It'sa me, Kaizo Mario!

[MCBanjoMike]

A funny thing has happened to me in recent years: I've started to take more and more enjoyment in mastering games I love, rather than trying to play as many different games as possible. It's probably my son't fault, to a certain extent, since he'll ask me to play the same game over and over again until I insist that it's time to move on. That's helped hone my Mega Man, Hollow Knight and Super Metroid skills quite a bit, among other things. Another thing that put me on this path was Celeste, a game where I found myself sinking dozens of hours (and thousands of deaths) into mastering the difficult B- and C- sides. Somewhere in there, I recognized that I was having fun bashing my head against these challenges, and that the frustration made every victory sweeter.

But despite noticing this change, I still managed to surprise myself a few weeks ago when I somehow decided that I wanted to try learning how to play Kaizo Mario games.

Most people here have some idea what Kaizo Mario hacks mean: incredibly difficult platforming, inscrutable puzzles that push the limits of the game's engine, and countless evil trolls designed to feed off the tears of frustrated players. And while I've always enjoyed watching players conquer these incredible challenges, at least since they started showing up regularly in GDQ marathons, the barrier to entry seemed much to high for me to ever consider playing one for myself. But that changed when I saw the recent SGDQ race of a hack called Super Hark Bros.

Super Hark Bros is marketed as being an "easy" Kaizo hack, one that is a bit more friendly to players who don't have thousands of hours of experience practicing shell jumps and spin-jumping off spinies through muncher mazes. It made me curious to see if there were other lower-difficulty kaizos out there, and it turns out there are quite a number of them. I decided to load a bunch of them up on my SuperNt (using ROMs made from a rip of my very own original Super Mario World cartridge!) and see how far I could get. Well, it turns out that even something like Super Hark Bros is a pretty steep hill to climb when you're first starting out and it took me about 30 deaths to just get past the first screen. Ouch!

Not to be discouraged, I stepped back another level and started playing some hacks specifically designed to teach you how to kaizo. Here's a list of some of the hacks that I've tried and how much progress I've made in each of them.

Learn 2 Kaizo: This game is a series of single-challenge levels, each of which is designed to teach you how to do a common kaizo trick. There are explanatory text boxes that generally tell you what you need to know to complete them, although once or twice I wasn't able to figure them out and I had to resort to watching a YouTube tutorial. Every 10 levels or so there's a Test level that forces you to string together a number of the techniques to get through a short fortress level. The second of these involves a very quick series of jumps, including a high-speed shell jump, and I felt like a million bucks when I finally pulled it off (after about 25 minutes of consecutive failures). This hack is designed to be as friendly as possible, given the subject matter: you have infinite lives, you restart the level instantly if you die, you can force a restart by pressing L+R at the same time and the game saves after every level. I've sunk about 3 hours into this so far and I have made it to Test #5, where I am currently stymied by a tricky jump off a falling Thwimp. You have to start running while it's still off screen, but gauging exactly where to start is tough and the timing is super tight. Hoping to get past it soon and finish the rest of the levels. Also, last night this hack taught me how to do my first double shell jump, which is one of the coolest things I've ever done in a game. Highly recommended.

Panga's Kaizo Kindergarten: Pangaea Panga is a well-known runner of kaizo hacks and he put this together to teach people the fundamentals. It's a lot wordier than Learn 2 Kaizo (there's text in the level backgrounds explaining various concepts) and it goes into a lot more of the minutiae of the game. The hack will surface things like Mario's speed or p-meter buildup to help you see how different situations affect your movement. I haven't played very far into this one, but it seems like it will be quite helpful.

Baby Kaizo Mario: This is designed to be an easy kaizo hack, which means I find levels to be very challenging but generally doable. Noted kaizo player Dode said that it "might be too easy to get any kaizo experience"; well after spending 30 minutes and 150 lives trying to complete the fourth level, I respectfully disagree. I've been alternating this with Learn 2 Kaizo to keep things fresh and I'm generally enjoying it. It has custom sprites and music, which makes for a nice change after hearing the same music over hundreds of deaths in L2K. In fact, I'm pretty sure the main reason to put custom music into kaizo hacks is to keep players from going insane while they learn them.

