It'sa me, Kaizo Mario!

[lincolnic]

Hey I'm still playing Mario. Over the past week-ish I played through Samsara Mario World, Margot's first hack. It's unique for her because it's more or less a vanilla hack, which is a style I don't think she ever returned to. It's listed as expert difficulty, but I think it's pretty solidly intermediate until you get to the late game levels. It does have some of the problems a lot of people have in their first hacks (there are a lot of visibility issues, and a lot of unnecessary kaizo blocks). The 100% levels typically felt a little Too Much for my taste, but the any% levels were relatively chill. For reference, I think any% (18 or 19 exits) took me about 4 hours, and the remaining three or four levels took the same amount of time.

If anyone was thinking about playing this one, I'd say definitely do any%, and maybe move on to 100% if you really want the challenge.

I know Margot's moved on from these kinds of hacks, but I can't help wondering what she'd make if she returned to the style now with everything she's learned about level design over the past few years. (ETA: to be clear, I liked most of the hack and I'm not trying to denigrate any of the other stuff Margot's made either! Just saying that I'd be curious to see what some more vanilla stuff from her might theoretically look like. I've seen a little bit of shovda and Shoujo playing levels from her upcoming hack (not vanilla) and that looks pretty rad too.)

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I...have not been playing any Mario. Or at least, not the 2D kind - we just ran through the 3D World trilogy (including Bowser's Fury and the delightful Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker). I might be ready to get back in, but I think I need an easier hack to play. I was thinking of trying Sauna Mario World?

 

[lincolnic]

Sauna is chill and fun, do recommend.

 

[lincolnic]

Important late-breaking kaizo news!

https://twitter.com/x/status/1632105763819732994

I can't decide if I want to play them and give feedback, or just play the whole hack once it's done (current release window: holidays 2023, according to Valdio). But it's still very exciting! I've been watching om_nom stream his playtesting and the levels are looking great so far.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I saw that! I think I'd rather wait until the hack is finished to play it, but it's really cool that Valdio is opening up testing to the community. I also saw that Dan2Point5 released a new hack recently, although as someone who enjoyed Peachy Moat less than most, I'm not in a huge rush to pick it up. I actually haven't really played any kaizo lately, but this is going to be a more relaxed week and I think I might finally start Sauna Mario World tonight.

 

[lincolnic]

So I ended up playing that new Dan hack (Pineapple Porcupine) this week, wrapped it up today. It was a good hack with a bunch of cool ideas, but I think it also had a non-zero amount of creator bias. To be clear, I'm specifically referring to obstacles where you already need to know what's about to happen to have a chance of getting through. There's one level in particular that sticks out in my mind where you have to jump onto an offscreen rotating platform, because by the time it's actually visible it's too late to make the jump. And sure, once you know the inputs it's no longer a problem, but when something like that comes up halfway through a section it frustrates me.

Aside from that, I did like the hack, although I'm not in a rush to run it back. It was tougher than I thought it was going to be, but even though I was rusty the total playtime was around 6-7 hours.

Anyway, I wanted to play more Mario after beating Dan's hack today, so I loaded up Lush's new Nightmare Cafe, NEW Nightmare Cafe. And I gotta say, I'm really glad Lush decided he wasn't done making hacks because I had a great time with this one. It really felt like it stands out from the other Nightmare Cafes while still clearly being the result of ten other hacks of experience. It's the toughest one yet, but a lot of the setups are really fresh, and it still feels great to blast through a bunch of rooms. I think the clear took somewhere between 60-90 minutes. Highly recommend this one.

 

[lincolnic]

Here's an interesting one: Wolfguy (of Joe Bros. series fame) made a shell tutorial hack called Lurn 2 Shell. I was curious so I checked it out today. I have some mixed feelings about it -- I feel like it doesn't necessarily explain some things as well as I'd want a tutorial hack to do, but you're generally given a closed environment to learn one specific trick, so you can just mess around without consequences until you get the feel of whatever you're trying to accomplish.

One section of the hack deals with Yosh shell tech. I wish Wolfguy had included videos for that part; I found it very hard to get most of it consistently and it would've been nice to be able to watch someone do those tricks to see where I was going wrong. But I'm almost certainly never going to play a hack that requires me to do any of that stuff, so ultimately I was fine to move on to other things.

