raocow's talkhaus

Because, as I just said: I wasn't making definitive statements about what people should and shouldn't do, instead just talking about the subject. Yes, I think that there's a bit of futility in providing serious criticism to a work that doesn't take itself nearly as seriously, and I also think that the game's bad decisions still exist. Neither of these were meant as absolute statements about how nobody should mention anything bad ever.

The LP is really enjoyable for me in any case. I also liked to see those good old-fashioned bringing items through pipes glitches today.

I have to completely agree with lolyoshi, that one jump really isn't THAT hard, it's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I can see how people find it somewhat frustrating, but of all things in that level, it's not even close to the worst.
This hack most certainly isn't for everyone, even most skilled players, it's pretty brutal (and kind of unfair) at times, but the difficulty of the platforming feels just right in my opinion. If it wasn't as challenging as it is, it would have been much less

fun

.

It's bizarre that the person playing the hack is enjoying it and being interested and the viewers are insisting it's not fun or interesting. Even when raocow is being frustrated he must sort of enjoy it, or he wouldn't still, after several years, be playing hacks that 'break his face'.

I think Hai Mari is sometimes careless about things but more often he's extremely astute in building towards his goal. Take the annoying 5 tile jumps in the ice level before the midpoint: The level continues to be about making such jumps afterwards, so it's actually very clever to force you to get those jumps in a situation where it's hard to die; and the jumps become more natural over time--I'm sure if raocow played the level again he would have much less trouble with that section.

Another point of unnecessary (or let's say misdirected) criticism would be the idea of the schizophrenic level. This seems to me to be the author's prerogative, not something inherently wrong. There is even some justification of it in the vanilla game: What has the second half of Morton's Castle to do with the first?; and similar examples are not lacking throughout the Marioverse. Similarly, you can justify the meanness of the hack's unforeseeable traps and the unholy glee it takes in the reversal of the player's expectations by looking at the Japanese SMB 2. When I hear someone say, 'Gotcha traps are always great!!!' I have to say, 'Well, they certainly may be.'

morsel/morceau wrote: ↑5 years ago(Uses the most bullshit Mario game ever made to justify bad Hyper VI decisions)

I personally really like reading the game design discussions here prompted by the things that don't quite work.

Also I genuinely really liked the Boss Bass level. Some parts of some levels in this game it feels like Haimari was kind of haphazardly placing blocks, but this level seemed to have a purpose to every obstacle and was overall pretty coherent. Like, super difficult, but in a way that seems more calculated and deliberate than some of the other cases. And like raocow said, Boss Bass levels are pretty hard to do right.

Grounder wrote: ↑5 years ago

morsel/morceau wrote: ↑5 years ago(Uses the most bullshit Mario game ever made to justify bad Hyper VI decisions)

I'm not nearly as hot on Hyper 6 as Morcel is and have no desire to defend it, but SMB2J is a great game, and I really don't think much of it is bullshit at all (outside of maybe the hammer bros in 8-3).

I think the game punished raocow for going outside the level list.

Never mind that it would have punished him for staying within the level list.

I'm just glad we unlocked a storehouse, which I see as implicit permission to bring double capes into every level.

Would have helped if you were able to catch Boss Bass today, haha.

What was up with the boo block glitch death? Can't recall ever seeing that glitch before.

I wasn't going to mention this because I felt it wasn't relevant enough but it seems like every new level keeps reminding me.
So now I want to go on record as saying that invisible blocks are terrible and you shouldn't use them, with a slight caveat.
So many times, both recently in this hack and hacks in the past, has rao been hurt from finding a "helpfull" secret block that interupted his movement. The same goes for (partial) bridge building, the surpise is almost never worth it and most important is that it's very arbitrary. For example those common "ladders" that help with getting up higher places; if you find them very easily they might as well have been visible while if you miss them you get frustrated with figuring out an "impossible" setup.

I don't want to go so far as claiming they should have been removed from the editor like with invinsibility stars in smbx; they have a place and I like the creative options they give being individual switch blocks etc. However I want to suggest everyone that when you place an invisible block you need to be very consious of the choice you make. Consider for instance if placing an outline block would be more appropriate given your intentions for the section. And again please keep them away from hazards so as to not punish the player for not knowing things they couldn't even anticipate.

This isn't intended as pointing out a large flaw with this specific hack. It just has been bothering me for a long time and it has, as mentioned, been showing up the past couple of videos. Please feel free to continue to enjoy our regularly scheduled rather difficult romhack.

