R-ACK - The End - romhack

[Grounder]

[davin282]

Man daizo’s prediction is getting worse and worse every day

[MonkeyShrapnel]

Do I hear DKC steel keg samples?

I’m digging this song.

[Lord Ruby]

Jump Switch Force was a really cool level, with both interesting aesthetics and setups. A bit on the trial-and-error side, but short and lenient enough for it to not really be a problem.

The berry room was a bit weird but not too bad, the difficulty seemed to be more about parsing what was going on than about actually difficult execution.

Shell room was neat but I'm pretty sure it would have felt so much better with SA-1 enabled, which most likely would have eliminated the slowdown and could have allowed for a higher density of shells.

By the way, I disagree with whoever told rao that yesterday's level isn't kaizo. While many kaizo hacks focus on high precision, since it's one of the main ways of making such hacks difficult, the actual defining design principle is that the setups can only be approached in a single way. Either way, it definitely leans into the marathon aspect, another way of making kaizo difficult, which also makes it stand out negatively compared to the other four stages that lead to Jump Switch Force (spring level is short, bird level has frequent checkpoints, peak level kind of has frequent checkpoints since failure usually lead to death).

[davin282]

You know has raocow has ever played Undertale because he only refer the sans heads as skulls

[KobaBeach]

You know has raocow has ever played Undertale because he only refer the sans heads as skulls

Serious answer, he's very aware of parts of Undertale and Deltarune since he uses Tumblr on occasion, but he never played it, he actually doesn't really want to play it, bc Tumblr was really aggro with posting Undertale everywhere back in 2015-2016. So it's similar to the Cave Story situation from the early 2010s. He might play it much later on like how Cave Story is now, but I wouldn't count on it + it's a menu command based RPG and he prefers like Action RPG stuff.

[KobaBeach]

ping

what's the song in bird level. i heard it in a fucking jrpg but i forget which. this is not undertale

nvm it's wind fish, but someone in the comments said it's in the smw soundfont but like. this is fully sampled right? or adsr'd to fuck

EDIT: peak level's music sounds like som falcom shit

[KobaBeach]

real final and billy joel are goddamned deranged but I like em

I'd just make an infinite lives flag be a secret upgrade that you get for doing somethign really dumb, like super hidden in the life farm store, but this isn't my game

Do I hear DKC steel keg samples?

I’m digging this song.

I like the FF6 chant (sigh?) samples

[KobaBeach]

r-acku chan

6qwb9G2.png (108.32 KiB) Viewed 2472 times

[repairmanman]

r-acku chan

6qwb9G2.png

My favorite vtuber

[KobaBeach]

My favorite vtuber

some nice pocky and ramoonay

[Lord Ruby]

I don't quite think describing these rooms as "too long" is accurate. The clearing run of today's last room shows that pretty clearly - it's just four big setups, with the last being (mostly?) optional. Four long setups seem like an acceptable length for half a level, and the final level being the length of two levels (and with checkpoints between each of the four halves) isn't really too long either.

If I were to propose my own hypothesis, I'd say it's more about poorly paced complexity. Having to redo two precise sections or just one very precise one with no room to breathe just to get another try at yet another precise setup where it's not entirely clear what to do is tiresome. A long level, of course, also eventually feels tiresome to play, which is why it's tempting to call these rooms long. I think the complexity pacing of today's third room would be improved if some of the trickier sections were saved for a future level, replacing them with some more lenient setups while preserving the length.

The second room today was actually genuinely quite long, though. It tries to milk a gimmick that's not that interesting for more than it's worth. At least it's not very complex.

The first room is kind of in between, both in terms of length and complexity, but unfortunately much of the complexity that it does have is both late and not always reasonable to sight-read, again making things tiresome. The effective result of a setup that can't be sight-read after a complex setup is that after finally figuring out that previous setup, the player is told to immediately do it and the rest of the room again. As far as I recall, most of the previous rooms were also like that, having just a few too many unwelcome surprise deaths deep into the rooms. For rooms/levels like these, I think it might be sufficient to just make sure to space out the complex setups, making sure they're not right after one another.

[KobaBeach]

hey raocow play brandish 2

[raekuul]

I'm a couple days behind, do we have designer commentary for the third door from episode 20 (the one with the surprise fish at the end)? I'd like to know what the intended solution was.

[General_Urist]

So much jank, so much kaizo, and at the end our final boss is a goalpost. One that's actually mostly jank-free, and aside from the derpy angry face feels totally in-place as a mario boss. Comfy.

[PSI Ninja]

I'm a couple days behind, do we have designer commentary for the third door from episode 20 (the one with the surprise fish at the end)? I'd like to know what the intended solution was.

Here's what I did, without taking any hits:

r-ack_magic_room.gif (7.36 MiB) Viewed 2251 times

I don't know if this was the intended solution either, but it still requires foreknowledge. I wonder if Kaizo streamers like those named in the credits yesterday would struggle a lot and become frustrated with these kinds of trial and error levels? Levels designed in the modern Kaizo style tend to have their setups be signposted pretty well using the conventions of the genre, so that players have an idea of how to read the level and react accordingly.

When I beat the final boss recently, the game also wouldn't let me go up. But when I reentered real final and exited back to the map, it triggered something that allowed me to go up. Not sure if this was a bug or not, though by now I'm sure raocow has been informed on what to do.

[PSI Ninja]

I also enjoyed playing through R-ACK, and I felt like it never really got super difficult. I'm glad that raocow decided to savestate-practice the more Kaizo-y endgame levels to spare a lot of the frustration of trial and death. I wouldn't consider scouting ahead as "cheating" in this case, especially since he still took the time to figure out what to do on his own.

The first Goaldobadorrer was a fun boss fight, not just because it's a "Mario" boss where you can jump on it, but because you have lots of opportunities to deal damage without waiting around too much. These are the best kinds of boss fights in the SMW engine in my opinion, and I hope we can see more of them in the future.

[General_Urist]

And so R-ack wraps up. Did they drop the O, H, and M because they have no resistance to jank? Eheheh. Ended on a little hardcore note eh, anyways this was a lovely rodeo!

[KobaBeach]

fun hake :)

[TheFunPolice]

And so it ends...sort of.

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That giygas looks...off.

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lmfao how dare u

what an ending

[Daizo]

Man daizo’s prediction is getting worse and worse every day

honestly 23 is pretty close to my estimated 24 episodes, unless that's not what you meant.

hi I'm back, what did I miss? (op updated btw)

[Daizo]

eh, not like it matters at all but I figured I'd make this public. This was the list I gave raocow before the Let's Play began which he decided to not really look at (I get it; it does spoil level names. It was an option, after all!). The idea was to give a heads up on what levels are on the higher difficult end, but it went about as well as it could've, so all's good!

~omh~ has these 'warnings' built into the game, so whenever 20XX rolls around and raocow gives that a shot, I'll be less worried about the sudden difficult level cropping up.

r-ack difficult levels list.zip

(2.92 KiB) Downloaded 86 times

^ actually just the txt but talkhaus doesn't allow for just a txt upload so it's a zip
I also don't think "faneant" is a real developer; I think I must've mistyped "faineant."

Why not, right? Either way, I'm glad raocow thought the game surpassed his expectations going in. There's rough patches, but the world burns either way. Hopefully it was an entertaining watch for everybody else, too!