Those are the ones that I've spent the most time with, but there are a few others on my radar (and on my SD card). Super Mario World Remix is a sub-kaizo-difficulty hack made by Matt Thorsen of Celeste fame, designed to pick up around where regular SMW's difficulty curve ends. Akogare Mario World is another hack that is described as being a good starter kaizo, although I wasn't able to finish the first level in the 15 or so minutes that I played. Invictus is a highly-regarded hack that includes a bunch of original music and new mechanics - once again, I wasn't able to clear the first level, but it seemed really neat and is apparently not as hard as many kaizos. And of course, once I manage a few of the easiest hacks, I'll have to go back and try Super Hark Bros again to see if I've made any progress.

Has anyone else here taken the plunge on these games? Have you attempted more difficult stuff like the original Kaizo Mario World, or recent big name hacks like Grand Poo World 2? Are you interested, but hesitant to dip your toes in? Just have some really cool hacks or speedruns that you want to share? Let's talk kaizo!

 

[SilentSnake]

If you want to see how impossible these kinds of games can get, go check out Hyper 6 sometime.

 

[Mogri]

Hyper 6 is stupid hard but not technically considered Kaizo. My understanding is the difference is that Hyper 6 gives you powerups that are not required to beat levels.

But it's still appropriate for this thread, and it's a good reminder that "Kaizo" is not necessarily synonymous with "hardest possible levels." Most Kaizo levels rely on a set of "Kaizo tricks" such as shell jumps that were always possible but never required. (In fact, from what I understand, up until relatively recently, shell jumps were thought to be TAS-only.)

I admire Kaizo levels from afar, and I'll keep it that way. They're a great showcase of player skill, but far too many of them are trial-and-error. I wouldn't have the patience even if I had the skill.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I haven't heard of that one! The streamer (authorblues) describes Hyper 6 as "very bad" in the video comments, so it's probably not the kind of hack that I'd ever want to try. But this brings me to a point I didn't make earlier: suffering is not the be-all-end-all of kaizo hacks! It's definitely part of the appeal, and even the best of them tend to have a few spots where a first-time player is nearly guaranteed to die to a troll, but in moderation that can actually be a fun thing. Kaizo trolls come in a few classic flavors: the kaizo block (invisible block that drops you into a hole), Barb fish (an enemy falls from the sky and kills you if you take the expected path), doors and pipes that lead to kill rooms, and probably a dozen more that escape me right now. A well-done troll subverts your expectations and pulls the rug out from under you at a key moment, but they're fun despite the frustration because you know the level designer predicted what you would do and intentionally set a trap for you. I've been trolled a few times so far and it's equal parts "aaargh I hate you" and "yeah, you got me". The aforementioned Barb, author of the Grand Poo World hacks, seems to be a master of trolling, going so far as to modify the code of the game to troll people in new and inventive ways. Gotta respect the craft.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Let's talk about hardware! The two primary ways to play a romhack are on original hardware or not. To play on an actual Super Nintendo, you would either need a custom cart loaded with the hack in question, or else a flash cart like the SD2SNES or Everdrive. As far as I'm aware, most kaizo hacks don't require special chips, so pretty much any solution is viable here. If you don't want to play on original hardware, then you can use an emulator or (my personal favorite) an FPGA recreation of the console. I've been playing on the Super Nt, which can be jailbroken to allow ROM loading from the SD card slot, which is a nice easy way to access new hacks quickly.

If you're going to play a really hard platformer like this, then you're probably going to be worried about input and display lag. I'm a huge fan of convenience, so I've been playing on an HDTV with a wireless controller, despite the fact that both of those things add latency in their own way. However, my HDTV is recent and quite responsive as these things go, and the controller I'm using is the 2.4GHz revision of the 8bitDo wireless Super Nintendo pad, which is pretty snappy. There's maybe one or two frames of lag, but it's worlds better than when I tried playing SMW on my old HDTV that had like a 100ms response time all by itself. I also run my Super Nt through an HDMI selector, which I've read shouldn't introduce any lag, but I can't really confirm that. In fact, I got a new switch last night and spent about 30 minutes comparing it to my old one, trying to discern whether one of them "felt" better than the other. In the end, I couldn't really convince myself that there was a difference between them - and if I cared that much, I would stop using a wireless controller in the first place. Which I might still do, since I have a pile of original SNES/SFC controllers and an extension cable for them. In the meantime, though, I don't really feel like the lag is holding me back from progressing.

