Although I have played and finished this romhack’s 2008 remake, I wanted to play the original Second Reality Project for the sake of curiosity. What were romhacks like in 2002 when the scene was young and the tools were new? I wanted some romhack rawness from a time before hack design ideas got codified in the community.
Granted, you can get 99% of that through this romhack’s Reloaded update as I quickly learned playing this version. It wasn’t long into my playthrough of this game that I loaded up Reloaded and played it alongside this one. Obsessive, but it gave me clear perspective on what makes this romhack special and helped me reappraise Reloaded.
There’s a charm that comes with this early version where vanilla assets are used in strange ways. There are a lot of levels where monocoloured pipes are a foundational terrain feature and brown blocks are used to represent the walls of a building. The hack is experimental in that the creator had to use these assets because they had nothing else. The remake avoids this problem by importing tilesets that fit themes any level is going for.
But, like the use of the final boss theme in the “Aggressive Water” level, I appreciate the strangeness. It gives the hack an absurd quality that works well with its idiosyncratic level design elements. You can see how this hack is extending off of the original SMW’s design tendencies and if you ask me, the levels in this hack are great for the most part. Even twenty years later, this hack has a lot of character and style.
A lot of the levels use SMW’s mechanics in clever ways or communicate interesting themes. This hack often had sections with spaced out platforms that were difficult but gave the level a vast feel. This is only present in a few stages but this hack also repeats section of level– not absolutely copy-and-pasted but mostly the same with small changes between iteration like changing up enemies or changing terrain slightly. It gives those levels a song-like structure with verses and choruses.
This hack gets too difficult, though. For a long time, I remembered this hack (or Reloaded, rather) having a lot of very long levels. Most levels are decently sized, actually. Some levels are quite long, though, and would be gruesome if not for save states. The remake is better about checkpoints but there’s so much you can do with a single checkpoint in a stage that’s 5+ sublevels long. The final levels are really rough, too. Some of the jumps in “Bowser’s Starship” were kaizo-like.
I’m one of the few people on this planet who could be enriched by playing this original version of Second Reality Project. I like its surreal environments and playing with vanilla textures allowed me to appreciate its unique designs that I didn’t grok when I played Reloaded and had a lot of those qualities obscured by the hack’s custom tilesets.
Ultimately though, Reloaded is the definitive version of this game. Among other things, this version of the hack had a lot of moments where enemies didn’t spawn in when they were supposed to. Maybe it was a problem with the memory that Reloaded fixed, but it happened somewhat frequently. If you are going to play The Second Reality Project, there’s little reason not to play the remake.
Granted, you can get 99% of that through this romhack’s Reloaded update as I quickly learned playing this version. It wasn’t long into my playthrough of this game that I loaded up Reloaded and played it alongside this one. Obsessive, but it gave me clear perspective on what makes this romhack special and helped me reappraise Reloaded.
There’s a charm that comes with this early version where vanilla assets are used in strange ways. There are a lot of levels where monocoloured pipes are a foundational terrain feature and brown blocks are used to represent the walls of a building. The hack is experimental in that the creator had to use these assets because they had nothing else. The remake avoids this problem by importing tilesets that fit themes any level is going for.
But, like the use of the final boss theme in the “Aggressive Water” level, I appreciate the strangeness. It gives the hack an absurd quality that works well with its idiosyncratic level design elements. You can see how this hack is extending off of the original SMW’s design tendencies and if you ask me, the levels in this hack are great for the most part. Even twenty years later, this hack has a lot of character and style.
A lot of the levels use SMW’s mechanics in clever ways or communicate interesting themes. This hack often had sections with spaced out platforms that were difficult but gave the level a vast feel. This is only present in a few stages but this hack also repeats section of level– not absolutely copy-and-pasted but mostly the same with small changes between iteration like changing up enemies or changing terrain slightly. It gives those levels a song-like structure with verses and choruses.
This hack gets too difficult, though. For a long time, I remembered this hack (or Reloaded, rather) having a lot of very long levels. Most levels are decently sized, actually. Some levels are quite long, though, and would be gruesome if not for save states. The remake is better about checkpoints but there’s so much you can do with a single checkpoint in a stage that’s 5+ sublevels long. The final levels are really rough, too. Some of the jumps in “Bowser’s Starship” were kaizo-like.
I’m one of the few people on this planet who could be enriched by playing this original version of Second Reality Project. I like its surreal environments and playing with vanilla textures allowed me to appreciate its unique designs that I didn’t grok when I played Reloaded and had a lot of those qualities obscured by the hack’s custom tilesets.
Ultimately though, Reloaded is the definitive version of this game. Among other things, this version of the hack had a lot of moments where enemies didn’t spawn in when they were supposed to. Maybe it was a problem with the memory that Reloaded fixed, but it happened somewhat frequently. If you are going to play The Second Reality Project, there’s little reason not to play the remake.