ASMT 11th Anniversary LP - Hey There Guy

[Leet]

for my part i feel like raocow forces himself to finish really long levels in one video a lot these days, which feels like an unnecessary adherence to the schedule to me. i think doing something like playing X game, playing Y game, and then returning to finish X game after the break of Y game (with Z game being on hold for a day) would be a more natural way to get through a very tough level than just continuing to play for 30 minutes after you're already tired. not that i know how this would be achieved in raocow's schedule in practice, i just think that's more like how these hard levels are supposed to be played

"b-b-b-but the patreons-" suggesting that a donation system would dissipate if the constant stream of videos was slightly more unpredictable is kind of an insult to the people pledging money, don't you think?

this is actually completely off-topic though, because ASMT hasn't been that level of hard so far.

[Kilgamayan]

The repeated harrowing jumps over the same 32 pixels of lava reminded me about the insta-kill Nickelodeon Gak from the fortress level in Mega Man DOS 3 and made me think about What Might Have Been If.

[KobaBeach]

that's nice

now please find me any meticulous documentation on the plot and setting details of Diebuster, The Big O, Melody of Oblivion, Ghost Hound, The 25th Ward, Hellnight, Deadly Premonition 2(!!!), or Rail Slave Games

once you cross a certain popularity threshold (and not even a particularly big one), you are fending for yourself in the wilderness with this stuff. the idea that seeing one (1) more meticulous wiki will make me forget about almost everything i've ever watched or played is very silly!

i keep meaning to update the SaGa Wikia but i just dont have any motivation anymore or desire to learn how to manipulate Fandom's godawful software, most of the pages there are extremely amateur hour compared to like. Final Fantasy Wikia

also good luck finding any info on the pre-Trails Legend of Heroes games outside of Japanese websites, i have not seen any western fans of Gagharv outside of the Falcom Discord or Falcom translation patch circles i s2g THANKS BAMCO

[Ashan]

I'm sure lots of work went into that Mario Galaxy port but it sounds so quaint and kinda silly compared to the actual song it's trying to replicate. I just find it kinda funny, I don't know.

Anyway, I'm curious to see how King Charles' castle goes because that was my breaking point on my last attempted playthrough. Can't remember if it was in the first half or second half but I could not find any path I could do consistently. I don't think I had a rage quit moment or anything, but after like my second session of attempts and not making any progress, I put the controller down and must have gotten distracted with something else after that cause I never played it again. At the very least I apparently didn't have enough of an urge to put myself through more of it. I was also on console so I couldn't give myself a checkpoint but also i probably would rather give up than do that cause I'm stubborn

[Argumentable]

I don't remember anything about the castle except two rooms vaguely (one being mine [yeah I barely remember it but it's enemy spam awful]) and of course the final boss. IIRC pretty much everyone who did something for the hack to got to do a room in the castle which sounds like a horrible idea just from severe overload now, haha.

Also I have no idea what SMWCP was like. I don't recall watching any videos of it but I vaguely remember reading some of their rules for it, which I recall agreeing with. As for bad blood, I know it wasn't just me but being a mod here I definitely overdid it with the "this wouldn't be accepted on SMWC" jokes. I know Kieran for sure disliked me, which may be what influenced some of it. For the most part everyone there was cool, though. SNN was a pretty cool guy and I know he was really active on talkhaus but I considered him a SMWCentral guy if I had to place him. And if I ever popped in the SMWCentral IRC most people were friendly. I don't recall anyone really making it known that I was unwanted there.

I've always liked SMWCentral I just had no restraint and loved poking that bear

PS Actually I remember something that talkhaus IRC did kinda ruin for SMWCentral and it's funny but it's not one of those things that I think should be openly talked about here. It's nothing bad, just a forum having to get editted, but I'm mentioning it vaguely to see if it somehow sparks something with someone else (I doubt it)

[CrispyMWHC]

This level reminds me just how much I like the Black Mage sprite for a Magikoopa replacement.

[PurpleDynamite]

I think the biggest difference between ASMT and SMWCP is pretty simple: SMWCP is hubris. ASMT is a love letter to someone in particular, our affable raocow.

Like, ASMT has a lot of dumb but it's mostly fun dumb, but SMWCP is like an entire romhack of dumb, that is also boring type of dumb.