Professional Mario streamers, of course, will output to a CRT to completely eliminate latency. Most of them seem to use an original SNES with a flash cart, from what I've seen, but I think FPGA devices are starting to catch on too. Sadly, both the Super Nt and the MiSTer require additional hardware if you want to connect them to a CRT, not that I actually intend to do that right now. Not until I quit my job and become a pro kaizo streamer, anyway

 

[Paul le Fou]

So this is the Dark Souls of Mario, then?

 

[MCBanjoMike]

In that it's tough but fair, except when it's clearly unfair to get a laugh at the player's expense...I guess so? Not a lot of lore in the item descriptions, though.

 

[Mogri]

Super Mario Maker 2 has a vibrant Kaizo community, as you might imagine. The physics of the Mario Maker games differ significantly in ways casual players don't notice, so while there's some overlap between SMW runners and SMM runners, they tend to specialize. For my money, Dode is one of the best SMW players in the world, and he's been playing through every Kaizo hack in existence on his YouTube channel.

On the SMM side of the coin, the two best players are probably iiPK, who doesn't have an active YouTube channel, and Thabeast721 (or "Thab"), who I highly recommend. Here's a sample video:

If you're out of the loop on SMM2, then this is a good one to watch: it's got a variety of extremely difficult levels that feature things like the Link and SMB2 costumes.

 

[pudik]

i did a shell jump once in mario maker 2

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Mario Maker is indeed a really cool game, but it irks me to no end that they didn't nail the Super Mario World physics. Mario World plays incredibly! It's basically the be-all end-all of platformers in terms of controls IMO, which I think is why it seems to have way more kaizo hacks than the other Mario games do. I'd be happy to play some more Mario Maker 2 in the future (I haven't bought it on Switch because you need the online service to play user levels), but I don't think I'd go for the kaizo-level stages if and when I do.

I definitely have a ton of respect for Dode, he seems like an incredible player with nerves of steel. I recently rewatched the incredible blind kaizo relay race from SGDQ 2019 and he was solid every time his turn came up. He has a video series on his YouTube channel where he's playing through literally every kaizo hack on SMWcentral.net, which is where I got most of my patches from. Aside from the fact that they seem to be adding kaizos faster than he's finishing them, it's a pretty impressive series!

 

[lincolnic]

I wanted to make a kaizo thread, but I've been beaten to the punch!

I started getting really interested in kaizo SMW after being really impressed by the speedruns at GDQ for the past couple of years. Before watching them, I mostly thought kaizo was just an entire genre built around trolling the players, but after seeing the runs of Grand Poo World 2 and Invictus I sort of began thinking of it as peak Mario -- not necessarily the height of design, but more like the upper limits on what can be done when you really master the mechanics of a game. I'm constantly impressed by just how much technical knowledge these players have (the explanations in Kaizo Kindergarten really drives that home).

At this point I look at well-designed kaizo hacks the same way I look at Celeste. You have to be incredibly precise in your platforming, and there's no real penalty for failure.

Just the other day Juzcook (creator of Invictus) posted a video about how to get started playing kaizo, and I thought it was pretty well thought-out and explained:

I've also been really, really enjoying Dode's Kaizothon series that you mentioned; I think Dode might be one of the best kaizo SMW players in the world. Aside from creating content, he's also one of the moderators at SMWcentral.net, and one of the reasons he's playing (often replaying) all of the hacks there is to reevaluate their difficulty levels. Might be worth mentioning that the Youtube uploads are significantly behind where he actually is in the queue -- the most recent Youtube video was #62 or 63, but I think he's actually finished ~140 hacks by now. The videos are edited really well, which must take an insane amount of time, so it makes sense.

I haven't yet jumped into any hacks myself, but I do have Kaizo Kindergarten ready and waiting. One of these days I'll dive in!

