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Hyper Metroid is decent, but for my nonexistent money the best Super Metroid hack, hands-down, is Eris. The map and graphic design is amazing, the map itself isn't ridiculously huge, and there's, like, one place in the game where the game balance is stupid (it's the Botwoon fight, which is done super-early with hardly any resources). Phazon is also an interesting hack, where you play as Dark Samus. It has some neat graphical edits and generally good map design.
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Jan 8, 2017 00:41
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Choco1980 posted:I'd like to see BNW for its mechanics, even though the script is terribly unfunny, and it has the connotations of the one team member and the drama he caused on SA. Given what happened to the last LP attempt, I suspect that BNW is now de facto banned from SA because any thread about it will devolve into shitposting, no matter how pure the OP's intent.
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Jan 24, 2017 18:10
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Dr. Fetus posted:If it is, I'm sure they would have outright said it was. But aside from NSFW games, the only games outright banned from this subforum were the Pokemon games, and the bans for those got lifted some time ago. De facto banned, that is, any thread LPing them will end up locked because of the thread content. I wouldn't mind being wrong, but as I recall last time we had people descending from GBS to shitpost up the thread for lulz, and I have little faith that won't happen again.
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Jan 24, 2017 18:51
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FPzero posted:
The music and setting for the second level reminded me of Knytt Underground, which is a good game for chilling out and exploring weird places.
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Feb 2, 2017 23:15
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biosterous posted:What the gently caress else are you going to do with your Wait for a boot-obsessed rich guy to die.
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Feb 9, 2017 03:03
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Why aren't you using your weapons more? The standard buster sucks, use the weapons!
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Feb 14, 2017 21:41
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Yeah, that was my thinking as well. Three koopas, a goomba, and a one-up, then you jump through, land on Yoshi, and ride him out of there. Speaking as a non-SMW-superfan, the Ninji level is one of the few where I thought "hey, I'd actually enjoy playing this". It has a cute theme, a decent number of variations on it, reasonable difficulty, and non-excessive length.
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Feb 18, 2017 20:47
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DoubleNegative posted:What does the 'leaked author' penalty even mean? Is that the late penalty? Presumably the judges aren't supposed to know who made which level, to preserve neutrality. If they knew "oh, this level was made by <guy that always makes lovely levels>" then they wouldn't give the level a fair shake (and similarly, famous level creators would probably have their levels judged more leniently).
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Feb 18, 2017 22:51
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Ephraim225 posted:Personally, though, I'd just stick to giving me Item 1, 2, and 3. Floor looks massively better than Item 1. With Item 1, you jump, place it, land, jump onto it, then jump again. And if you try to place it too close to a wall (not uncommon as one of its primary uses is getting over walls), then it fizzles and wastes the weapon energy. With Floor you just jump, use it, land on it, and jump again. Item 1 does have a minor "elevator" effect, but IMO that's not enough to make it better than Floor. Plus Item 1 has a dumb name. Floor is Floor.
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Feb 21, 2017 17:52
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Yeah, that's a Ratchet & Clank song. It, uh, did not translate well.
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Feb 23, 2017 18:13
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Those were some pretty cool levels! The line guides/layer 2 one reminded me of the NSMB levels, what with all the moving parts. And the switch palace felt like something that I could have figured out on my own without needing to know a lot about the mechanics of SMW, while still being an interesting puzzle. What is that tile type (the one the sprites slide on) used for in the vanilla game?
