Finished up the contest hacks:
At this point, hacks by Croakmire tend to be referred to as “croak hacks,” as if the term were a self-explanatory sub-genre. Croak hacks are the kind of hacks that you recommend to your worst enemies — they’re a special kind of kaizo. Previous hacks of his have been proven to be capable of slowly murdering top leaderboard runners in broad daylight (and I have an understanding that he has developed other torture devices that he hasn’t uploaded to Metroid Construction).
This is all to say that his latest hack is by far his fairest and most approachable:
This should under no circumstances be construed as a recommendation though.
Reportedly this hack is inspired by the old “Robot Wants Kitty” series of flash games — I have no familiarity with the source material, so I wouldn’t know how well the influence comes across. Whatever the case is, this hack is remarkably high-concept in several ways (which I’ll spoil since I assume almost none of you will ever try this (unless you’re an SMW kaizo-head looking to branch out)).
The space station here is called “Hourglass Station.” It is shaped like an hourglass. The top half of the hourglass is cold, while the bottom half is hot. Samus must explore the station like a grain of sand — travelling horizontally between rooms is allowed, but going back up a room is virtually never permitted. There is a save station in the middle of the station, as well as save stations in the top and bottom corners. Eventually in your exploration you will be funneled to one of the two bottom-corner save stations, where you will be asked to “wait an hour”, after which the game reloads with the whole space station flipped (sans the weird center area), but what was the hot area is now cold and vice versa, and you must explore the station in a downwards direction once again in search for progress.
This creates an interesting rhythm to the exploration, where when an area is in its cold state you can safely do some reconnaissance/analysis for when you travel through the room in its flipped and superheated state (and sometimes vice versa). Do this enough times, and with enough curiosity and grit, and you will eventually beat the game!
Progress beyond just “knowledge” is hard to come by. Major items are few and far between. You start with 3 e-tanks and never gain any more — instead you have “batteries”, which are instant refills scattered around the station, and knowledge about their location is key to surviving and routing your hellruns (batteries respawn when you leave the room). There are also a bunch of “ship fuses” scattered everywhere, and honestly I have no idea what they do. I think they might trigger certain gates, but that’s just a guess on my part (I at least know they count towards the ending percentage). There are also a couple bosses.
Overall, this was perhaps the most interesting hack of the contest. I had a good deal of fun with it, despite some frustrations, but given how punishing it is it’s almost impossible to recommend.
Verdict: Croak rated my hack 4/5 for being too easy so I think it’s only fair for me to rate his 4/5 for being too hard (actually this is a lie I rated his hack first)
P.S. It’s weird to me that we got three different hacks this contest that used a variation of the inverted castle trope (not saying what the other two are).
Isolation by dewhi and mentlegen
This one is a weird mix of nice aesthetics and patchwork design. It has nice tilesets, effects, and custom music, but the design feels undercooked.
At the start you are trapped in 3 dark rooms until you find one specific block in one specific corner you need to shoot to go to the room that turns the station on. There’s another room not long thereafter where some enemies are hidden behind columns waiting for you to stub your toe on them. Some rooms in random places are “off the map”, which is in principle cool (I love me a good overlapping or non-euclidean map), but given that those rooms just say you’re in “Tourian” when you pause it gives me the impression that they just didn’t bother fitting everything together properly, and threw random rooms under the bus to make it look like everything fits together (I could be dead wrong here though).
idk, there’s just a bunch of decision compromises, both small and large, that bothered me. It’s not a very difficult hack, in terms of combat or exploration, but it left me frequently baffled as to what exactly the intent was at certain points.
I did enjoy the mood at least. Seeing the ship becomes more overriden with flesh as you delve deeper into the lower decks is quite neat:
Verdict: I wouldn’t mind a bit more polished up version of this.
Asteroids are a lottery for prospectors. They normally hope to find rare mineral deposits. This time, they found remnants of a Chozo asteroid ship. Their joy turned sour when they found active torizos that tore into the mining station.
The setting in this hack is by far the most well-developed of any hack in the contest, despite the small scope. The mixed tilesets convincingly convey how the both the federation mining operation and chozo ruins exist in the same environment. The areas themselves are all both fun to navigate and spatially complex in ways I envy (but am perhaps to cowardly to commit to). Also, the maps you get from the map stations have a slight tinge of feeling like in-universe schematics, with the full height of some mining shafts being shown despite being only partially navigable by the player — I love that kind of stuff.
