This was a pretty good replay. I got mostly everything, I got the good ending. I saw just about everything you need to see but I also got a good idea on whether or not this game is a masterpiece like I've previously believed, and well it is great, there are some problems.

The collision detection and ambiguous nature of the game's prerendered graphics made it hard to tell how far into a bush of bramble I could move before getting hurt. Stuff like that gives the game a constant feeling of unprecision.

That said, the game is still fun with a good general gamefeel, loads of cool mechanics, varied levels that take advantage of those mechanics and even a fun bonus world to explore.

Some story elements here were wonky. The opening with the Queen of Maggots misdirected to what the story would be like and what the focus would be on. Other elements of the story are so surreal I have to wonder if they're metaphorical or in the character's head so the extended opening set me up for the wrong expectations.

Judging this story's portrayal of depression is hard because I didn't get a strong essence of what Susan's problems are really like aside from she's lonely and traumatized. As a series of vignettes about sadism and horror– this game works very well. I like the aesthetics and thought that the dour environments were very realized.

I also like the simple controls and presentation. Using the keyboard exclusively– a handful of keys– worked well with the game's stripped down attire. The music could be a little goofy but it was mostly excellent taking from a broad handful of genres.

I've been marathoning a video games podcast and when I got to their episode of The Cat Lady, I decided to check the game as I have heard a lot of good things here and coming away from it, even if I had played more titles this October, I can't imagine me any other potential game giving a more affecting horror experience.

As a game that opens with Mario sentencing Princess Peach to her death by walking off a cliff into a pit of lava, you can expect Mario Gives Up to be edgy and mean-spirited. This is the rare piece of media where the mean-spiritedness adds substance to the material instead of just taking it away.

For example, in vanilla SMW and even many romhacks (including very hard ones), powerups are easy to get on the fly. In Mario Gives Up, there weren’t many occasions where I could go into a level to grab a quick mushroom or such. Most powerups are somewhat into the level and require overcoming a fair if brief challenge to obtain.

This emphasized me starting a lot of levels as small Mario. That boilerplate challenge could get frustrating but I kind of see the point. It makes the world ambiently threatening. Same goes for the fact that a number of checkpoints are hidden away from the conventional level. There were a lot of them stashed in pipes– bonus room. Many were rather missable.

It makes the world feel more threatening, and maybe that wouldn’t be enough for a romhack but the level design was often sharp with many creative uses of SMW mechanics and ideas. It’s the consistent quality of play that makes the hostile parts of Mario Gives Up’s design come off as decisions made intelligently instead of just trolling.

The story is pretty edgelordy though. There’s the occasional use of gore and 2010s humour but overall it’s a pretty great hack.

This is 20 years old and even if it was a gamechanger when it was released, a lot of ideas here have been done several times again (and better) by other romhacks since. That said, there’s a lot of creativity on display here. While the hack adds in new mechanics, the vanilla fundamentals are mixed up in interesting ways, like certain key exits and other tricks with SMW’s logic.

That said, some of the things hacked in are pretty interesting, like the powerup that allows you to summon a message box. The problem with a lot of these hacked into summonable items is that if you get hit, the game will drop the item responsively, and if you need to bring that specific item somewhere (like the end of the level), it can be frustrating.

I get the feeling, though, that the devs meant for the player to use save states. One of the hidden messages even mentions one of the devs using them. The hacks difficulty is brutal otherwise, at least at points, and finding the use for a lot of the hack’s special items is a challenge in itself. I liked the puzzly elements of this hack but I didn’t have the patience to figure them all out and used a video guide.

This hack will stick with me because of the idiosyncratic level design. There are a lot of stark level design choices that lack aesthetic flair but also make the hack stick out. You could flip a coin on whether the basicness of the design made the level distinct or if it make the level forgettable, though. The Star World level designs get especially surreal with how much throw at you and how unconcerned they are appearing like an actual environment.

The second special world and how it unfolds is also pretty cool. I was surprised how fresh this hack was, even today, but I get the inkling that maybe the reason newer hacks don’t do a lot of these ideas is because of them are hostile to the player.

If this was a rank milder in difficulty, this would probably be my favourite SMW romhack.

The fundamentals here are solid. The level design is sharp and creative. There are a lot of tricks and gimmicks that spin Mario’s moveset into interesting directions. There were a handful of times when levels would repeat a small bit of level– copying and pasting– which felt like an unnecessary extension for already long levels, but for how much SMW there is in this hack, it doesn’t exhaust itself.

What makes this romhack special is the world progression. While keeping within Super Mario World’s framework, the adventure of TSRP2 unfolds with some interesting plot elements that add to the story and journey through the game’s strange biomes. There are a number of very impressive and cool secrets that the player will have to figure out in order to get the game’s best ending. This world feels more connected and intricate compared to other romhacks and maybe even Super Mario World itself.

It is a long romhack. Not only are worlds jam-packed with levels, I’d say most levels are double the length than usual. I played this on and off over the course of two years and I had to take breaks. I say that the game doesn’t exhaust itself, but it sure exhausted me. Combine that with the difficulty and I don’t think this could be a number one favourite for me. It sure is impressive, though.

This game got close to being a truly excellent romhack. I had a blast playing this– speeding through one level after another. The level design is snappy and tight. Unfolding the world map was satisfying and the difficulty level was tame enough that I could play this one without using save states.

There are a few things that drag it down from being a masterpiece, though. First, the game has a lot of secret exits and there's a lack of imagination in where the game stuffs its keys and keyholes. Usually they are either in a particular secret room or just out in the open in the middle of the main level.

