Name: | stick mice in my head and then beat my head in with a hammer and let them back out |
Authors: | JUMP Team, idol |
Added: | |
Version History: | View |
Demo: | No |
Hall of Fame: | Yes |
Length: | 19 exit(s) |
Type: | Standard: Very Hard |
Description: | "Well, we psychiatrists have found that over 8% of the population will always be mice, I mean, after all, there's something of the mouse in all of us." - Kargol this is a short 19 exit hack made at the beginning of winter 2018 c3, meant to showcase a lot of the cool stuff shown off. enjoy! if we fucked anything up or didn't properly credit someone let us know. Changelog: V.1.1: fixed reset door issues in spin, statue issues in bowsber, credit issues in everywhere, blank message boxes in yoshis house, and invisible room in furcon not being clear enough. V.1.2: removed autoscroll in non-euclidean, fixed room in bowser, made message in husk clearer. |
Tags: | asm exgfx gimmick hdma music powers variety |
Comments: | 67 (jump to comments) |
Rating: |
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Comments (67)
Intro: I absolutely love the idea that there's a hundred pages of Deep Lore about exactly why Mario has to stick mice in his head and then beat his head in with a hammer and let them back out, but it will never be known because the text box is too small to contain it.
how does it feel to eat a cloud? Very solid, very fun intro level that was clearly an inspiration for the first level of Of Jumps and Platforms.
Twister! but with Chainsaws The transition from a rollicking good-time Kaizo-lite autoscroller to a standard level defined by a particularly dangerous enemy was quite jarring to me, and I spent a little while thinking I needed to keep them alive for something. I also still don't understand what the right way is to get past the platforms suspended in bubbles, I ended up just jumping around randomly like the a three-year old at the Carnival Night Zone barrel until eventually the game got bored and let me through. Not a bad level at all, though.
Ryugyong Mountain (football) See, this is a bad level. I don't know what the heck the hitboxes on the giant footballs are meant to be, but what they are is incredibly inconsistent, frustrating, and hard to predict. This is one of the only levels not revisited in the finale in some way, and I'm guessing there's a reason for that. I found it one of the hardest levels in the hack for all the wrong reasons.
Mario hides inside a husk of a Koopa This, meanwhile, is a great level. The central gimmick of shell Mario is fun, flashy, well-executed, jank-free, and doesn't overstay its welcome even with the secret exit. The perfect antidote to the previous level, although there's a little cheese possible.
Ground Beef Switch Palace This is... a level, I guess? There's no challenge, and you can't rack up the lives in any meaningful way the way you can with the institute of wiggler torture, so it just feels really vestigial.
a hollow metal heart And we're back to the solid levels. A nicely creepy industrial vibe and a solidly fight-y track pairs well with the mutant dodongo enemies here. I'm still not sure what the point of the parachuting bombs near the midway was - I was expecting there to be a secret on top of the level, but I couldn't find one. Bonus points for a rare non-aggravating use of the P-balloon and a solid level overall.
trepenation clinic Dammit it's trepanation. That said I really enjoyed this level, slightly incongruous holiday music and all. The new enemy is innovative and leads to some nice situations. Short and easy but fun.
BALLER! This level would have been absolutely insufferable without the message box yelling at me about the tufts of grass. With it, it was a thoroughly good time. Carefully calculated powerball trajectories make the shameful maths nerd part of my brain happy. For me the last screen was about at the sweet spot for puzzle difficulty in a non-puzzle hack - which is to say, engaging my brain without having to seriously think (given that I often play platformers to stop seriously thinking).