I think what Wolfguy made here is laudable. It's something that probably a lot of people will be happy to see, and he clearly put a lot of thought into the curation and presentation of tricks. Even if I would've liked to have seen some things explained a little more in detail, I know there are limits to what you can put in a message box. Overall it's not perfect, but it's still a pretty cool addition to the growing list of beginner resources in the community.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

It's possible that Wolfguy - or someone else! - will put together a video series in the future. It's pretty cool that people keep making these tutorial hacks, it makes me wonder if there are any important tricks that haven't been covered to date.

Haven't played any more kaizo since the weekend, but my arms have been doing better these last few days. I switched pillows and that seems to have had a big impact! Trying to limit my controller use for a little longer, just to be on the safe side.

 

[lincolnic]

Haven't played any more kaizo since the weekend, but my arms have been doing better these last few days. I switched pillows and that seems to have had a big impact! Trying to limit my controller use for a little longer, just to be on the safe side.

Glad to hear it! I've got a bunch of easy exercises from when I was in PT meant to specifically ease these kinds of nerve issues, let me know if you're ever interested in those.

 

[lincolnic]

There's another new Nightmare Cafe! Appropriately titled NEW Nightmare Cafe 2. Unfortunately, I didn't like this one as much as the last one -- there's a lot of chocolate (although one particular gimmick, which I won't spoil here, amused me to no end) and multiple boss fights, none of which are great. Even so, it only took about an hour and it was nice to have a little kaizo snack.

 

[lincolnic]

Not sure exactly why, but I saw drkrdnk play a new beginner shell hack called Shelltopia recently and decided to give it a go myself. And honestly, it was a cute little hack. It's more of a beginner hack that has a bunch of shell stuff in it than a full-blown shell hack; you're mostly just doing regular shell jumps and bumps, with the occasional double shell jump. And there are whole stretches where you're not doing any shell stuff at all. Not a whole lot to say about it, it was 9 exits and I was done in 40 minutes. It was alright! Recommend it if you want something easy that'll still work out your thumbs.

I'd also taken a while off since I was playing other things, but I've been working my way through an Akogare 2 runback on and off over the past few weeks. I'd been meaning to play the 1.1 version for a long time. I'm mostly done with it now -- I don't think I'm going to play the two special world levels, because that Yoshi level is no fun at all. Honestly, I didn't like it as much as I did the first time and I'm having a hard time figuring out why. I think the hack is actually harder on a big TV than it was playing on an emulator. Because the color palettes are so saturated, I often had a hard time seeing things like Munchers against dark backgrounds, especially if I'm physically looking farther away from Mario to see the next obstacle. It's not that tough -- most levels clocked in around 10 minutes or so -- but it felt more frustrating that way. There are still a bunch of really cool levels in the hack, I just wasn't feeling it I guess.

One other cool piece of news is that after four and a half years, there's a new Quickie World speedrun world record! Over the weekend, DecioSpeedMaster (a Brazilian player I hadn't heard of before) beat GlitchCat7's 100% record by a stunning 11 seconds. There's at least one new optimization in there that I'd never seen before, and he even set a new Any% world record along the way. It's an incredible run, frankly. If you ever wanted to see one of the most optimized kaizo speedruns ever, this has to be up there.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

That's a pretty impressive run! Tons of micro-optimizations, like jumps cut within an inch of their life to save a tenth of a second. I think the most impressive part for me was the spring jump in the ghost house, is that a new strat? The ending to Sawrfing is equally cool, but I'm pretty sure that one has been in the run for a long time. And I didn't know you could bring the yoshi from Rainbow Road into the final level! Very cool stuff, never underestimate the Brazilian kaizo scene.

I'd also taken a while off since I was playing other things, but I've been working my way through an Akogare 2 runback on and off over the past few weeks. I'd been meaning to play the 1.1 version for a long time. I'm mostly done with it now -- I don't think I'm going to play the two special world levels, because that Yoshi level is no fun at all. Honestly, I didn't like it as much as I did the first time and I'm having a hard time figuring out why. I think the hack is actually harder on a big TV than it was playing on an emulator. Because the color palettes are so saturated, I often had a hard time seeing things like Munchers against dark backgrounds, especially if I'm physically looking farther away from Mario to see the next obstacle. It's not that tough -- most levels clocked in around 10 minutes or so -- but it felt more frustrating that way. There are still a bunch of really cool levels in the hack, I just wasn't feeling it I guess.