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Feb 25, 2017 22:10
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Trip report: I've been playing Metroid: Rogue Dawn, the new hack of the NES Metroid game. Unfortunately, after about three hours and getting the first three key upgrades (to wit: high-jump, bombs, Varia), I'm not impressed. I mean, sure, aesthetically the game's quite solid; the environments are much more organic than in the original, and it doesn't literally plop down 3-5 iterations of the same terrain pattern in a row the way the NES game did. Unfortunately, the actual gameplay is a step down. NES Metroid was not a great game, but it played to what few strengths it had. Gameplay was primarily a gauntlet, where the player would try to navigate difficult terrain while taking as little damage as possible; most punishment came in the form of the player falling into acid or lava after getting whacked in the face by an enemy. Rogue Dawn, in contrast, is technically more exploration-oriented, but what this really translates to is "do a bunch of finicky platforming challenges and be rewarded by a missile pack instead of something you actually want, because you chose the wrong path". The Metroid physics engine is not built with precision platforming in mind; Samus is slippery, damage knockback is huge, and the morphball/bomb physics are beyond bizarre. Even more damning, Rogue Dawn's idea of punishing failure is to force the player to fall to a lower area and have to redo a segment. And sometimes "failure" means "you were presented with a blind choice between 4 options and didn't pick the right one"! Like, literally, to get one E-tank, you have to guess which path through an invisible maze doesn't drop you down to an earlier area and necessitate retreading 30 seconds' worth of level. Come on, guys, as a society we've moved past this kind of game design. Meanwhile, there's little threat of death; enemies are not densely placed and there are periodic healing stations. Thus the game consists of tediously wandering aimlessly through a vast and largely undifferentiated world (it may be pretty, but most areas still look pretty samey), hoping you've stumbled across the one path that leads to actual progress instead of an upgrade that you don't really need. The game also incurs negative extra credit for making the player go to an underwater section right off the bat.  If you want to play a good Metroid game, play AM2R, or Metroid Eris (in my opinion the best of the many good Super Metroid hacks). Unless you're a major NES Metroid fan, you have better things to spend your time on than Rogue Dawn.
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Mar 1, 2017 03:12
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Haha, that's a fair point. I'd forgotten about Eris' early underwater crap. The 2012 tweak of Eris doesn't make you go underwater until later, but it does still have a nontrivial amount of suitless underwater stuff.  I still maintain it's the best of the Super Metroid hacks, but ultimately it is still a ROM hack with all the baggage that entails.
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Mar 1, 2017 03:28
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I could see a scrolling shmup level being reasonably creative, but it'd need to be a lot more forgiving and non-silhouetted. Grabbing red shells to spit fireballs to clear a path through a wave of enemies sounds plausibly fun, for example.
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Mar 3, 2017 23:21
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Yeah, Dr. Light going all Ryu on your rear end was brilliant. In fact, almost all of the broad strokes of this sound great or at least silly in an Axe Cop sense. It's all the details that turn it into a horror. Like Simon said, someone should take this ROM and make a game out of it.
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Mar 13, 2017 21:10
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For the falling segment, I think you were supposed to figure out to aim away from the doors -- they're tall (giving you some advance warning), and the platforms are set up so that you land on them if you're near the door when you reach its level. But I think that's a lot easier to notice in hindsight or as a spectator.
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Mar 15, 2017 02:24
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She's been embalmed by that crazy guy; IIRC he makes specific reference to using special herbs to preserve her. Locke's entire storyline is kinda creepy, honestly. He's an obsessive romantic with a massive white-knight complex.
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Mar 17, 2017 15:54
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So are those red coins just normal coins that are worth 800 points? I liked some of those levels, but watching them they did feel kinda long. Like, maybe 50% longer than they should have been.
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Mar 23, 2017 21:40
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How did that Boo in the dark area work? Some kind of background animation, you said, but could you explain further? Also, how does a "nice" sound effect qualify as "vanilla"? I get that the music's all custom but that seems excusable given that SMW's soundtrack is pretty played out at this point, but sound effects?
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Mar 29, 2017 02:59
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lets hang out posted:I can't find it could you link a video Literally just go on Youtube and search for "vldc8 hostel".
