Die Hard, for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), is an awesome game. It’s probably the most faithful movie-to-game adaptation I can think of, and pretty much presents the player with a sandbox version of the movie and says “now, how would YOU handle this if you were John McClane?”.
The biggest issue with the game is that the graphics are not the best, even for the NES era. Also, health is very limited, and the timer – which is very similar to the one used in the first couple of Dead Rising games many years later – makes it a pretty tough games at times. Thankfully, awesome NES hacker Magnus Nilsson created an amazing patch in 2014 that fixes almost every issue one could have with Die Hard (NES). Found here at Romhacking.net, it is a must for any fan of the game or those who tried it long ago and didn’t like it. As with all NES patches, you will need a copy of the original game rom (don’t ask for it here!) and an IPS patcher program like Floating IPS.
However, there are two small things I don’t like about this “Special Edition” version of the game: the health pickups are changed from Coca-Cola cans to Marlboro cigarette packets, and the submachinegun HUD and pickup sprite are changed to a Beretta M93R machine pistol.
In the case of the latter, the game’s original sprite looked pretty bad by comparison, but was a much closer match to the H&K MP5 submachineguns used prominently in the movie itself. However, since the code to display the weapon HUD sprites has been changed, I have not been able to change the submachinegun pickup or HUD image yet, sadly.
I have, however, been able to restore the health pickup (cigarettes->coke can) sprites, reverting the game to use the original Coca-Cola can sprites instead of the “Special Edition” cigarette packets. That little change is what the patch below does.
To use this patch, you will need to first patch your Die Hard NES ROM (US version) file with Magnus Nilsson’s “Special Edition” IPS patch as linked to above. Only THEN should you apply my little patch (below) to the already-patched ROM. Trust me, if you’ve not patched NES roms before, it’s easier than it sounds!
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