I don't want to dump on someone's personal project, but I think the biggest knock against Ako 2 is that most of the levels feel really samey. Tons of left-to-right obstacle courses without much use of verticality, and the pacing is almost always go go go. Say what you will about ChrisG making players wait, but the back and forth movements you make in Hark 2 go a long way to making the levels feel more varied.

 

[lincolnic]

Yeah, the ghost house spring jump is the new strat I hadn't seen before. But bringing the Yoshi into the final level is actually an old strat, GC7 did it in his previous WR run too.

 

[lincolnic]

For whatever reason I found myself still in a shell mood, even though I'm not a shell person by any means, so I started Shellax today. I'm three exits in after an hour, and having a surprisingly good time! Although I had to stop at that point because shell levels are super rough on my right hand. But yeah, I was really pleasantly surprised at how much fun I was having. I know a lot of that is probably from the fact that this isn't a particularly tough shell hack, but I'll still take it.

I do wish there were checkpoints in these levels; the first two levels took about 15 minutes each, and the third took 30 because I got hung up on the final trick and had to keep grinding the rest of the level just to get more chances at it. I can understand from a design standpoint why they don't have checkpoints for the sake of flow, and they're not super long, but they're certainly long enough. In any case, I'm excited to wrap it up tomorrow as long as my thumb doesn't fall off.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

That’s funny, I thought you had already played Shellax. I quite enjoyed it, although I’d been led to believe it’s a beginner shell hack and it isn’t really. But yes, shell/item levels are always really rough on the poor hands. I don’t think I’ll ever go the hitbox route, but if I got way into difficult shell hacks, I might need to consider it.

 

[lincolnic]

I've heard rumors that some people are able to play shell levels without holding their controllers in a death grip, but until I see it with my own eyes I have a hard time believing them.

 

[lincolnic]

Controller death grip or no, I blasted through the remaining four exits of Shellax in ~25 minutes (including one-shotting the second half of one level* thanks to some very good sight-reading). I really enjoyed this one! It felt like fryinb instinctually understands that there's joy to be had just from moving Mario around. I don't think I want to play any shell hack that's harder than this, but I'd recommend this one to anybody.

Also, out of curiosity, I loaded Quickie World 2 onto the Analog Pocket to see how it felt to play kaizo on a very small screen. Turns out, it's weird! It's tough to gauge distances accurately and the d-pad isn't great, but I still did a 100% clear in probably under an hour. It was enough to convince me that I shouldn't try playing other kaizo hacks, though I do still want to see what the latency's like when it's docked and playing through the TV. Since the openFPGA SNES core can handle SA1, I'd like to play A Plumber for All Seasons at some point. For now my dreams of playing Grand Poo World 3 during my commute will have to wait.

*By which I mean everything past the secret exit in the one level with a secret exit. The back half of the main level itself, not the actual secret exit.

 

[lincolnic]

I guess it's 2021 again, because there's another NEW Nightmare Cafe (3)! This one's a little different from the first two in that it's structured: six sets of ten rooms, each set built around a particular gimmick. I didn't get on super well with this one, probably because it starts off on a gimmick I don't enjoy at all. Everything after that is mostly fine, but it was a rough start for me. Still, not a bad hack by any means and it was a fine way to spend an hour.

 

[lincolnic]

After watching Juz's playthrough of Rooms of Despair (Nowieso's filebin-only single room hack), it looked fun enough to play for myself. I started yesterday, and this hack is good, but it is Hard. I mean, I knew it was gonna be hard, but it's tougher than I expected. After an hour and a half, I'm only 30 rooms in (out of 100). Most of the hack is fine, you just occasionally come across a room that's way beyond everything around it. Won't get to play again probably until Friday, looking forward to it though.

And there's a new fryinb hack! I don't know anything about it but I really liked Shellax and Memory Lane, so I'll definitely play it after I wrap this one up.

 

[SilentSnake]

I will return to kaizo soon, I promise! But I have a couple of short Standard hacks to cross off the list first, namely 2Mice. Also I'm back to testing for RHR, so my skills aren't going to completely atrophy.

 

[lincolnic]

Oh, sweet! I don't think you mentioned that you were testing for RHR before. I've thought about doing that too, but I really don't feel like I can dedicate the time every week.