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Mar 29, 2017 03:20
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Let's Play Super Metroid: Eris (2012 edition) What is it? As the name implies, Super Metroid: Eris is a Super Metroid hack. It was created by DigitalMantra and is probably the most artistically impressive hack out there. Super Metroid has a vast tileset and effects library which has been put to some extremely creative uses here; the hack author also made numerous graphical edits, which are almost entirely seamless with the original art. The result is a highly atmospheric hack with numerous distinct and characterful environments. The hack also has a few minor changes to the game engine, the most notable being that you can start spinning in midair without having to touch ground again. The challenge level is mostly pretty reasonable, but it can be uneven at parts, especially in the early part of the game before Samus can gear up a bit. In particular, the second and third bossfights are punishingly lethal and have limited room to maneuver. This is also a hack that expects you to have full control of Samus; you don't need to pull off any glitches, but you do need to be able to walljump and midair morph. Finally, this is the 2012 edition of the hack. Compared to the original edition (published in 2009, I believe), some items and barriers have been moved around to tweak the item sequence, and a few small areas were added. I don't think there's a good reason to play the 2009 version at this point, in particular because it leads with a lengthy suitless underwater section. What's the LP going to be? This is a video LP, with subtitles showing Samus' thought processes (vaguely similar to Freeman's Mind, if not quite so deranged). Subtitles are provided via YouTube's closed-captioning/subtitles system, so make sure to turn them on by clicking on the "CC" icon (or don't, if you want a "silent" LP). Full disclosure: I abused savestates mercilessly for this run, just to keep things going smoothly. If you like, imagine Samus dying over and over again during the aforementioned boss fights, and a few times during exploration. It happened, but I see no reason to subject you to watching Samus repeatedly walk back from the save station. You won't ever see me actually save or load state, though; that's all been excised through movie magic (read: I recorded the controller input, TAS-style, then made an encode of the playthrough). Part 1: Eris Colony  Part 2: The Hardest Fight in the Game  Part 3: The R2-D2 Problem  Part 4: Quantum Thermodynamics  Part 5: Cuteness Through Murder  Part 6: I'm Going to Blow This Planet Up  Part 7: One Small Problem  Part 8: Ol' Face Ship  Part 9: Get Paid First 
TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Aug 1, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 06:33
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FPzero posted:I can't watch because I'm on mobile for a few days and mobile youtube has no annotations but I should inform you of something if you're unaware. Youtube is planning to do away with annotations soon in favor of those "cards" and "end scenes" they offer. Except that neither of those allow the functionality of annotations. I don't know when exactly they're removing the ability to create them but you may need to think of a different way to do your subtitles since annotations won't be viable soon. (videos with existing annotations won't see the messages be removed; you just won't be able to add new ones to any videos.) Thanks for the heads-up. That really sucks for the annotations, especially since there's a number of cool "games" people have made on YouTube, implemented via clickable annotations. I'd be extremely surprised to see subtitles go away though, since Google makes big noise about making their stuff accessible to everyone, and subtitles are a vital accessibility feature. That said, I've fixed the terminology used in my "fake OP".