Homing Instinct Another brilliant ASM gimmick, this time Boomerang Mario. The difficulty was tuned really well on this one - I wasn't one-shotting much of it, but I could generally see how I could have done if I'd been a little faster on the uptake. One thing this hack does really well most of the time is giving you a couple of safe environments to play around with a new gimmick and explore its uses before cutting loose, and this level is no exception. Great level.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 2 The music on this one really starts to grate after a while - what even is it? The opening bars (which you'll be hearing a lot of without fast restart) sound like the Simpsons theme died and went to silicon hell. The level itself is a collection of one-screeners themed around munchers, thwomps and spike balls on a train, and it's fun but also very forgettable. I feel like the one-screen gimmick works best with difficult one-screen levels combined with fast reset - here it just made things feel cramped, like the setups didn't really have room to breathe, which is the opposite of how a train level should feel.
FURCON 2018 And with that we're back to the hack at its worst. I respect the effort it must have taken to get the Tanooki suit in, but I really feel like the hack would have been stronger without it. An invisible maze? Janky flight mechanics? A quite bland and incredibly short music loop in a very long level? That awful "floor is
lavapoop" section that was twenty minutes of constant frustration thanks to slightly janky hitboxes? The slim but lingering possibility through the whole thing that you'll die, which leaves all your dragon coins unsaved and forces you to start the whole ordeal over again? This level is worse then any actual furcon past or present and I really recommend anyone playing the hack just skip it. This place is not a place of honour.Oh! Saws And straight back to the good! Propeller Mario from NSMB is a serious workout on the hands with SMW spin jump controls, and the level drives you a long way without a checkpoint, but it's been incredibly well-coded - I died a lot here but always felt like it was my fault, and a solid music track always helps. After that, the boss felt like a bit of an anti-climax - it was much easier than the level itself.
Everything is Everything Ever Another really solid level with a really solid ASM gimmick, this time jet boots that I think are original. The jetpack-style double jump feels great, no jank here, and it's well-used in the level. It's nice to see a ghost house eschew secret-hunting to a funereal dirge in favour of tight platforming with a good soundtrack.
you think you're big kid? And the streak continues, this time with mini Mario from NSMB. The floaty jump physics are well-executed and perfectly suited for a precision jumping level like this one. I found the second half of the level in particular brutally long and difficult, but it never crossed the line into feeling unfair.
little green mice These little guys are probably my favourite new enemy in the hack. The idea of an enemy that briefly turns into a spring after being jumped on isn't super-original, but it's very well-executed and well-used in this level, and the spritework is adorable. I was sad not to see them come back in the finale. This also feels like a nice breather level in terms of difficulty.
Non-euclidean spin Yessss, vertical screen wrap with the propeller hat and an absolutely outstanding track that I wish I could hear more of (fast reset would have been really nice). The best power-up combined with the best kaizo gimmick combined with really tight design all the way through makes for my favourite level in the hack. Perversely I actually thought the section autoscroll was removed from would have been better with it left in - without it I found it a bit difficult to read, with it I'd just have avoided overthinking it and gone.
him name hopkin green frog Ah, my first morsel level. And hopefully my last morsel level. OK, so the pre-midway part of the level being torture was mostly on me for not reading the text box right and trying to swim fast by rapidly pressing buttons rather than holding jump. That said, there was one particular spike ball arrangement near the end of the first part that I couldn't work out that just started randomly lining up differently when I beat it, so either I was getting screwed over by jank earlier or benefiting from cheese later.
The part that wasn't my fault, though, was the second half of the level. The frogsuit on dry land is a janky, inconsistent pile of garbage. I know that's true in SMB3 as well, but that's not a good reason to emulate it, it's a good reason not to use the frogsuit on dry land, especially for an extremely long precision platforming segment. This level endangered my Steam Deck. Then it ends with a squeaky drawn-out fart of a boss - not particularly difficult, but far longer than it had any right to be and not particularly pleasant or satisfying for anyone other than its creator.
The Princess and the Frog The central gimmick here of switching between two power-ups from previous levels in an extended segment is absolutely amazing and I love it. The music is outstanding, and the level design is mostly brilliant. FT029's frogsuit/shell section in particular is one of the best in the game and single-handedly justifies the frogsuit's inclusion in the hack for me.