 

[lincolnic]

Took another couple of sittings (about 2.5 hours) but I wrapped up Rooms of Despair today. Great hack, but there are a handful of rooms that I found extremely frustrating. Outside of those it was a good time, and I wish Nowieso would submit it for moderation because I feel like this hack would have a much wider audience if people were aware of it. It's like a cross between Nightmare Cafe and Mad with Kaizo Power, but at expert difficulty. I definitely recommend it, with the caveat that it's most likely not a hack you'll beat in one sitting.

Next up is fryinb's new one, Day at the Turkey Races. Looking forward to it!

 

[lincolnic]

Day at the Turkey Races was really great! I played it in three sittings between Sunday and today, about an hour each. Levels averaged out to ~15 minutes per exit and they were all super creative. I didn't particularly care for two of them, just out of personal playstyle preference, but every level was full of interesting vanilla stuff and really well designed. There are so many setups that make you feel super smart when you figure them out. Fantastic hack, I'd recommend it highly.

 

[lincolnic]

So here's a neat little development from the past week or so: someone started a Kaizo Klub, with the idea to run it like a book club. Every month, everyone plays the same beginner or intermediate hack and folks talk about it! A bunch of very cool folks have jumped into it (like Snake), and I'm also there. Mike, if you want a link to the Discord, let me know.

Anyway, the hack for this month was Super Schrausch World 2 (apparently chosen more or less at random). I played it over the weekend and it's mostly fine, though not without some issues. Going into spoiler tags so I don't poison the well for Snake if he decides to get in on this one.

The biggest problem with the hack is that it frequently can't get out of its own way with aesthetics. There are a bunch of levels where the backgrounds are either very busy or so saturated that they're really hard to tell apart from the foreground. A lot of the time it's manageable, but unfortunately it's at its worst in the hardest level of the game. There's also one autoscroller where you have to be as close to the front as you can, but there are death blocks that are the same color as the background. Ungood. There are also a ton of custom sprites, which is cool from the labor of love standpoint but also not cool in that you're not gonna know what any of them do until they kill you once or twice.

On the plus side, the platforming is mostly fun, and the difficulty isn't super high. Although most levels are a weird mix of setups that are totally free and setups that don't make any sense without staring at them for a minute. As mentioned above, there are a ton of custom sprites and it really shows that the creator put a lot of effort into the hack. It's also kind of like two hacks in one, since there are two completely unique paths depending on the character you select at the start. I hope they continue to grow and improve if they keep making stuff, because they've got a lot of good ideas. I just ultimately wish this hack was more polished, I feel like that ends up holding it back from being great.

In any event, the Klub is off to a good start, and I hope it continues because I love the idea. Seems like a bunch of other people do too! It's a nice way to get to interact with people who I've seen around but never really get to talk to (I ended up chatting with Fén a bit about this one). Looking forward to next month already.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I'm definitely interested in checking out the group, please send me the Discord link! As for the hack itself, about how hard would you say it is? I'm still having some arm troubles, so I'll be staying away from harder stuff for a while, but I can probably manage anything that doesn't trigger my stress reflexes (or involves a lot of shells/items).

 

[lincolnic]

Oof, sorry to hear you're still having arm issues. Have you seen a doctor about that? It's been going on long enough now that it might be time for outside help. Anyway, the hack is really not too hard, barring the final level of the Bowser Jr. path. That one was a big difficulty spike for me, but most other exits were finished in about 10 minutes at most.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

That doesn't sound too bad, maybe I'll fire it up this week!

And yeah, I thought things were getting better, but I had a pretty bad day on Friday and I think it's time to take some steps. We have an ergonomics consultant at my hospital, I'll try to get them to come in, and go from there.

 

[lincolnic]

Yeah, the hack's alright, but my strongest recommendation right now is probably still Day at the Turkey Races.

Hope you're able to start recovering quickly! I ended up in PT for a long time with my wrist, with luck your road will be smoother than mine.

 

[SilentSnake]

I should mention lincoln and I had lunch yesterday, and we agreed that we all need to give ourselves more credit for our kaizo abilities. That goes for you too, Mike! You are no kaizo doofus!

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Just because I can jump good doesn't mean I'm not a doofus! Don't take my identity away!