 

[MCBanjoMike]

That’s awesome! I’ve been mostly sticking with Baby Kaizo World so far and I’m really enjoying it. But oof, after the first world the gloves really come off. There’s a level built around maintaining p-speed that took me about 400 attempts to complete, followed by a really tricky (but fun) level that teaches the basics of sky trees - when you have to race a growing vine up a level, hitting blocks before it reaches them (and stops growing). The former was a bit too frustrating, but the latter was really fun. Now I’m on to a level based around shell jumps, and I actually managed to pull off a double shell jump in context! Haven’t cleared the level yet as it requires a backwards shell jump that I keep biffing. Learn 2 Kaizo was a big help on that front because it has levels dedicated to single and double shell jumps where you can just try over and over again until you get it right. I’ve made it to Test #5 in L2K, but a blind jump onto a falling thwimp was giving me fits and decided to put that down for a bit. At this point I can make headway in easy hacks, which is more fun that taking kaizo lessons all day.

As for that Juzcook video, I just watched it yesterday and found it to be really interesting. It was reassuring to hear him describe Learn 2 Kaizo’s Test #2 as a major roadblock for people, cause I found that one pretty darn tough myself. He convinced me to add a few new hacks to my SD card, including Quickie World 2, which I played last night. Managed to clear 3 or 4 levels and I thought it was pretty good overall. It’s made by the same creator as Super Hark Bros IIRC (EDIT: oops nope), but it’s a good step below in difficulty. It has some pretty cool music selections, including a Super Nintendo-style cover of a Dave Brubeck song!

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Exit after exit in Baby Kaizo World is falling before me and I think I'll be at the end soon. That shell jump level that I was stuck on was the biggest hurdle so far, after completing it I managed to take down the next 4-5 stages relatively easily. Something I find really impressive is how ingrained these levels become once you complete them - every time I've gone back to a previously completed level, I've been able to make progress in it really quickly. I imagine that goes away after a while, but for now the sequences of jumps and throws feel like they've been encoded in my DNA. Anyway, I stopped last night at a challenging level that was all about the use and abuse of poor old Yoshi. As bad as I feel for that dinosaur, it's pretty impressive the maneuvering you can do when you're willing to huck 'em down a pit every 3 seconds. Some of my favorite kaizo levels to watch involve Yoshis falling from the ceiling that you land on literally just long enough to jump off again before they fall to their doom. Nature can be so cruel.

If anyone really cares, you can watch me play a little Baby Kaizo (and then some Quickie World 2) below. It's basically 10 minutes of me doing a pretty decent job with a level called Sky Tree Jr, followed by 45 minutes of me failing shell jumps (maybe skip that part), then 10 minutes of decent progress in Quickie 2. I got a copyright claim on the video from the Deltarune music that was used in one of the levels!

 

[lincolnic]

Nice job on that sky tree level! I noticed after the midway that there were a bunch of points where you weren't holding run that I'd expect would've been quicker if you were running - was there a gameplay reason not to be running there?

I still want to dive into these games, but work has gotten insanely busy and probably will be until Thanksgiving, so it may be a while.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Oh I was definitely holding run - I just didn't have P-speed, so Mario didn't stick his arms out. That level in particular is super tight and there's no way you'll make it before the vine if you aren't running. Honestly, most kaizo levels seem to be designed like that, offering scant moments for the player to pause and collect their thoughts. I often find my thumb gets sore from holding down the Y button nonstop while I play these hacks (also I'm really tense most of the time, which doesn't help).

 

[lincolnic]

Weird, I guess it just didn't look like he was running!

 

[lincolnic]

I had some unexpected downtime today, so I was inspired to boot up Kaizo Kindergarten. Unfortunately I'm stuck using OpenEmu as my only way to play, and I couldn't get it to recognize my 8bitDo controller for some reason (I think I have the same one as you, Mike), so I had to use a PS4 controller. Feels weird to play Mario with anything that isn't SNES controller-shaped! There also seemed to be a significant amount of input lag even though I was playing with the controller wired, so I'm not sure what the deal was.

Even so, I persevered to the Regrab level, where I spent the next 45 minutes jumping into Munchers. It was...extremely humbling. I want to go back and try to push on (and I probably will), but the lag makes a hard thing even harder.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Even so, I persevered to the Regrab level, where I spent the next 45 minutes jumping into Munchers.