I recall the most difficult levels in SMWCP just being downright boring to play. There was a ton of item babysitting in overlong mazelike levels with obstacles that were difficult, but not fun to avoid. I know lots of people hated raocow's level, Rupture in Reality, but I liked that one a lot more than the other really difficult levels. At least RiR was mostly platforming.

[Ashan]

I don't know how anyone could even read SMWC with their insane per-user post customization. Any time I end up reading a thread there my retinas burn out going between green on black and then pink on red and then beige on grey, and random anime characters in the background. It's like every post is its own geocities website

[Xenesis]

I don't know how anyone could even read SMWC with their insane per-user post customization. Any time I end up reading a thread there my retinas burn out going between green on black and then pink on red and then beige on grey, and random anime characters in the background. It's like every post is its own geocities website

It's a weird artifact of the old forum software where the SMW hacking community originated - known as acmlmboards (named after the creator). Basically the idea was that everyone could customise their posts with HTML and the tradition was just carried forward for about 20 years.

Most forks of the original got the ability to turn post layouts off, though. I'm not sure if SMWC lets you do that however.

[Le Neveu de Rameau]

I don't know how anyone could even read SMWC with their insane per-user post customization. Any time I end up reading a thread there my retinas burn out going between green on black and then pink on red and then beige on grey, and random anime characters in the background. It's like every post is its own geocities website

It's a weird artifact of the old forum software where the SMW hacking community originated - known as acmlmboards (named after the creator). Basically the idea was that everyone could customise their posts with HTML and the tradition was just carried forward for about 20 years.

Most forks of the original got the ability to turn post layouts off, though. I'm not sure if SMWC lets you do that however.

It does. This used to be the default when not logged in, as I recall, but it was eventually changed so that layouts were enabled by default, and you could only disable them if you were logged in. Incidentally, I lurked some months on the forum before joining, never once suspecting the existing of post layouts; logging in for the first time and discovering them was quite a shock. I immediately disabled them, and consequently forgot about them entirely until the switch was made, whereafter they would occasionally pop up and say "surprise!" Whenever I was auto-logged out. It was most scampish.

[J. J. W. Mezun]

“Serious Sam eats and critiques a video game”cow“ is my favorite cow.

late 00s-early 10s smwc was just super up their asses in terms of hack standards and toxic all around.

¿Which one am I s’posed to be gainst in that argument? The guy quoting Sean Maelstrom as a s’posed authority or the guy who seemingly unironically said, “I, for one, designed a 51 level puzzle hack which swept the site by storm at one time”.

[S.N.N.]

Also I have no idea what SMWCP was like. I don't recall watching any videos of it but I vaguely remember reading some of their rules for it, which I recall agreeing with. As for bad blood, I know it wasn't just me but being a mod here I definitely overdid it with the "this wouldn't be accepted on SMWC" jokes. I know Kieran for sure disliked me, which may be what influenced some of it. For the most part everyone there was cool, though. SNN was a pretty cool guy and I know he was really active on talkhaus but I considered him a SMWCentral guy if I had to place him. And if I ever popped in the SMWCentral IRC most people were friendly. I don't recall anyone really making it known that I was unwanted there.

We weren’t innocent of anything either, and I know myself and others got way, way too defensive about SMWCP/SMWC as a whole during that early era, probably to the point where it became comical at times. I can only speak for me, but I really wanted to see the community flourish and produce something to be proud of in 2010, and it probably clouded my own vision of things a lot more than it should have. I think things got a lot better with SMWC once everyone dropped that “competitive” mindset and started focusing on projects for fun (the modern VLDCs come to mind). It’s hard being a teen in a community you grew up with, I guess.

(And for what it’s worth, I always thought you were a cool guy too.)

[Shard1697]

I don't know how anyone could even read SMWC with their insane per-user post customization. Any time I end up reading a thread there my retinas burn out going between green on black and then pink on red and then beige on grey, and random anime characters in the background. It's like every post is its own geocities website

the best part about smwc formatting is that when people put rom map stuff in their posts, this happens

I will still take messy oldschool website design over modern 'minimalist' aka 'everything is designed for mobile' sites

[Argumentable]

Oh hey there's SNN the cool guy

I recognize some of these rooms, there's more here than I thought that I knew. Also, the room with the bombs and reverse boos was mine. I think it had a proper name that was stupid like "The Hallway of Exploded Dreams" but my old files just call it "Hallway with Background." I guess out of the 6? levels I made, 4 of them had reverse boos. Great! Only one had phantos, though. I think in a vacuum a lot of these rooms are good.

