It'sa me, Kaizo Mario!

[lincolnic]

Hey, nice! I'd love to play on a CRT sometime, but it's not like I'm getting one any time soon, so I will live vicariously through folks like you and schema_tuna. But if you can't keep that setup, you could put that FX Pak into your Super NT and hook it up to the regular TV...and you should, because you should play Sauna Mario World 2.

 

[lincolnic]

I just have the five room castle left, and I fully expect this to take at least a couple of sittings.

So, uh, about that. I sat down today completely prepared to spend my play session in the practice rooms, but I found myself feeling good about all of them after about 45 minutes. Moving on to full attempts, I'd ended up in the final room a couple of times after another half an hour or so, and within an hour of starting in earnest I realized that I could absolutely beat the level today. I ended up going back to practice specific rooms a handful of times as I hit some weird regressions along the way, but around the three hour mark I was getting to the final room fairly consistently. If you've seen the hack, you may remember that it ends with a really messed up shell jump. After failing it a couple of times in a row, I realized that while I had the correct timing, I wasn't getting enough height, meaning I needed to start from just a little farther back to build that much more momentum. After another couple of spins through the practice room and some focused attempts, I finally got another chance and made it into the pipe. All in all, it took about three and a half hours to clear the level once I started making attempts.

And that's the any% cleared! Right now I have no plans to try the shell level, so that's effectively a wrap on My Favorite Things. What a way to kick off the year. I didn't keep track of all my clear times, but I'd say the whole thing overall probably took me around 12-15 hours -- much faster than I expected, honestly. This was a tremendous game and I had a great time taking on the challenge. In terms of input density, it's easily one of the hardest hacks -- if not the hardest -- I've played, but I remember seeing it when it came out and thinking "I don't know if I'll ever be good enough to beat that". Going from that memory to seeing it again last week and saying "Oh, wait, this actually looks feasible" to actually doing it has been a very powerful journey for me. These levels were a fantastic exercise in developing consistency, as well as a chance to reexamine some of my own playing habits. I learned a lot and it made me a better player. I can't ask for anything more.