Oh lord, I know exactly the part you're talking about (and I haven't cleared it yet, either). I haven't spent a ton of time with PKK, but Panga himself did a video series breaking down the levels and you can go watch that if you want a bit more explanation as to how regrabs work. I haven't had to deal with regrabs yet in the hacks that I've been playing, so there may be a rude awakening in store down the line. However! I've made a ton of progress in Baby Kaizo World and the end is within site! I think I have 26/29 exits and there's a very final-stage-looking castle on the map screen now. I've really enjoyed this hack as a hybrid tutorial/game, even though there were a few stages where I got stuck for a long time. The most recent one was a disco shell stage that was more frustrating than fun, but it's one of those things you have to learn to deal with eventually. I'm going to see if I can get to the last level over the course of this week and then I may even stream the castle stage, depending on how things go. There are apparently some secret levels, too, but I haven't found the second switch palace (I'm pretty sure it's in the second ghost house) so I may have to look up how to get there. I'm also looking forward to getting back into Quickie World 2 once Baby Kaizo is done, I really enjoyed what I've played so far. I left off at a level that seemed pretty intimidating, so I'll have to gather my courage before attempting it again.

While we're here, please enjoy this video of Dode playing Ultra Slope Muncher, an (intentionally) incredibly janky hack by LinkdeadX2. I was literally laughing at loud at how ridiculous some of the challenges were in the early levels, it's horribly cruel.

 

[lincolnic]

I haven't spent a ton of time with PKK, but Panga himself did a video series breaking down the levels and you can go watch that if you want a bit more explanation as to how regrabs work.

I did exactly that! It helped me realize that part of my problem was that I was doing the actual regrab too quickly, and another part was that I was getting too much momentum, but I think a third part was also the input lag I was getting with the PS4 controller. I can do it, just not consistently enough to get through the level yet. When I have the time I'm going to try getting the 8bitDo controller to work again and seeing if that makes a difference.

The lag is super frustrating, because I use that PS4 controller for Steam games all the time and I've never had an issue with it.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I did exactly that! It helped me realize that part of my problem was that I was doing the actual regrab too quickly, and another part was that I was getting too much momentum, but I think a third part was also the input lag I was getting with the PS4 controller. I can do it, just not consistently enough to get through the level yet. When I have the time I'm going to try getting the 8bitDo controller to work again and seeing if that makes a difference.

The lag is super frustrating, because I use that PS4 controller for Steam games all the time and I've never had an issue with it.

Hmm, not quite sure what the issue is re: lag. Not to ask the most obvious question, but have you tried using this setup on your PC for similarly-precise games like Celeste? Third-person action games have so much animation that it can cover up a lot of input lag. Another possibility is that the emulator you're using is particularly bad on that front. I had a look at PorkChopExpress' Controller Input Latency spreadsheet and a wired PS4 controller only has about 4ms of lag, at least on MiSTer. So the problem is mostly likely coming from either the computer, the monitor or the emulator. I typically play using a wireless controller on my HDTV, so I'm probably living with 1-2 frames of input lag, but I don't think that's enough to be a problem at my skill level.

Slogged my way through another difficult level in Baby Kaizo last night, which puts me at 27 exits. I thought there were only 29 in total, but I had a quick look at Dode's Kaizothon video and apparently there are forty four exits in this game?? I know there's supposed to be a Star Road with more difficult levels, so either it's really long or else I'm farther from the end of the main game than I thought.

 

[lincolnic]

I used the same controller to beat Celeste. I'm on an iMac, so there aren't really too many variables in play. I guess it could be OpenEmu, I haven't really used it for anything before. Unfortunately I don't really have many other options if I want to try to keep playing these games.

 

[lincolnic]

Mike, you got me, I came back for more. I still couldn't get the 8bitDo controller to work while plugged directly into my computer, but it does work via Bluetooth. I was hoping to avoid that since resyncing it to the Switch is kind of a pain, but whatever. It feels about the same as the PS4 controller, so either the emulator itself is a little laggy (which I don't necessarily think so, because when I look up or duck Mario responds more or less immediately) or there's some built-in lag between when you press jump and when Mario actually takes off that I forgot about.