When I originally made this level, all of the platforms were the gray cement blocks. I remember doing that because it was a tribute or thievery or whatever you wanna call it to a room in VIP. I don't remember if the room was anything special, I think I just liked the look. However, THIS was the one thing in ALL of my levels that YCZ came up to and said "hey maybe you shouldn't do that." Again, not trying to criticize, if YCZ said something about everything that was wrong he'd probably still be working on it. FWIW the uniform castle tileset is better but I don't think that came along til later.

It also amuses me that the boo room gives you THREE power ups and then the very next one is like "You can have a mushroom but only if you time it correctly, teehee"

I do have a scrapped room video laying around, but it's way too reasonable, there's not 500 things flying at you at once. It feels like it's supposed to be a parody of a puzzle level but I don't think I was or am that clever so I'm really not sure what's up with it.

[yoshicookiezeus]

To be honest, I’m fairly certain “being able to reasonably beat the whole thing without savestates” wasn’t in the design specs for King Charles’ Castle. Although if we had had the technology, there’d definitely have been an extra midpoint in the second hub (and a couple more in the second half); one thing I remember us discussing was putting an “F2” graphic there to show that no, you shouldn’t feel bad about putting down a savestate here.

Also there are a few rooms in here that I definitely don’t remember from the old playthrough. I think there might have been some that got lost or submitted too late or something, and we put them back in for the final release? I’m fairly certain the original layout had five rooms on each path rather than six.

When I originally made this level, all of the platforms were the gray cement blocks. I remember doing that because it was a tribute or thievery or whatever you wanna call it to a room in VIP. I don't remember if the room was anything special, I think I just liked the look. However, THIS was the one thing in ALL of my levels that YCZ came up to and said "hey maybe you shouldn't do that." Again, not trying to criticize, if YCZ said something about everything that was wrong he'd probably still be working on it. FWIW the uniform castle tileset is better but I don't think that came along til later.

Of all things, that’s such a weird thing for me to get hung up on. Can’t say I remember my reasoning for that one. :V

[KobaBeach]

ブルーノ城

late 00s-early 10s smwc was just super up their asses in terms of hack standards and toxic all around.

¿Which one am I s’posed to be gainst in that argument? The guy quoting Sean Maelstrom as a s’posed authority or the guy who seemingly unironically said, “I, for one, designed a 51 level puzzle hack which swept the site by storm at one time”.

that's my point

snn has chilled out as you can see now, and cm30 is relatively more relaxed than before but holy hot damn

[LunarRainbowShyGuy]

Well this place is certainly a thing. When I first went into this level my demo counter was at 550. By the time I reached the midpoint it was at 570... plus 32 loaded save states from deaths, because I eventually started using save states after a while, and one more loaded save state from when the game froze one time

when I got a feather off the top of the screen in the icy room with a bullet generator

.

For the first area that you get a choice the path that seemed most doable to me was the one with the boo tetris room, and the boo wizard did not make that place fun. It wasn't even that difficult, just boring, since my approach was to progress one safe spot at a time and wait for a safe opportunity to move forward, and because of the boo wizard I often ended up waiting long periods of time before I could finally move forward (and sometimes it would appear right where the next safe spot was, basically forcing me to take a hit). Doing that did allow me to get through fairly consistently, but after getting through that and dying almost immediately after choosing a second path I quickly decided I would put a save state in the second decision room. Going through the boo tetris room twice was bad enough; I think I'd sooner quit the game than go through that 32 more times.

For the second half before the midpoint I ended up taking a different route than raocow, but I did spend some time trying to go that way, since the first room is basically a free pass. Although in the second room I once again had a pretty boring time due to playing slow and methodically. When I saw the exploding bullet generator my thought process every time I saw and enemy that wasn't generated from a cannon or something was "why put myself at risk when I could just sit around and wait for the bullets to explode the enemies for me", which is what I did, but it often led to me waiting long periods of time for a bullet to appear in the right spot. Eventually I did make it through, but after dying in the third room I decided to start considering the other options.

