Did you know that 1) They exist 2) They can be quite good?
I’ve been playing something called Super Mario 64 Star Road. It looks great.
This is crucial: It just looks great.
The Mario 64 hack wiki says:
“Super Mario Star Road is a hack made by Skelux. It was released around Christmas 2011, and contains 130 Stars. This hack is known for being the best, and most well-known Rom Hack out there. This is due to the similarities to Mario 64 in terms of difficulty »
That is false. This is much, much harder than the original SM64, and you have to make ridiculous jumps all the time.
I suspect all the other hacks are even harder
If you go in with the right mindset, though, it’s cool.
Mario 64 was the beginning of 3D platforming, nobody knew what to do so they just gave Mario a maximalist moveset. You have a lot of options for simple jumping, each with their pros and cons.
- Jump
- Double Jump
- Triple Jump
- Wall Kick
- Backward Somersault
- Long Jump
- Slide Somersault
- You can use B at the beginning of a jump to go farther but you will have a terrible recovery
- You can also use B to kick during a jump to control the jump a little
For each difficult jump, you’re carefully choosing between these options. Doing a backward somersault is easy but this move doesn’t have much reach. The triple jump makes you go far, but is hard to pull off. The slide somersault is amazing, but you shouldn’t use it on a small platform because Mario might turn around and fall instead of backing off.
It doesn’t take too long to become some kind of Mario 64 god, fully utilizing all of Mario’s moves perfectly and looking cool as hell. Levels that were almost impossible early on (like the ghost forest) now look trivial.
This hack manages to be just as playful as the regular game. Here’s a secret, just for SB:
Of course there is a Giant Instruments Floating In Space level
Spooky castles
And mysteries?
The camera is still hell, of course.