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Apr 1, 2017 15:17
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Kurui Reiten posted:You know, people say DMantra's hacks are supposed to be really good graphically, but it always just looks like he fucks up palettes and slams tiles together to me. This is a valid complaint; there's a reason why I characterized his environments as "artistic" rather than "good". The confusion about foreground vs. background is also a concern, as is being able to recognize what's a screen transition and what's just a wall. The important thing though is that his hacks are strongly-differentiated from the many, many hacks that have extremely repetitive or otherwise samey environments. There are a lot of hacks where the only especially unique things about a given room are its dimensions and which other rooms it connects to, which makes them hard to navigate because nothing really sticks in your mind. Whereas in Eris (and to a lesser extent, his challenge-mode hack Cliffhanger) most rooms have something significant that helps them be memorable. I can actually navigate Eris without constantly resorting to the map screen to remind myself which way to go. ArashiKurobara posted:The commentary is really good though so I still very much enjoyed that first episode! Thank you! I haven't tried anything exactly like this before, so I welcome constructive criticism. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Jul 21, 2017 |
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Apr 1, 2017 20:53
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Ben Kasack posted:This is an interesting take on the game and I do like the "thoughts" as I did chuckle at a couple points so kudos to that. I do have a couple minor questions though. I saw no map. Is that a "feature" or is that an upgrade in the game? If it's an upgrade, aggravating, but you will at least get it at some point while as a "feature" it would make me not want to play it period. In these kind of games, a map is critical for exploration and backtracking for collection acquisition. Second, did you set the game to hard or is the hack auto hard? I ask only because I know getting only 2 missiles per tank is a hard mode thing and well, you took hefty chunks of damage from normally annoying/mildly dangerous monsters. There is a map, it comes up if you hit start, and we'll see it a few times during the run. It's just not visible as part of the HUD. I kind of question its utility in this hack though, as the entire game is packed into a single "zone" and there's very little unused space. Consequently the map is a mishmash of blue rectangles that all might connect to other blue rectangles but probably don't. Later hacks upgraded the map screen to show doors, but this one doesn't have that functionality.
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Apr 1, 2017 22:11
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What I mostly remember about Redesign is that it's ridiculously gigantic. The author invented extra lock-and-key mechanisms just so they could pad out the world, with the net result being that it takes ages to get from anywhere to anywhere else. Then they stuck a bunch of Chozo statues that you have to find to unlock Tourian, like the artifacts in Metroid Prime except there's no hint system to tell you which room to look in. The physics engine was also tweaked, making gravity substantially stronger, the morphball roll much more slowly (coupled with a crapton of morphball mazes), and walljumping was made into an upgrade...and when you get it, it only works on specially-designated walls. I played until the Lost Caverns, which is a Lost Woods-style maze (a room with four exits that all loop indefinitely) that you have to navigate in order to find Phantoon. For some reason that was my breaking point, rather than the many points before that that were also frankly rather bad.
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Apr 2, 2017 01:26
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Incidentally, if you're curious about Super Metroid hacks, probably the best place to find more info and downloads is The "Completed Stuff" subforum on Metroid Construction. Each hack has a thread where you can download the patch, read reviews, and ask for help if you get stuck. Here's some quick overviews of more notable hacks: Cliffhanger: DigitalMantra's previous effort, intended as a "challenge" hack (think the more infamous SMW hacks and you're on the right track). There's an "easy" variant that removes most of the spikes and acid and so on, but it's still quite hard and suffers from a lack of adequate signposting, so you'll spend a lot of time wandering. Phazon: play as Dark Samus! Has some neat environments including an "ocean", and I don't remember it being too punishing or badly-designed. Hyper: a pretty decent hack that's mostly notable for making fairly substantial engine tweaks, so you can respin in jumps, speedboost in morphball, trigger Samus' damage animation at will as an ersatz backflip, combine the Spazer/Plasma beams, etc. Rotation: it's normal Super Metroid, just rotated by 90 degrees. Was run at AGDQ 2017. Super Zero Mission: notionally a remake of Metroid Zero Mission in Super Metroid, but is mostly just a Super Metroid hack that's thematically inspired by MZM. The maps are too big and the way to proceed isn't always terribly obvious, but it has the best Tourian I've ever played.