I don't think there were invisible blocks and I often felt the lack of surprise powerups. There are a lot of superfluous mechanics hacked in, some of them feeling a bit jank. And while the level design was snappy, many levels stuck to a SMB3-style template. It got repetitive even if it was still pretty enjoyable.

This is one of the better SMW romhacks I've played this year but sadly my reverence petered out by the end even if my enthusiasm didn't.

It's been four years since I've played this one but it's stuck with me for representing a lot of the greatness and some of the excess of SMW romhacks.

On one hand, the level design is snappy and the enhanced graphics are eye-catching. On the other hand, the difficulty can get pretty rough and some levels go on for so, so long. Some levels give you the max 999 timer to complete their long labyrinthine trials and those levels are exhausting. The engine only allows one checkpoint per level so even these super-long stages have to stick with one. I won't hold that against it because in the end this was a romhack and I could have used save states and I did use save states.

What makes this romhack so memorable is that the journey takes Mario to a series of fascinating worlds and towards the last leg, it gets pretty epic and surreal– similar to the vanilla game's use of the Star World and Special World. Except way more demanding, difficulty wise.

This is almost a total recommend. In terms of being a back-to-basics romhack, what Return to Dinosaur Land is doing here is a direct sendup of Super Mario World's adventure. The level design isn't too tough (not until Bowserland anyway), and the mechanics are all familiar. There isn't a lot of trickery.

The game deviates from SMW by making the adventure almost completely linear and using secret exits as obstacles to be overcome aside from switch palaces and secret zones with easy powerups to grab. For a SMW veteran, that's a good spin on secret exit philosophy.

While the level design is pretty good, it can also get plain in some stretches. Many levels only have one theme to them and some of them don't bring a lot of variety to that theme. Many levels are also very horizontal. I don't think there are more than a couple levels that are outright bland, but there's weren't a lot of excellent ones either.

The lack of a Star World or SPECIAL World disappointed me a bit but the journey is still loads of fun, very breezy, and quite clever. I can see why this remains a highly recommended romhack.

I can imagine that when this dropped in 2009, this romhack was impressive for a lot of the features hacked in– the shop, the cutscenes, the miscellaneous mechanics. Maybe other romhacks had stuff like this, but never before in such a complete package.

That being said, they are hacked into Super Mario World and have a bit of jank to them. Often some of these new features don't have sound effects, like how buying an item at the shop gets you nothing but the bump of Mario's head as 300 coins disappear from your purse.

And just because it's a new feature doesn't mean it's fun. The shop prices for basic items are wildly expensive. The story isn't terribly interesting even if it has the right idea of not putting too much emphasis on Mario himself. The levels where you have to collect multiple items to progress are very long and don't have checkpoints aside just before the boss, so if you die in the long stretch of collecting whichever orbs you need to progress, you have to do the whole thing over.

The SMW fundamentals aren't too good either. Often I found level design to be rather bland with basic geometry. I didn't hate this but I was hyped for an immaculate SMW romhack and I'm coming off of it shrugging my shoulders.

I liked a lot of this game. I’m glad I played it. This story about a secret cult in ancient Greece featuring the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War is my cup of tea. The use of real historical figures as Kassandra’s companions; I dig that! I rather liked the crew that Kassandra built for herself over the course of her adventure like Sokrates and Alkibiades! The sci-fi elements sprinkled into the plot are very cool too.

The game does so much, however, to sabotage itself. Like a lot of other Ubisoft games, this is a big open world. And the stuff you do in this open world? Extremely repetitive. The outposts that you conquer, the side stuff you do: it’s often copy and pasted across the game map and it’s not very engaging past the first ten hours.

Now, I’m at the blame here for engaging in completionism for the long time that I did (eventually I abandoned and mostly focused on important stuff), but even barring that, the combat in this game and the power arc is one of the worst I’ve ever experienced, if not the worst. The way enemies scale alongside you so, so closely ensures that you’ll never feel strong. Additionally, most enemies have about two or three times the health they should, ensuring that every fight felt perfectly unsatisfying. Even quick assassination techniques are kneecapped compared to the old AC games. The combat was a chore. I dreaded fights.

I guess it’s to push players towards the game’s microtransactions? I didn’t check out that menu but I’d assume that it would sell you a weapon that kills enemies at a halfway decent rate. The inclusion of MTX stuff in the UI was always an ambient discomfort. Ubisoft really sucks getting in the way of what could have been a pretty decent game.

If you took the stuff I liked about the game (the story) and removed a lot of the chaff, this would be a 7.5 or 8 out of ten. But unfortunately there’s a lot of problems around the stuff I enjoyed and for the foreseeable future, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is going to be the game I think about first when I think of game companies ruining their own products with microtransactions and overbalancing game mechanics.

This romhack has a lot of great levels but some pretty annoying ones. A lot of the "weekday" levels are breezy SMB3-styled stages (with checkpoints in many) while the boss levels are usually way harder and feature an overlong problematic boss at the end.

A lot of what this romhack hacks into it (like the several complicated battles) is impressive but not necessarily fun. The bosses were frustrating and the mushroom shop unlocks you get from collecting coins were very pointless.

I beat the final boss and eschewed the bonus(?) worlds after the fact because I wasn't sure that I would enjoy the next handful of worlds compared to everything I had played up to that point.

I saved stated my way through this over the course of the afternoon. If this was a regular Mario release, I'd be harsh on it, but it existing as a hardtype makes me forgive how unforgiving it is.

Being that it's looser with proper level design, there's a lot of interesting gameplay concepts like having to find the secret beanstalk to progress to the next level or having to hop off of parakoopas to get to higher and necessary platforms.

Nothing I'd want to play seriously, but a fascinating game.