| Name: | THROWING HANDS |
| Author: | Xulon |
| Added: | |
| Version History: | View |
| Demo: | No |
| Hall of Fame: | No |
| Length: | 12 exit(s) |
| Type: | Standard: Very Hard |
| Description: | THOWING HANDS is a collection of short but challenging levels. I started out wanting to make a hack mimicking the feel of the SMB3 hand-grab stages from world 8, but it quickly became something else entirely. You have no powerups to help you and enemies come at you from every direction, but you have infinite lives and instant retries to make the challenge a bit smoother. The hack starts off around medium/hard difficulty and by the end it becomes borderline Kaizo, but I think the difficulty curve is smooth enough that by the time you reach the last few stages you'll be ready for them. This is my first full hack on the site despite the fact that I've been here for over a decade, so this is a huge milestone for me. I hope you all enjoy! |
| Tags: | gimmick music no boss sa-1 vanilla |
| Comments: | 13 (jump to comments) |
| Rating: |
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199.22 KiB | 311 downloads
Comments (13)
Every level was unique and enjoyable. It gets tougher as it goes but the short length of each level means it’s never frustrating.
Most of the levels felt very dynamic, with enemies coming at you that you have to react to.
I really loved fishing season, it was a great way to finish off the hack. One small thing though is that the piranha plants were red stemmed, but acted like green stemmed ones. It took me a few tries before I figured that out, knowing they wouldn’t come out when you stood on the pipe made the first part a lot easier.
Wait they act different??? I thought the red/green stem thing was purely an aesthetic choice, and I just went off the one in the sprite menu so idk how to make it the green one.
Glad you enjoyed the hack though! Thank you for the kind words
Simply an amazing little hack that takes the concept of very short levels a la SMB3 Hand Traps and turns it into a neat collection of obstacle courses. Don't be fooled by the levels being only a couple of screens long though: the first levels are rather easy but the later levels offer quite a serious challenge (especially the last two levels that might be a bit polarizing, but I personally liked the penultimate one and loved the ultimate one) while still feeling very rewarding to beat.
What struck me as peculiarly impressive is that some levels manage to fully develop their ideas despite their very short length (one example that comes in mind is THE FRIENDLY SKY), and despite being completely vanilla (aside the QoL patches obviously) the hack brings a fresh breath on what could be made with vanilla constraints which doesn't happen often with vanilla hacks.
I agree with neidoodle about the fact there's a lot of inspiration to take from this, I hope this'll open the way to short but very challenging levels/hacks in the future.
To resume, one of my favorite hacks of this year, and an easy recommendation to anyone looking for an introduction to the Standard: Very Hard difficulty (and perhaps kaizo) or more seasoned players looking for a chill hack.
Thank you for making this, and I'm definitely looking forward to what's coming next! :)
Everything else is great, and I think super hard bite-sized levels are a neat concept.
The hack was meant to be simple by default since it’s my first and I wanted to make something quick and fun to play. If you didn’t get much out of it then hopefully my future projects will be more fun, though I won’t be doing Kaizo outside of contests for the foreseeable future. Not sure where you got the idea that I was heading in an even harder direction.
Aside from that overall positive impression there were some levels I enjoyed less than the others. The dolphin level gave me trouble for some reason (I know the dolphins are not as random as they felt to me), as did the one with the jumping fish and the "invisible lines" one. But even those levels are so short that it's rather easy to overcome the challenge. Good job!