Sometimes, I get the feeling that hackers don't quite understand that they can just ... not put powerups in their levels. It's okay to make normal Mario-only levels, you don't need to make sections that are effectively powerup filters unless you do an obnoxiously precise crouch-slide or shove in instadeath obstacles that just turn Super Mario into a bigger hitbox.

Then again based on the rest of the hack, it doesn't seem all that out there to assume HaiMari intended to make it so people who unconditionally went for powerups ( aka like 99% of all Mario players ) to suffer from said powerups only making their situation worse, so.

Figuring out when it might be better to be small Mario is a skill hack players tend to end up learning (as raocow has).

You always have an opportunity to lose your powerups if you don't want them, so grabbing them is never a punishment. It just opens up the choice to keep or lose them, to be decided at your discretion.

Given that Hyper 6 expects you to be aware of techniques such as carrying objects through pipes to change their properties, I'm sure it expects you to realize that you can get hit strategically.

Leet wrote: ↑5 years ago Given that Hyper 6 expects you to be aware of techniques such as carrying objects through pipes to change their properties, I'm sure it expects you to realize that you can get hit strategically.

The main issue with that comparison is that taking items with you is just a normal action with a glitch associated with it, while taking a hit is a punishment at its core.

I'm not even sure if this is really even comparable to a damage boost, or at least a non-mandatory damage boost - a damage boost is really much more like the trade-off you're presenting where it's a player's choice to take damage to get some i-frames to avoid more damage and / or some extra momentum to clear an otherwise impossible jump. Here, though, it basically boils down to "well HaiMari didn't want you to be able to tank stuff but he put a powerup in this section anyway so here's something that's much harder if you have the audacity to keep the hit you had to work to get in the first place."

I dunno, in a game with a SMB3-style inventory but usable mid-level or even just a reserve item system that doesn't auto-drop like in the newer Mario game I could see managing your size to be an appropriate gameplay mechanic, as then it becomes more about timing your resources rather than just a way to gate powerups while still giving those powerups away for whatever reason. With SMW's mechanics, though, it just seems like a dick move without even some humor to lighten it up.

I don't think the instant kill spikes and a ceiling that harms you (which happened a couple times later in the video) improved the level. The level would have worked fine with regular spikes and a normal ceiling. As for giving the player incentive to power down, it could be presented more explicitly if that was the intent, like having "touch here" zones or objects that you can readily tell is meant to be used that way.

I dunno, my super-ignorant-pleb self thought the setup made sense. The final major obstacle before the spike filter, the drop, is designed to be made much easier if one is good enough to get that far with a powerup intact. The spike filter is then necessary to prevent the cape from trivializing the Dry Bones trap obstacle. So the reward for getting that far with a powerup is non-trivial, but not level-breaking.

This was a good current level, surprisingly fair compared to really insane current levels that raocow has played.

This is one of the levels in this hack that would be fun to play if I didn't have to go through the rest of the hack to get there.

Forced hits (or nearly forced hits) really don't bother me all that much. And I enjoy having to decide whether to maintain a powerup through an obstacle that is more likely to kill me, for the sake of it helping me out in the rest of the level. I'd much prefer either of those to a level that just doesn't provide a powerup in the first place.

now that we've seen peach, this hack better not end with her being rescued from the clown car and walking home with us

Apparently the next two worlds are the worst in the game, so uh, have fun!

Compared to world 8?

they can be the 'worst' without being the hardest

I'd prob still lean towards world 8 being objectively worse

I dunno. This LP is great. The hack might not be fun to actually play yourself, but it's very entertaining to watch someone else play it.

I recently watched parts of the Hyper V series that was done several years ago, and one thing I thought was kind of funny was that that game had actual creative, fun and original level names. Going from that to the generic "place land #5" we get in the sequel feels like kind of a downgrade to be honest.

Also, according to LHB the bridge level today is actually called "Phon Bridge" in reference to the "Phon Coast" in Final Fantasy XII.

So I just finished world 3 of a dragon coin run I decided to do, and man, some of the timers are really tight. The water level in world 3 I finished with 15 seconds left, and the level with hurt-water I finished with 27. There's just no room for taking your time really. In other levels there's plenty of time though, and most of the time it feels like these levels were meant for a full dragon coin run.

World 3 castle is a good example, after the midpoint if you go for the dragon coin to the right, you essentially have the other half of the level, whereas the left path is just "there".

(At least so far, I don't think most of world

6

and onwards are reasonable to do a full run of.)