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Apr 2, 2017 03:35
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Kurui Reiten posted:Also, it kinda confuses me how it seems like no one has swapped the suit order, giving you Gravity first to make water areas navigable, and then Varia later for fire and lava. The Gravity Suit as implemented in Super Metroid is a near-total replacement for Varia; if you have it you take no damage from heat rooms or lava (which Varia doesn't protect against), and you take even more reduced damage from enemies and hazards compared to Varia. The only exception is that Mother Brain's rainbow beam is only mitigated by Varia; if you don't have it then you'll be taking 6 tanks of damage instead of 3. That's literally the only reason it's picked up in speedruns, which grab Gravity early. Doing the swap as you propose would require the hacker to change basically all of that, or else Varia wouldn't really be an upgrade when you find it. Unfortunately, ASM hacking in Super Metroid is not very advanced compared to other games. I'm not saying it couldn't be done; obviously it could be. But nobody has yet. dis astranagant posted:I've played a little bit of Eris and drat does it love punishing exploration in the early game. I restarted a good dozen times before bombs just from taking morphball tunnels that proved nigh impossible to get back out of. That's odd, I don't think I've encountered something like that. It'd have to be a morphball tunnel that drops you down a gap that's only 2 or 3 tiles wide; anything taller and you can jump into a midair morph to get back up it. Can you describe the areas you ran into that were giving you trouble?
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Apr 2, 2017 15:39
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fritz posted:One of the things I noticed in the vids is what seems like a bunch of those half-buried blocks, I don't know if this mod uses them more than others or if it's just me seeing things. Oh yeah! And some of them are the blocks you can break with spinjumps if you're big, so I keep assuming there's secrets down there and you guys never check them out. 
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Apr 5, 2017 03:14
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get that OUT of my face posted:As Smite said, this guy put a lot of effort into manipulating stuff in MMX. He just used it for evil.The ROM hacker mentality was discussed a bit in the Pokemon Uranium thread. I'm no psychologist but I feel it stems from elitism and egotism. It probably bears noting that it's a lot easier to make a hard hack than a fun hack. All you need to do is define a narrow path through the level and punish any deviations with failure. That's a pretty easy concept to grasp. Whereas making a fun hack requires a much deeper understanding of what makes games engaging and rewarding. And since plenty of people do find such "pointlessly hard" hacks entertaining, it's pretty tempting to just cater to that crowd.
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Apr 5, 2017 19:06
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Incidentally, I don't think it's been mentioned yet, but there's an SA LP of Seiken Densetsu 3 hardtype going on right now. Except that they're playing on the "normal" difficulty so it's mostly just a rebalance and bugfix hack.
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Apr 6, 2017 01:24
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Part 2: The Hardest Fight in the Game The fight against Botwoon is pretty unfair. In vanilla Super Metroid, the bottom-left corner is a pretty easily-discovered safe zone, where the only way Botwoon can hurt you is with his five-shot spread. Here there's no safe zone, and dodging requires either morphballing or jumping up to a small platform, depending on Botwoon's movement patterns. This gets seriously hard in the later stages of the fight! And even if you find both energy tanks before this fight, you'll die on the sixth hit, making this a very tight damage race. About the only saving grace is that you can exit the fight at any time by bombing the floor, and there's a refill right next to the fight, so if you're playing on console, you probably won't be dying over and over again. On the other hand, turning off Bombs so you can hold a charge shot while in morphball can be quite helpful...and also makes it that much harder to retreat if things go poorly. I died a lot here, is what I'm saying. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Apr 7, 2017 |
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Apr 7, 2017 00:57
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FPzero posted:Early Botwoon fights are never a good idea because he's so difficult to manage in terms of difficulty. There's almost no safe space even in his vanilla arena. At the time Eris came out, I don't think SMILE, the editor for Super Metroid, was capable of heavily modifying the damage that his segments do to the player, only the damage his head did. So it looks like DMantra decided to have a short, but dangerous fight. Still, I'm not sure I agree with the idea of a short boss gauntlet, though you could always return to the save point after fighting Spore Spawn. In principle I think the fight was more fair in 2009, as it was moved later in the item sequence, and thus you have more gear by this point (including one rather critical upgrade that I'm not mentioning because I do think it's spoiler-worthy). 2012 gave you a little more room to stand; I'm pretty sure that the floor I spent most of the time standing on was 1 tile higher in 2009, for example. But there are still plenty of ways Botwoon can nail you in that fight without giving you much of any recourse. In Vanilla, Botwoon is free -- just stand in the bottom-left corner and the only thing he can hit you with is his projectile, and he stops using that halfway through the fight! Fortunately he never stops using the spit attack in Eris, because it's the best time to get a favorable damage trade out of him. You really want to save those missiles for after he speeds up though, because there's realistically no way you can dodge high-speed Botwoon in the space available. If you spend the missiles early, you'll be trying to close out the fight with Charge Beam; not a pleasant prospect.