In any case, I put another 30 minutes into the Kaizo Kindergarten regrab level and finally made it through, beat the next level (low bounces) in about 10 minutes, and then got stuck on the level after that (high bounces). To try something different, I loaded up Learn 2 Kaizo and was making relatively quick progress until the infamous Test #2. It's just so fast! I can make the throw block jump maybe every third time, but I can't get over the shell jump immediately after. I've managed to do the jump itself a couple of times, but I'm always too slow and the layer 2 Munchers hit me in the butt. Most of the time I miss the shell jump completely.

I'll go back to try and make more progress in both, but right now my hand hurts!

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Yup, Test #2 ain't playing around. I managed to complete it in one sitting, which took me about 30 minutes of running it over and over. You're right that the biggest hurdle is how tightly you have to chain everything together, it's like a real kaizo level in miniature form. Don't give up! But do rest your hand. Just as a warning, I managed to clear the shell jump a number of times and still didn't finish right away because of a tricky Yoshi sacrifice that comes after it.

I managed to clear out another 4 exits in Baby Kaizo last night in around 45 minutes, which felt pretty good. I found a switch palace in world 4, but there's at least one palace that I'm still missing, and maybe two? There was a nasty trap at the end of a level called Unhealthy Cola where a ceiling of deadly, uh, cola comes down to crush you after you finish the stage. I got frustrated and looked up the solution: turns out the ceiling is part of a layer 2 setup that starts dropping when you touch a certain spot on the floor (which is raised). I thought you had to get to the exit really quickly to win, but the answer was actually to just avoid stepping on those sections, which prevents layer 2 from starting its descent.

 

[lincolnic]

I think part of what makes that shell jump so hard is that you have to do it with momentum, whereas the training stage right before the test only needs you to do it while standing still. Maybe I'll go back and practice shell jumps while moving to try and get a better feel for it.

 

[lincolnic]

With a fresh start today, I got through Test #2 in about half an hour! The hardest part for me was still nailing the frame perfect block grab, though it also turned out to be harder than expected to keep my momentum for everything after the shell jump. Still, the first time I managed to actually land on Yoshi is when I cleared the level. Half considering crossposting this in the "gaming accomplishments" thread.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Ha ha, congrats! It's definitely a big milestone. You can probably consider dipping into some of the easier hacks like Baby Kaizo and Quickie World (2 is easier than 1). I found it was fun to play some actual levels in between "lessons".

 

[lincolnic]

That's actually why I switched from Kaizo Kindergarten to Learn 2 Kaizo -- Kaizo Kindergarten is amazingly in-depth and I love learning that stuff, but the levels are so hyper-focused on one specific thing that it can become really abstract. I'll keep going with it, I just don't think I can play it start to finish without breaking it up. I'm happy working through the tutorial hacks right now, but I'll definitely pick up the easier hacks soon too.

 

[Kirin]

While we're here, please enjoy this video of Dode playing Ultra Slope Muncher, an (intentionally) incredibly janky hack by LinkdeadX2. I was literally laughing at loud at how ridiculous some of the challenges were in the early levels, it's horribly cruel.

Watched this and it was indeed amazing. Though I quickly realized the only way to watch unedited Kaizo runs is to open them on the main youtube site so I can make liberal use of the right arrow key to skip through deaths til the player gets to each new bit.

 

[lincolnic]

Watched this and it was indeed amazing. Though I quickly realized the only way to watch unedited Kaizo runs is to open them on the main youtube site so I can make liberal use of the right arrow key to skip through deaths til the player gets to each new bit.

I do the same thing! Luckily, most of Dode's videos are pretty tightly edited. I loved watching him realize what he had to do in that "don't touch the ground" level.

Meanwhile, I had some unexpected downtime at work today so I tore through some more of Learn 2 Kaizo. Not only have I done my first double shell jumps, I've done them to pass Test #5 and and currently am stuck at key jumps.

I kinda feel like I'll be stuck at key jumps for a while.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Hey, you’ve passed me in Learn 2 Kaizo! I got stuck at the falling Thwimp jump in Test #5 and never went back to it. Congrats!