(Small moan: The mini mario/tanooki segment suffers from two issues. The first is a minor bug right after the brutal mini Mario jump between two shells under a flare, where the tightly-timed transition back to Tanooki form sometimes freezes Mario for a split second like normal and sometimes doesn't - for me it felt like about 50/50. The next move is a very fast transition to statue form so this really messed with my timing. The other moan is that the Tanooki just... isn't very good? The flight and floating are too janky to do precision stuff with, so Idol wisely avoids that, but without it they were basically just left with statue form and long run-ups.)
Now, you know how I said FT029's section single-handedly justified the frogsuit's inclusion for me? Yeah, the boss did its best to undo that. Frogsuit juggling on dry land is even more janky than normal frogsuit stuff on dry land. I didn't resort to save states, but I'm pretty sure I cheesed the hell out of that boss and I'm not going back no matter what.
Overall: Everyone should play this hack. It contains a tremendous amount of great level design backed by great ASM work, and the finale in particular is outstanding. The best stuff in here is absolutely a 5-caliber. But the worst stuff (Ryuguong, FURCON, hopkin, the final boss) is, like, a 2-caliber. And there's some mediocre stuff thrown in too, like Twister, Cassidy, and the switch palace. And when it's only 19 real exits, by volume that's quite a lot of it that isn't the best stuff. So with regrets I think I have to give it a 4. My recommendation to new players is to skip Ryuguong and FURCON, and play just enough of hopkin to get a feel for the frogsuit for the finale.
nice
Intro: I absolutely love the idea that there's a hundred pages of Deep Lore about exactly why Mario has to stick mice in his head and then beat his head in with a hammer and let them back out, but it will never be known because the text box is too small to contain it.
how does it feel to eat a cloud? Very solid, very fun intro level that was clearly an inspiration for the first level of Of Jumps and Platforms.
Twister! but with Chainsaws The transition from a rollicking good-time Kaizo-lite autoscroller to a standard level defined by a particularly dangerous enemy was quite jarring to me, and I spent a little while thinking I needed to keep them alive for something. I also still don't understand what the right way is to get past the platforms suspended in bubbles, I ended up just jumping around randomly like the a three-year old at the Carnival Night Zone barrel until eventually the game got bored and let me through. Not a bad level at all, though.
Ryugyong Mountain (football) See, this is a bad level. I don't know what the heck the hitboxes on the giant footballs are meant to be, but what they are is incredibly inconsistent, frustrating, and hard to predict. This is one of the only levels not revisited in the finale in some way, and I'm guessing there's a reason for that. I found it one of the hardest levels in the hack for all the wrong reasons.
Mario hides inside a husk of a Koopa This, meanwhile, is a great level. The central gimmick of shell Mario is fun, flashy, well-executed, jank-free, and doesn't overstay its welcome even with the secret exit. The perfect antidote to the previous level, although there's a little cheese possible.
Ground Beef Switch Palace This is... a level, I guess? There's no challenge, and you can't rack up the lives in any meaningful way the way you can with the institute of wiggler torture, so it just feels really vestigial.
a hollow metal heart And we're back to the solid levels. A nicely creepy industrial vibe and a solidly fight-y track pairs well with the mutant dodongo enemies here. I'm still not sure what the point of the parachuting bombs near the midway was - I was expecting there to be a secret on top of the level, but I couldn't find one. Bonus points for a rare non-aggravating use of the P-balloon and a solid level overall.
trepenation clinic Dammit it's trepanation. That said I really enjoyed this level, slightly incongruous holiday music and all. The new enemy is innovative and leads to some nice situations. Short and easy but fun.
BALLER! This level would have been absolutely insufferable without the message box yelling at me about the tufts of grass. With it, it was a thoroughly good time. Carefully calculated powerball trajectories make the shameful maths nerd part of my brain happy. For me the last screen was about at the sweet spot for puzzle difficulty in a non-puzzle hack - which is to say, engaging my brain without having to seriously think (given that I often play platformers to stop seriously thinking).
