stumbled on some disassemblies by our very own P.Jboy, which helped me understand how assembly on the GBA actually works. Then I discovered Biospark's RAM and ROM maps, and suddenly, the possibility of this became very real.

Unfortunately, I'm notoriously bad at putting things on the shelf for long stretches of time.

I made some good progress in the first few months I started, then didn't touch it again for almost a year. Life got in the way shortly thereafter, and the project was once again shelved, until I started getting back into it late last year. Now, with the current state of the world and most of us working from home, I was able to shift hacking gears into overdrive and really make some substantial progress on things.

It's about 18 years overdue, but hey, better late than never, right? There are still a handful of important things that need fixing, but I expect to have a release by the end of the month.

Major thanks to interdpth, Biospark, P.Jboy, and anybody else who came before me in advancing the state of GBAtroid hacking. Without you guys, I would be nowhere close to this level of doneness.

Vidja

Edit: It was pointed out that it might not be too clear what's going on here. Basically, I'm coding sequence breaking into the normal event sequence. Meaning you can both play through the standard set of events, and also obtain items early as you're able to get to them. The event sequence will continue as expected until you catch up to your progress, at which point it'll jump ahead to where it should be. Security Stations will always unlock if they're higher than your status, and Data Stations will always let you download the item they normally contain. The ARC station has both Ice Missiles and Power Bombs. You just need to do something else in-between in order to download both from there. But you can also get Power Bombs from picking up any Power Bomb tank. Same goes for Missiles (although you'll never run into a Missile tank early, in the normal event sequence).

This is also being designed with future use in-mind, as well. Just because you can't encounter something early in vanilla Metroid Fusion, doesn't mean it's not possible to get it early in say, a hack. ;)

[DandyDNA]

where can i download

[Tower]

wasnt that already made by someone else?

[FelixWright]

wasnt that already made by someone else?

It was incomplete. You could grab the abilities you want, but that had its share of problems, which are tackled with this implementation

[FV2112]

It would be really cool if you could somehow make it so that the Adam AI recognizes sequence breaks and adjusts the story accordingly... like have him say "I've noticed that you recovered your [Insert Item Here] much earlier than I thought. I'm impressed, Samus, well done."

[Nicholas Steel]

Should also point out this hack enables single-wall wall jumps.

[Paulinho]

Excellent hack. I've managed to pick up early power bomb, plasma beam and space jump before Serris.
After serris and opening green security door you're able to pick up early wide beam

After that the game goes like normal vanilla game. After getting varia suit on sector 5 the game skips all the boiler room/generator plot and goes straight into getting the power bombs and fighting nightmare

On my opinion a few changes in text would be cool to include in this hacker. An option to get out of any navigation room would be cool to open some freadom in between sectors.