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Apr 7, 2017 04:36
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FPzero posted:Yeah, and I'm sure with a little more exploration you could also have more missiles and maybe another energy tank to tackle him with. For example, I know there's another missile in the room below Botwoon hidden below a bombable floor. I'm pretty sure you also have access to a few other areas after getting Grapple + Charge Beam so there's surely something to be found if you need additional weaponry. Honestly from here on out things get much easier. The game starts handing out more energy tanks and better offense, and infinitely-spawning enemies are relatively common (and can easily be killed with Grapple), so you're unlikely to run out of health so long as you're willing to stop and farm for a bit. I think I'd be happy with the overall difficulty of Eris if you just started with 3 energy tanks instead of 0; 100 health just isn't very much in this game. Regarding getting more gear, you're right: I could have gotten Spazer before this fight, which would have made it easier. In addition to the added damage, Spazer has incredibly generous hitbox logic -- the beam won't despawn unless it either deals damage or all three beam segments get blocked. So hitting Botwoon with it instead of the basic charge beam would have been much easier. But getting the beam would have required a lot of backtracking as well as skipping a nearby item that's blocked by super missile blocks. Instead, I routed the run to minimize backtracking. This also means I don't pick up Ice beam at the absolute earliest point, but oh well.
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Apr 7, 2017 18:42
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Gnoman posted:That is the control issue I was having. Holding up was locking out the left and right buttons, so if you left the water it was very hard to actually land on the shore. Are you using a keyboard for controls, by any chance? Keyboards have limits on how many keys they can have pressed at a time, and any remotely decent controller will be massively better than a keyboard.
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Apr 13, 2017 18:48
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Trasson posted:It's really amazing any Fixed that for you. Modern games are just as tangled a mess as old console games were. In fact, modern games are even more complicated, leading to more opportunities to break things in new and interesting ways!
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Apr 13, 2017 22:40
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Can berserkers use any command other than Fight? Zepeli might theoretically be redeemable by getting access to really awesome equipment. I mean, imagine if he were the only one able to use the Ragnarok.
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Apr 14, 2017 04:14
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The only controllers I've used that have had tolerable D-pads were the SNES and PS2 controllers. Everyone else seems to be obsessed with making circular D-pads where it's really easy to accidentally hit the wrong direction.
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Apr 16, 2017 03:28
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Dr Pepper posted:Wait. So falling platforms in SMW will slow down if in water, and float back up if you jump off them? I think it's Yoshi's Island 4? It has water all along the bottom edge of the screen, and floating platforms and spikeballs.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:30
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Can you use L/R to despawn them or something? Being able to adjust the camera in SMW just seems to cause way more problems than it solves, honestly.
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Apr 18, 2017 03:44
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Shady Amish Terror posted:I will say that graphics seem to still have a surprising amount of weight in the scores based on how several levels have been placing, but I guess we haven't really seen the cream of the crop yet either. This isn't really that surprising. In fact I bet that if you removed the aesthetics score line altogether, pretty levels would still score better than plain-but-fun levels. It's very difficult for a judge to separate how they feel about a level from how it plays, so the positive response garnered by good aesthetics allows a level to punch well above its weight. Hence why the commentary mentioned designing levels using only the concrete block tile. It'd be interesting to see a competition where each judge would be randomly assigned to play either the level-as-written, or the level with all its assets replaced by basic assets, no background, vanilla palettes, etc.
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Apr 18, 2017 16:56
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