Homing Instinct Another brilliant ASM gimmick, this time Boomerang Mario. The difficulty was tuned really well on this one - I wasn't one-shotting much of it, but I could generally see how I could have done if I'd been a little faster on the uptake. One thing this hack does really well most of the time is giving you a couple of safe environments to play around with a new gimmick and explore its uses before cutting loose, and this level is no exception. Great level.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 2 The music on this one really starts to grate after a while - what even is it? The opening bars (which you'll be hearing a lot of without fast restart) sound like the Simpsons theme died and went to silicon hell. The level itself is a collection of one-screeners themed around munchers, thwomps and spike balls on a train, and it's fun but also very forgettable. I feel like the one-screen gimmick works best with difficult one-screen levels combined with fast reset - here it just made things feel cramped, like the setups didn't really have room to breathe, which is the opposite of how a train level should feel.
FURCON 2018 And with that we're back to the hack at its worst. I respect the effort it must have taken to get the Tanooki suit in, but I really feel like the hack would have been stronger without it. An invisible maze? Janky flight mechanics? A quite bland and incredibly short music loop in a very long level? That awful "floor is
lavapoop" section that was twenty minutes of constant frustration thanks to slightly janky hitboxes? The slim but lingering possibility through the whole thing that you'll die, which leaves all your dragon coins unsaved and forces you to start the whole ordeal over again? This level is worse then any actual furcon past or present and I really recommend anyone playing the hack just skip it. This place is not a place of honour.Oh! Saws And straight back to the good! Propeller Mario from NSMB is a serious workout on the hands with SMW spin jump controls, and the level drives you a long way without a checkpoint, but it's been incredibly well-coded - I died a lot here but always felt like it was my fault, and a solid music track always helps. After that, the boss felt like a bit of an anti-climax - it was much easier than the level itself.
Everything is Everything Ever Another really solid level with a really solid ASM gimmick, this time jet boots that I think are original. The jetpack-style double jump feels great, no jank here, and it's well-used in the level. It's nice to see a ghost house eschew secret-hunting to a funereal dirge in favour of tight platforming with a good soundtrack.
you think you're big kid? And the streak continues, this time with mini Mario from NSMB. The floaty jump physics are well-executed and perfectly suited for a precision jumping level like this one. I found the second half of the level in particular brutally long and difficult, but it never crossed the line into feeling unfair.
little green mice These little guys are probably my favourite new enemy in the hack. The idea of an enemy that briefly turns into a spring after being jumped on isn't super-original, but it's very well-executed and well-used in this level, and the spritework is adorable. I was sad not to see them come back in the finale. This also feels like a nice breather level in terms of difficulty.
Non-euclidean spin Yessss, vertical screen wrap with the propeller hat and an absolutely outstanding track that I wish I could hear more of (fast reset would have been really nice). The best power-up combined with the best kaizo gimmick combined with really tight design all the way through makes for my favourite level in the hack. Perversely I actually thought the section autoscroll was removed from would have been better with it left in - without it I found it a bit difficult to read, with it I'd just have avoided overthinking it and gone.
him name hopkin green frog Ah, my first morsel level. And hopefully my last morsel level. OK, so the pre-midway part of the level being torture was mostly on me for not reading the text box right and trying to swim fast by rapidly pressing buttons rather than holding jump. That said, there was one particular spike ball arrangement near the end of the first part that I couldn't work out that just started randomly lining up differently when I beat it, so either I was getting screwed over by jank earlier or benefiting from cheese later.
The part that wasn't my fault, though, was the second half of the level. The frogsuit on dry land is a janky, inconsistent pile of garbage. I know that's true in SMB3 as well, but that's not a good reason to emulate it, it's a good reason not to use the frogsuit on dry land, especially for an extremely long precision platforming segment. This level endangered my Steam Deck. Then it ends with a squeaky drawn-out fart of a boss - not particularly difficult, but far longer than it had any right to be and not particularly pleasant or satisfying for anyone other than its creator.