Overall I feel like lot of these rooms could be their own levels, and I feel like I'd be able to enjoy them a lot more if they were just standalone levels, but when they're all put together like this I feel like it just makes the whole experience worse. Although it would seem that this wasn't meant to be done without save states, which seems like questionable design to me, especially in a game with a built in death counter, where using save states will render said death counter inaccurate. Even with save states it doesn't change the fact that this feels like a bunch of levels mashed into one.

[helucard]

La berceuse d'Emo

It has been a tough task to crawl through Sheol,
and there is still yet more to do.
How can it be that so close to your goal,
the world brings more pain down on you?

For now, close your weary eye.
Take some time, a day perhaps, to rest.
There may be no bed on which to lie,
but tomorrow, you must carry on your quest.

[Argumentable]

When I originally made this level, all of the platforms were the gray cement blocks. I remember doing that because it was a tribute or thievery or whatever you wanna call it to a room in VIP. I don't remember if the room was anything special, I think I just liked the look. However, THIS was the one thing in ALL of my levels that YCZ came up to and said "hey maybe you shouldn't do that." Again, not trying to criticize, if YCZ said something about everything that was wrong he'd probably still be working on it. FWIW the uniform castle tileset is better but I don't think that came along til later.

Of all things, that’s such a weird thing for me to get hung up on. Can’t say I remember my reasoning for that one. :V

I mean I'm exaggerating a bit. You'd given input on some other things I know, and there may have been some other things changed, but I want to say this is the most significant for anything I'd submitted. I mean, I certainly didn't wanna be in charge of all of that so you did good with what you had!

[Ashan]

Yeah so I think I'm recalling how my last playthrough ended. I might have gone through a different path for the first set of rooms, but I definitely took the same path as raocow for the second set. It took me a good handful of attempts to finally get through bomb hell, and when I finally go to the end and saw it was followed by a crazy layer shenanigans room I didn't understand, and immediately died, I just said "nope" and stopped playing there. Also looking at my post history in the "what games are you playing thread" it looks like this was right around the time Mega Man 11 came out, so that's probably why I never continued my playthrough.

If I had known that final room was relatively short and not THAT bad (the neckbeard/charlie spam section looks a bit stupid, and I think raocow got a bit lucky with going through that one neckbeard) I might have continued. But also I don't remember what the second half is like either

[Paragraph]

wow that first time through the explosion room purely on reflex, absolute top notch playing, the skills on display, horny splash emoji

[Nesera]

The music in Charlie's Castle is probably my favourite in the entire game. Makes quite the change from the level immediately before it, whose music was absurdly unfitting.

[J. J. W. Mezun]

I won’t give ASMT flak, ’cause ’twas an early example ( & I did this same thing in a hack I made, & didn’t e’en have the ’scuse o’ it being a collab hack ), but here’s a convenient place to talk ’bout how I’m not a big fan o’ levels that are just a bunch o’ other levels put together, specially as the last main level, as that’s the 2nd most important level to a game, 2nd only to the 1st. I know it’s a reference to Bowser’s Castle from the original SMW, ¿but did anyone truly like that level? I’ve ne’er seen it on anyone’s top 10, & for good reason.

I wouldn’t mind if they shared a theme o’ some sorts, — I actually liked the “Yellow Switch” from YUMP2 for that very reason — but most don’t do that. E’en Nintendo themselves don’t do that if you look @ levels like “Darker Side” from Odyssey.

I’m just saying, it’d be refreshing to see a hack end with a solid, cohesive level that’s memorable rather than a grab bag o’ B sides. Specially when some o’ these areas — like the bomb area, which, in this context, looks jarringly out o’ place as the only chocolate area with a palette that seems like it actually fits its tileset surrounded by a bunch o’ “vanilla” areas with wacky palettes, like the super ketchup red zones — looked like they’d have made cool levels, but feel like they’ve been diluted by all the other levels.

[Leet]

I mean, I have never seen anyone's "top 10 levels in super mario world" period

The idea is that rather than the final level - indeed, the 2nd most important one - being arbitrarily assigned to any random person, with them carrying both the privilege and responsibility of drafting the culmination of what has been a group effort, everyone on the team gets to be involved in making the biggest most extravagent finale. Of course, this can be done vastly more elegantly than "24 random levels before the midpoint". But I do prefer an inelegent version like this over a level by just one guy.

[HTFCirno2000]

Those green icons actually are the old XP restart icon.