This hack also has some very neat custom code that was just a lot of fun to play around with. The “Bomb Launcher” item is perhaps the best thing in the hack. It’s just fun to fire it constantly and see the bombs bounce everywhere, destroying any bomb blocks they touch and making quick work of enemies. It’s also used in some interesting puzzles, like in the second image here where I had to clear out some rubble that was blocking these rippers (trust me it was there):
The other fun custom thing in this are these Donkey Kong Country barrels, which are just hilarious to see in this context:
The largest room in the hack is just chock full of these, and it was a really neat navigate and traverse because of that.
Supposedly this has issues with it being possible to miss progression and enter later areas underequipped, but I didn’t run into that problem.
Verdict: No joke, this is my second favorite hack from the contest.
The only Zero Mission hack submitted to this contest, and the last hack I played.
This hack makes me envious of (a) some of the tooling GBA hackers have, and (b) Roebloz’s ability to just cobble together something adequate.
While, from my experience, Super Metroid has a lot more community resources in terms of pre-made ASM patches and documentation for the original codebase, GBA Metroid hackers have the advantage of a much more sensible asset pipeline. You want a custom tileset, custom title screen, custom backgrounds, custom ending images? Just shove some PNGs in there. Want some custom music? Use a generic music editor that supports 90% of the system’s library, or just shove MP3s in there. Just about the only area where SM hackers have an advantage here is inserting a custom character sprite, but as this hack shows they’re catching up.
The custom Sylux sprite was taken from somewhere on DeviantArt. Hitboxes and cannon position kinda janky? Eh, it’s fine. Kitbash some tilesets together from Mega Man: The Wily Wars? Yeah that seems good. Import a bunch of compressed MP3s from a dozen different sources, but with wildly different styles? Sure why not. We need another room in this area? A bunch of randomly placed platorms and a few too many enemies should do the trick!
Now, I am being a bit hyperbolic in my criticisms here (for one, the Wily Wars tiles are pretty good!). What I mean to say is that if I were to make something like this, my internal alarm bells would be ringing wildly (more than they were for what I was actually making, I mean).
Playing it however? It’s fine.
It’s got some really big fangame energy, but it’s fine.
My biggest actual criticism is with the enemy balance — there’s too many enemies and they’re too spongey. Eventually however, you get a good set of beams and things finally feel manageable and, you know what, it feels nice — good feeling of empowerment.
As for the actual premise or design of the hack: (a) there’s an included STORY.txt that like 1000 words that I don’t remember (the space pirates stole Nightmare and things went terribad for them, I think?), and (b) it has a novel non-linear structure with 5 areas forming a ring around the final, center area, which can be approached whenever you’re ready (the difficulty can be a bit uneven depending on your route).
Word of warning: there are a couple rooms with instant death pits.
Verdict: It’s neat.
Rudie likes this.
In Conclusion
One of the admins on MetConst said that this contest had the best slate of hacks the site has ever seen from a contest and, well, I haven’t actually participated in that many prior contests, but I can see it.
If you want me to rank the hacks, I say this:
Sorted by Quality
- Eleven
- Super Asteroid
- Tour of Italy
- Samus Wants Robot
- Symphony of the Light
- GRAVITY
- The Cereth Invasion
- Isolation
- Nuts Station
- Achelous
- Ceres is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid of Space
Now, if you wanted some actual recommendations from me, this is the order I’d put them in:
Sorted by Recommendability
- Tour of Italy
- Symphony of the Light
- Super Asteroid
- The Cereth Invasion
- Nuts Station
- Eleven
- GRAVITY
- Isolation
- Achelous
- Ceres is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid of Space
- [empty space for rhetorical emphasis]
- Samus Wants Robot
Thank you for reading. Now to do something else with my life for a bit.
enough to play it:
![DOS_Handgun.webp [webp-to-gif output image]](https://dlcn7yodlhcnn.cloudfront.net/original/4X/9/0/e/90e780461364e0e0d0f4700022a0726cb8a4b6c5.gif)