The Princess and the Frog The central gimmick here of switching between two power-ups from previous levels in an extended segment is absolutely amazing and I love it. The music is outstanding, and the level design is mostly brilliant. FT029's frogsuit/shell section in particular is one of the best in the game and single-handedly justifies the frogsuit's inclusion in the hack for me.
(Small moan: The mini mario/tanooki segment suffers from two issues. The first is a minor bug right after the brutal mini Mario jump between two shells under a flare, where the tightly-timed transition back to Tanooki form sometimes freezes Mario for a split second like normal and sometimes doesn't - for me it felt like about 50/50. The next move is a very fast transition to statue form so this really messed with my timing. The other moan is that the Tanooki just... isn't very good? The flight and floating are too janky to do precision stuff with, so Idol wisely avoids that, but without it they were basically just left with statue form and long run-ups.)
Now, you know how I said FT029's section single-handedly justified the frogsuit's inclusion for me? Yeah, the boss did its best to undo that. Frogsuit juggling on dry land is even more janky than normal frogsuit stuff on dry land. I didn't resort to save states, but I'm pretty sure I cheesed the hell out of that boss and I'm not going back no matter what.
Overall: Everyone should play this hack. It contains a tremendous amount of great level design backed by great ASM work, and the finale in particular is outstanding. The best stuff in here is absolutely a 5-caliber. But the worst stuff (Ryuguong, FURCON, hopkin, the final boss) is, like, a 2-caliber. And there's some mediocre stuff thrown in too, like Twister, Cassidy, and the switch palace. And when it's only 19 real exits, by volume that's quite a lot of it that isn't the best stuff. So with regrets I think I have to give it a 4. My recommendation to new players is to skip Ryuguong and FURCON, and play just enough of hopkin to get a feel for the frogsuit for the finale.
* -
It's the title theme from Kirby's Dreamland
4/5.
and 10/5 for the name.
4/5.
and 10/5 for the name.
Big epic reference to the old comments btw, me not really enjoying the hack aside, what i wrote was completely unrelated to my actually opinion of it. I dont feel like it's necessary for me bore everyone with my genuine input, the hack is finished, and due to it's nature any shortcomings i could point out would be irreverent
It's like going to a restaurant and saying "its veri bat wuld b beter if gordo ramsai made the fud"
either you dunno what grammar is, or you try to be funny if it's the second one, you failed lmao
Yes?
Note I said it was fun "most of the time." The hack was fun... until the end. The last two levels took me longer to play than the rest of the hack combined. They are such a large difficulty jump it's insane; this really ruined the hack for me. Given the rest of the hack, the last level with its powerup swapping gimmick requires way too much precision, and restarting all the way back to the beginning of the section you're in when you get hit once is ass. This includes the boss, which is literally just Bowser with shitty controls.
The nonsensical humor starts off great, but eventually wears thin. I'm also not sure that the minor graphical glitches throughout the hack (which were clearly left in intentionally) work all that well with the hack's stated intent to be a showoff of resources in addition to level design.
RIP rating, other comments, download count
if there's one positive i can give, its that its easy to uninstall from my computer.
I hope it is the same for the other levels tho
After that, you throw the shell up to hit a turn block which drops a springboard. Shell jumping and other similar tricks aren't required at all in the hack.
...but then there's a bit of a problem: the difficulty. I mean, I wasn't expecting anything less from a Very Hard hack, but holy shit, some of the puzzles in this are just really infuriating
like, rn I'm stuck at this part
and it basically requires you to hit that Spiny with a Boomerang while you try not to hit that Koopa shell in the process, so that you can be able to do a shell jump straight after
if this ends up being easier than intended tho, I'll retract my statement right here and now, tho I don't think that would be possible considering this hack seems to get harder after this, so uhhhhhhhhhh
I'm sure anybody who knows ASM could design a more reliable one that saves after a level is cleared. Though it's currently unclear how much people have been affected by these issues.
2) issue with how the boss's gfx were handled, low priority.
