Having finished Baldur's Gate 3 some time last week, I've finally had some time to get back into kaizo. And I've been playing a decent amount again! There hasn't been a ton of activity lately, but there's been some, including a new Nightmare Cafe! Specifically, NEW Nightmare Cafe 5. I played it, it's good! You already know if you'll like it.
Lush also put out another long-form hack recently, The Long Way Home 2, which I played most of but then decided to put down four or five exits from the end. I just wasn't having fun with it. There's a surprising amount of item abuse key stuff and some of it felt excessively tight, so I moved on.
I also played new-ish beginner hack Sweet World, which was just fine. Straightforward, readable, I even had some one shots. Decent way to feel good about myself after not playing for a while!
At some point last week I was inspired to give Unintended Behavior another go -- I tried playing it when it was released, but since that was only three months after I'd started playing kaizo, I took one look at the first screen and noped out. I'm sad to say I also did not finish this one because I wasn't enjoying it. I played a good chunk of it, maybe seven or eight exits (I quit on the level where you trap Wigglers in on/off blocks to launch them into the air), but it felt like levels were either fun and easy or chores to get through. Gbreeze is still an absolute genius for making real playable levels out of the jankiest vanilla jank, it's just not for me.
What else has been happening? I played through Marathon and Laser Lifts again out of excitement for GPW3, and those went pretty well. Marathon was a 20 minute clear, Laser Lifts took about an hour (20 minutes first half/40 minute second half) because for some reason I have to learn how to play that level from scratch every single time I do it. But I didn't hit the kaizo block before the end of the first half, at least!
Out of curiosity (and because someone on the Kaizo Klub Discord has a fast retry version) I played the first three levels of the original Grand Poo World. Honestly, they're fine, but nothing as groundbreaking as GPW2. I think they all took maybe 20-30 minutes each to clear. Barb really grew an astounding amount as a creator between those two hacks. I know all the levels I actually want to play are later in the hack, so if I keep going with it I'm considering just downloading a cleared save and skipping the levels I have no interest in. I don't feel the need to have a 100% GPW playthrough on my list of clears. I dunno, we'll see.
Besides that, yesterday I booted up My Favorite Things because seeing om_nomnom_nomnom play through it got me wondering how I'd do. I still don't know if I'll play all of it (definitely no intention of playing the shell level at the end), but for now it's going okay! I cleared the first level in about an hour and 20 minutes yesterday, and today I did the only secret exit in the hack in another 20 minutes. I also got through the first half of the ghost house level that follows, which took about 2 hours. From the clear video, the second half of the level really doesn't look too bad, so I'll keep going with it for now. I'm honestly having a lot of fun so far! Yes, it is very very hard, but it's all creative vanilla platforming, which is my favorite kind of SMW. It took me a little while but I'm starting to get a sense of what I think revolug's design intention was for the hack -- it's kind of an exercise in permutations. All the sections I've played so far have shared a similar "do a jump, then do it two more times in slightly different ways" vibe, which is interesting to me from a technical perspective. I like the idea of exploring subtle differences between very similar inputs/setups. It feels good to play, and since I didn't go in with the expectation of actually beating the hack, nothing's really felt like a grind yet. As long as I'm having fun, I'll keep playing. It's been kind of refreshing to just play without feeling like I have to accomplish anything while still improving my skills.
Other than that, I'm kind of in a holding pattern until GPW3 comes out. Assuming nothing big drops before that happens, I'll probably just play a few more random levels that I liked from GPW2, maybe explore some of GPW1, and definitely play more My Favorite Things as I feel like it.
Oh yeah, I also playtested Mithrillionaire's Old School Level Design Contest entry on Friday! That was a lot of fun. Mith has a great sense of flow and I hope he makes another full hack one of these days. Maybe I should run Arcane Mario World and Kaizo Crisis back too before GPW3 releases...