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The Way of The M, Take One

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Originally posted by my hack description
I have quite a bit to say about this romhack, though I'll do that elsewhere.

Here is the Way of The M, a romhack made to be vanilla but also very unique (aside from the custom music, to break the monotony of the original songs). Many tricks with MAP16 and Super GFX Bypass were performed to achieve new visuals that would have been impossible for me to do back then.

While this is the best SMW hack I've ever made (and tied for longest), it's also one of the hardest made in a while, especially if you can reach the Special Zone. The difficulty is something that comes along with this romhack, and I'm hoping that it will stay or at least not get butchered by moderation.

The story and the overworld don't have too much attention drawn towards them, though they are still there.

Take on the mighty challenge and succeed, and you shall be praised!


This sort of explains everything. This was built over the course of a year, and I have changed a lot over that one year. It may feel very awkward to put early stages and late stages of this romhack next to each other since they should be kind of different from each other.

The long wait for the full version of what could be a masterpiece is finally finished, a year after the 1 world demo was released.

ADDED: The download of the IPS patch also comes with a Way of The M Soundtrack text file. It lists all the tracks the hack used and also give credit where it's due. Also, the difficulty of the hack picks up at World 4 (the first 3 worlds are sort of a learning curve, I guess).
This is going to be

Fun!


I'll review what i think about it, Congrats on finishing your hack.
Funny hack! Congrats for hack!!!
Amazing layout by JackTheSpades


Dude,What were you thinking? This actually made me laugh
I was thinking that the water there would look nice, and it's the first time I tried using it to make levels like so. This hack pretty much has a whole bunch of things I consider to be experiments thrown in, since I never tried them until now.

Brazilian Comic, even if you may have mixed up ''funny'' with ''fun'', I still thank you for the kind words. It encourages me to keep making hacks.

Maybe I should make some funny hack in the future, who knows.
There's a bit of cutoff in the water below the 2 cement blocks in the screen Akireyano posted.
Hey, this actually looks pretty nice! I'll give it a try, and maybe review it.

By the way, I'm not really sure if this is actually cutoff.
Maybe it's supposed to be a underwater ledge tile or something?
I don't think your hack'll be accepted, I've played trough it today and there's a lot to fix.


First of all: In nearly every level there's some slowdown, this really sucks if you are surrounded by enemies.

That's thing number two - this hack is definitely NOT playable without savestates. At the beginning it's okay, but world 6/7 were pure hell for me. You've overused the castle sprites, they are in so many levels, the same thing for the music, it's nice that you used custom music but if i hear the same song four times in a row i turn the emulator sound off. You shouldn't place so much enemies on places mario should jump on to to finish the level.

If you remove the slowdown by removing some sprites problem #2 would also be solved, here some examples for sprite overusing:


over 9000 wave motion eeries + layer 2 poison = not a good idea.
BTW: you can swim in this poison water, this also sucks if you do a spinjump because there are 15 spikey sprites next to you and then the water stops your spinjump.


for me it was impossible to cross this trap without loosing my powerup.



the most used sprites were shell kicking koopas, chucks and castle sprites, sometimes rex, bats, moles and the smw hammer bro (btw: if you hit him in the wrong moment you have no chance to survive (world8), his hammer will always hit you.




this is underwater so please give me a bit more time to react, there are soooo many sprites everywhere...



it's impossible to jump trough the gap between the note blocks and the spike without getting hurt.


maybe some kaizo places appeared only that hard because i had a mushroom/fire flower, you should test your levels with each powerup.





mhh, what could happen in the next two seconds? |-O
I see that I'm getting helpful feedback. Even before whether or not this hack got accepted or not, I've already fixed a few things (but I don't want to butcher it by toning down the difficulty, though I should look at the slowdown). That tricky jump in Descent to Darkness was just one of those things that had to be fixed. Even if the hack gets accepted in the version submitted to the site, I'll ask to replace it with an improved one.

I even gave a fair warning about the difficulty, it'll murder you if you're not very good at playing SMW.
Originally posted by levelengine
I see that I'm getting helpful feedback. Even before whether or not this hack got accepted or not, I've already fixed a few things (but I don't want to butcher it by toning down the difficulty, though I should look at the slowdown). That tricky jump in Descent to Darkness was just one of those things that had to be fixed. Even if the hack gets accepted in the version submitted to the site, I'll ask to replace it with an improved one.

I even gave a fair warning about the difficulty, it'll murder you if you're not very good at playing SMW.


I'm playing SMW since I'm seven years old, I think it's not my skills. If suddenly sprites appear on the screen you have to evade, but if they exactly jump in your face and there are more sprites around you it's hard to evade everything without savestates. The most deaths happened because of the change from slowdown to normal emulator speed while jumping on a small block or evading enemies, I'll play your hack again after all the slowdowns were fixed.

BTW: played with zsnes


mh, playing the final castle right now, here another example:



we can discuss about "hard for smw-newbies" and "not playable without savestates", but this has nothing to do with skill i think. for me it's okay because i have no problem with using some savestates, it's just that hacks like this one mostly don't get accepted like my first hack :D


another example, your shell kicking koopas in every second/third level, some of them are placed very bad. how can i evade this shell if i'm playing your hack the first time? it's in the screen for 1 second then it's already killing me.

Yes, Like AltheronX said and posted, These flaws were seen quite frequently in the hack. But anyways good job! I'm not saying that i didn't like the hack, but it needs minor fixes.
Bug fixes are always a part of the editing process. So far, I'm at World 3, and levelengine, you've got a gift.

I dig this hack. It's a wonderful creation. Keep going at it man. You've got a featured winner here.
Originally posted by Sagittaire
Bug fixes are always a part of the editing process. So far, I'm at World 3, and levelengine, you've got a gift.

I dig this hack. It's a wonderful creation. Keep going at it man. You've got a featured winner here.


I know. In my opinion, levelengine is a pretty creative guy. He can do quite amazing and perplexing vanilla gimmicks that mostly nobody would think. Your hack should be a featured one. you must've placed in your hack quite an effort in making.

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