3) you sure can buddy. maybe its not wise to do that next time
4) glitchy fish, yeah.
5) need more info on this. wouldnt be surprising - the sprite has a lot of issues. what emulator do you use, for example?
https://i.imgur.com/yG2HVZH.png - The Live icon is a boomerang
https://i.imgur.com/z0SMeoc.png - That koopa has glitched graphics and it disappear when it enters in the shell
https://i.imgur.com/SBXGw7r.png - I can die pressiong A or B here
https://i.imgur.com/IefQmQe.png - I don't know what sprite is that, a fish?
https://i.imgur.com/W0tYj7p.png - The game crashes when i kick this bomb
That's all
Note I said it was fun "most of the time." The hack was fun... until the end. The last two levels took me longer to play than the rest of the hack combined. They are such a large difficulty jump it's insane; this really ruined the hack for me. Given the rest of the hack, the last level with its powerup swapping gimmick requires way too much precision, and restarting all the way back to the beginning of the section you're in when you get hit once is ass. This includes the boss, which is literally just Bowser with shitty controls.
The nonsensical humor starts off great, but eventually wears thin. I'm also not sure that the minor graphical glitches throughout the hack (which were clearly left in intentionally) work all that well with the hack's stated intent to be a showoff of resources in addition to level design.
I love the design.
The design seems most brilliantly executed for what it tries to accomplish. Some may, however, be off-put by the repetitive nature of its structure.
This hack will not surprise you at every corner nor play with your expectations the way that JUMP or YUMP did. Nevertheless, those who find great appeal in challenge-string and puzzle-string design philosphy will feel right at home with this ROMhack.
I must congratulate everyone involved in the making of this ROMhack for sticking to a specific, easily identifiable audience, thusly taking advantage of ROMhacking as a medium.
I personally didn't like my experience playing this hack, coming out exhausted after playing a few levels, but since the design is so clearly elaborated with all of its synergy going to that specific audience, I will give it 5 stars.
Edit: I will also advise anyone to take it slow and take breaks if they feel that the experience leaves them hollow or somewhat dissatisfied.
Also, two questions:
1) Are the message boxes at the start meant to be blank?
2) And why didn't you guys opt to use the Auto Save patch instead of making the player press Select for a manual save? I can imagine most people will forget to use the feature.
small mario, probeller mario, "kanonball mario" and frog mario (which is way better than in smb3) are all present.
its a typical JUMP hack.
i give it 4/5 because there are many things you can do that clearly you arent supposed to do. none of them break the hack, but broken sprites, unintented ways etc are pretty common here if you mess around a bit.
small example (yea i said small) if you are small mario, you cant jump while holding items, cause they are too heavy. you could still keyjump tho. as tanooki mario you can turn into a statue and kill things. theres a part where you are supposed to take dmg and lose the suit, but timed right (i got it first try) you can turn into a statue and kill the enemy from below and keep the suit. again this makes one room easier and thats it. not much use but its doable.
the credits are a broken sprite mess and the "fuck you" at the end makes me wonder if this hack gets accepted.
overall worth playing, but i can only recommend savestates for this one as some parts are really hard and impossible on a first try.
small mario, probeller mario, "kanonball mario" and frog mario (which is way better than in smb3) are all present.
its a typical JUMP hack.
i give it 4/5 because there are many things you can do that clearly you arent supposed to do. none of them break the hack, but broken sprites, unintented ways etc are pretty common here if you mess around a bit.
small example (yea i said small) if you are small mario, you cant jump while holding items, cause they are too heavy. you could still keyjump tho. as tanooki mario you can turn into a statue and kill things. theres a part where you are supposed to take dmg and lose the suit, but timed right (i got it first try) you can turn into a statue and kill the enemy from below and keep the suit. again this makes one room easier and thats it. not much use but its doable.
the credits are a broken sprite mess and the "fuck you" at the end makes me wonder if this hack gets accepted.
overall worth playing, but i can only recommend savestates for this one as some parts are really hard and impossible on a first try.