Harold is a virus

Hey hey everybody! Laura Cough, Internet Lizard’s Firstborn Daughter here, and welcome to your weekly-ish Automaton Lunch post, where I bring you random and obscure fun facts about Luke Vincent’s titles, from the Willful to Walk!
Today, we’re gonna be poking around the Harold’s Walk 3DS CIA to see what goodies we can find in there!

Now, this episode is probably going to be somewhat short in terms of actual content, and I can explain why later on. For now, I’ll give this article some padding through the power of context!!

In the Nintendo 3DS technical world, a CIA (or CTR Importable Archive [the exact acronym is debated, but it’s typically along those lines]) file is pretty much the 3DS equivalent of an .msi file, for example. It contains application and installation data that, when fed to certain apps on the Nintendo 3DS, will install the associated application on the console. The noble CIA file is the most popular method of installing homebrew (or legally-obtained copies of official) applications on the 3DS, and they’re also the most commonly used ways to install applications onto emulators.

Before we begin, I want to preface by saying that you should generally only create personal copies of applications you installed from the eShop before it was shut down. Downloading illegal copies off the Internet, or distributing your own personal copies of a game, is illegal and *checks notes* harmful to Nintendo, the people who make so many great games that we love. There is definitely not a sniper laser dot pointing at my forehead right now, these are my own personal opinions.
In all seriousness, there are no longer any legal ways to acquire the original Harold/Reborn 3DS games. That being said, supporting Luke is still important, so if you do ever decide to do a bit of swashbucklin’, make sure you buy the Steam port of Harold’s Walk or Automaton Lung first.

And one more thing, earlier I mentioned that this would be a short episode. This is why:

Most of the exported textures in here will come out looking like this. A couple are intact, as are most of the sounds and models, but try as I may, my asset ripper doesn’t like extracting these assets very much. There might be one out there that works better, but I haven’t really taken the time to look.

In any case, I’ll show off what can be found in here. For example; this bean.

This would completely non-extraordinary if it weren’t for the fact that there are two of them, despite never being used in the final game. It’s possible that these were/are used to test collision in the game, as 3D “Pill” collision shapes are not uncommon in 3D game design.

Next up, it turns out that the rectangles and rings that make up the portals in this version of the game…

Are actually separate models from each other. This is different from the Steam version of Harold’s Walk, where the portal is actually one model that gets animated in-game.
In other strange and mostly insignificant news, looks like the Wheel and Border present in Wheel of Eight are actually both separate from each other!

The next few fun facts are regarding level names – they’re actually really wild. For example, turns out that the level equivalent to Water Tower in Walk PC (known as Test Town in Uncle Dale’s GameFAQs Guide) is actually called…

…Harold’sFearOfWomen??? It doesn’t stop there, though, other highlights include:

Spheres (actually known as CrownGate),

Castle (actually known as BigOldStairs) [Sorry it’s hard to see in this screenshot],

And finally, Desert (actually known as Speed).

Now, one last quick fun fact before I go, the Level Select screen is actually just the model of the Water Tower! I never realized this when playing, and some people smarter than I probably already have, but it’s still fun to see. You can also spot the pre-rendered crown there too, but that being a 3D model was already pretty obvious and THAT definitely didn’t need to be pointed out.

And unfortunately, that’s about all I could find. Not much to be said about this one without textures sadly, but maybe I’ll come back to this one if I find the right asset ripping software for Unity 3DS games. Until then, come back next week as I reveal some EXCLUSIVE Dank Rave Development Secrets with my Poppy!
Cough Out!