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gammaprimesmw · 3 years

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All My Worthwhile SMW Hacks - Now on GBATemp

For those who have perhaps wondered where the SMW in my screen name comes from, it comes from my long history in the Super Mario World ROM hacking scene. It's something I originally discovered all the way back in 2006. Back then, I quickly fell in love with the ability to change levels. I could make the most annoying levels of the game a bit more bearable. (Looking at you, Tubular!) Before long, I had joined Acmlm's Board and attempted to pass a collection of blatant level edits off as my first SMW hack, only to be shot down rather quickly. I briefly quit, only to start again. This time, I tried to make my own levels, only to eventually break something in my ROM. I almost gave up yet again before finally producing my first passable (at the time) hack late that year. I intended to follow that up with another hack called Super Mario Bros. 5, but ended up burning out sometime in the following summer. I then left hacking behind until late 2010. That's when what I consider my real SMW hacking journey began.

By late 2010, a lot had changed about the scene. New utilities now existed, and new custom assets could be inserted that the average user wouldn't dare to mess with in 2006. Custom music, blocks, and sprites could be inserted whether or not one knew 65c816 Assembly. Meanwhile, I was getting better at pixel art, allowing me to make my own graphics from scratch. Before long, I had decided to resurrect Super Mario Bros. 5, recreating the whole thing practically from scratch. The result would be Super Mario Bros. 5 Roborn. It wasn't easy to pull the hack off, even with new skills and tools. I'd suffer from bouts of Hacker's Block, which is like a writer's block or artist's block, but it affects the ability to create new levels. I'd also run into technical problems and the inability to find the right resources to do everything I really wanted to do. Learning to make my own custom music helped somewhat, but I would still be dependent on the ASM people to either code what I needed or fix bugs involving whatever custom code had already been inserted. Sadly, requests for custom bosses were seldom, if ever, fulfilled. This fact would eventually kill a sequel to SMB5R known as Mecha-Bowser's Revenge. I wanted custom bosses that didn't exist and lacked the patience to learn the necessary ASM skills to make them myself. After canceling that hack and honing my level design skills a bit, partially thanks to a great tutorial written by AxemJinx. I entered my first Vanilla Level Design Contest in late February of 2012. While my level didn't win or even place in the top 5, it didn't place at the bottom either. A very critical hack reviewer called XKeeper, who I remember being one of the people to lambaste my earliest attempts at SMW hacking, gave the level a 4/5 when he played it during a Twitch stream. The time was fast approaching to try for another full-length hack. I tried my best to manage my ambition with this one. I'd keep the story simple. Bowser kidnapped the Princess (again). Koopalings would be the World bosses, and the existing bosses and boss templates made custom Koopalings feasible. I decided to draw all the foregrounds and backgrounds for this project. Only one thing really posed a threat to this project: Hacker's Block. It would get so bad sometimes that I'd question the morality of ROM hacking, believing the blocks came from God/my conscience trying to stop me from promoting the "sin" of downloading ROMs. Thankfully, friends like imamelia would reassure me that it wasn't. The hack was finished just as 2012 came to a close. This is the oldest hack that I felt worthy of going on GBATemp.

It was game on from there. I'd produce several more hacks. Each one would receive mostly positive reviews. The most frequent complaint I'd receive would be that my hacks all felt the same. I was, and still will be should I return to hacking, a traditionalist hacker. I tried to make my hacks feel like official Mario games. I eschewed the typical ROM hacking practice of making something significantly harder than the base game. I'm the first person to test the levels, and I'm not the greatest at video games. Lost Levels-tier difficulty curves aren't my thing, and Kaizo definitely isn't my thing. The latter fact suited me just fine. Up until about 2015, Kaizo hacks were banned on SMWCentral. That would start changing that year. A little thing called Janked Up Mario Party (AKA JUMP) was released, and it began changing the very culture of SMWC. Kaizo hacks were now permitted, thanks to them being popular with Twitch streamers. I kept going for several more years, even as popular opinion began turning against my "safe, homogenized" hacks, and Streamer Kaizo hacks began taking over the hack database. Let's Plays and streams of my hacks became more and more sparse, and my overall motivation to hack slowly dwindled through 2019. I burned out so back early last year that, for a couple weeks, I became thoroughly convinced that ROM hacking was a sin, regardless of what people like imamelia said. That conviction would bring me to tears every time I thought about everything I had created. I was still proud of it. These hacks were still available. I could've very easily asked a staffer on SMWC to take them all down, along with all the other resources I created. Being seen as crazy, and the fact that I could never truly erase what I'd done, ultimately held me back. Eventually, I gave into temptation, popping into a friend's stream while he was streaming a hack called Return to Dinosaur Land. That night, I also had a chat with Daizo Dee Von, and he finally convinced me that I was wrong about the whole "ROM hacking is a sin" thing. I salvaged some levels from the canceled Chocolate Collection I was working on since late 2019, threw in a few contest entry levels, and built a few new levels to create a much smaller collection hack simply called "Ten." I could've been done there. That could've been my send-off to the world of SMW hacking. Then COVID-19 happened, inspiring me to start another project inspired by the various conspiracy theories surrounding the pandemic. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough inspiration and motivation to see said hack through, and it was canceled. I decided then that I was pretty much done with hacking. I'd been doing it for a decade straight. That was probably the real reason I was burning out, rather than some divine intervention. I was burned out, and SMWC's culture was no longer one that really supported my style of hacks. I was no longer the one whose hacks could generate hype in large swaths of the community. I was now known as someone who just put out a string of very similar hacks. I even wondered if a sufficiently-trained AI algorithm could make hacks like mine. Maybe that thought can go two ways. I could see it as meaning I'm more like a machine than a person when it comes to designing levels, or the hypothetical AI could be seen as passing the ROM hacking equivalent of a Turing Test.

Anyway, here are the rest of the hacks. You will need a Super NES emulator and a Super Mario World ROM to play these. I can't tell you where to get the latter, but I can recommend using snes9x as your emulator of choice.

KAMEK'S ISLAND (2013)

MARIO & LUIGI: KOLA KINGDOM QUEST (2014-2015)

SUPER MARIO WORLD: BOWSER'S CATACLYSMIC TRAP (2014-2015)

SUPER MARIO LAND 3: TATANGA'S RETURN (2015-2016)

MARIO IS MISSING DONE RIGHT (2016)

SUPER MARIO BROS: THE EARLY YEARS (2016-2017)

SUPER LUIGI LAND (2017-2019)

SHORT BUT SWEET This is a collection of 4 mini-hacks I made during this time. These were usually side projects I did to keep my skills sharp and still do some hacking without burning myself out on the larger projects. Often, these would incorporate levels I had made for various hacking contests. One of them, Oiram's Invasion, is actually a contest entry itself, created for the 2013 12 Days Before Christmas contest. It's my highest-ranking contest entry on the site, having made it all the way to 3rd Place.

#gaming #rom hacking #super mario world #snes #retrogaming

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