Exactly what it says on the tin. Feels like a Captain Toad level but you play as Link. Which is ironic since that's how Captain Toad originally started as conceptually.

I don't know if it's just cause I haven't played OoT in a second (like, literally a month or two lol), but I kept messing up simple things. Walking slightly diagonal instead of straight which caused me to fall off a ton, repeatedly falling off vines I hooked to making me climb all the way to the top again, getting hit by Keese multiple times. Maybe I'm just tired, but all these stupid mistakes made this playthrough take way longer than it needed.

Anyway, this was fun. Big fan of putting Mario in Link's world and vice versa, it's always great fun. Hope this mod developer takes this concept further; I know a full game of this was going to be done by someone but that was cancelled, I'd love for it to come to fruition.

Okay I love this thing but damn am I just bad or is this game hard as fuck? Probably a bit of both. I can't make it past the cave area.

I guess the birds will never be saved and will probably die a cold, lonely death. Oh well.

Played on NSO GBA

Please don't read what this actually is, just play it. It's short (20-30m?) and one of the coolest things I've ever seen come out of romhacking. Patch over at the author's profile on smwcentral.

CW: Low effort review.

The unassuming name wouldn't lead you to believe it won the Questionable Level Design Contest '23, but from the way things are phrased it, it's as if it were an easy pick! And it's not really hard to see why!

Spoilers below here.

How is this possible? LOL, absolutely genius concept, this is the kinda stuff I play video games for. How one came up with the idea of the entire game being just the map movement (with occasional bits of hybrid normal and map platforming) is beyond me; or at least I feel like it is. The individual texts for a lot of squares were humorous and some of the level design just a bit mean.

And yet, something about reaching the end of it, with the long walk and ever so faintly sarcastic text, still felt sincere. Like "yea, here's my thing." Awesome.

You wouldn't think the NES would have a fighting game of this calibur, and for what it is, it's fairly impressive: It only has 8 playable characters, sure, but there are 36 characters in the game total (even if I wanna say half of them are powered up versions of previous, which can be funny in its own way after you beat a weak robot only to find a more threatening stronger version of that, with a silly name). Not only that but they all have 4 special moves, setting them further apart from each other, all with unique names. The game even has proper cross-ups which is impressive.

It's not all perfect though, as combos aren't really there besides a minor air juggle or two. Moves have seemingly no endlag, once your hitbox goes away you can start your next move. On top of that, there's no hitstun either, so enemies can and will quickly punish you back if you aren't careful. The AI will love to spam their strong special moves at the end of the game because of this. Grabs are also incredibly powerful and have no counterplay, just don't get grabbed.

There's a fun campaign, but it does drag. 36 fights is a lot to ask of a player, especially with how brutal they can get closer to the end. I would have just cut out one of the sections and rebalanced accordingly, and compensated elsewhere.

The biggest crime of Joy Mech Fight is its copyright getting lost for years until someone found it in a drawer, this could have been a solid Nintendo fighting series, but it just wasn't meant to be. Now that the rights are recovered, I hope something can be done with this, as I'd love to see it return with the polishes of modern fighting games.

Playing this gave me the conviction that it's actually criminal Nintendo will throw up games onto its Switch Online service for western audiences without translating them. I get that it's an extra expense, but hey, I'm paying them for this. It's honestly impressive how much of this you can get, even the little tutorials, without understanding a character of Japanese. But it sure would be nice to enjoy the flavor text, and I fear the lack of translation will turn people off from a solid, cute, very enjoyable little title.

I'm not a fighting game person, but playing through the story mode was really fun, and encouraged me to try out all of the playable roster (8 for story mode) as the various abilities for each might give you an advantage when you find yourself stuck. The last set of fighters in story mode are clones of your own roster, but more powerful, which seems unfair but makes it more satisfying when you beat them.

I love that the mascot is essentially the comedy character, as well. Still, drill guy for life.