Aeron's Golden Cookie Quest

Aeron’s Golden Cookie Quest is an old-school styled hack, that has inpiration in various videogames, including Kirby, Mega Man, Castlevania, Ganbare Goemon, Shinobi, Mario and others. Instead of inspiring myself in any hack creator, I wanted to make this project as a love letter for videogames and I plan to achieve that with this hack.

It’s a weird hybrid of traditional and chocolate. While this hack has a lot of ASM, its level design is more focused all in tackling obstacles than innovative level design. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel or anything, just to be clear, so don’t go with the wrong expectations, when playing this hack. Much like an old game, it has some bullshit moments, but a lot of good and rewarding gameplay.

This hack has lore, but it’s not too wordy or too wacky. It’s very easy to understand. You only watch the cutscenes once and go back to the action even if you die once, due to my clever vanilla checkpoints placement. Slightly inspired by The Second Reality Project 2 Reloaded and Luigi’s Misadventures.

What this hack contains:

• A custom player sprite, drawn by Deeke.
• Various patches aimed for quality of life experience, to make the platforming even more fun;
• 10 tough levels;
• 3 HUB areas to save your progress;
• Neat selection of custom musics;
• Tough platforming;
• A few “gotcha” moments, inspired by SMW: Gaiden;
• Simple and challenging bosses;
• Bumpties (Segment1Zone2 angry noises);
• Hot Dino Rhinos;
• Cutscenes;
• NPCs;
• A slightly suggestive final boss;

This hack was not made with CRT monitors in mind. I don’t take any responsability for cutoff in the cutscene texts or status bar. Sorry about that.

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Version 1.5.2 changelog:

• Gargoyle’s Cliff: Made two jumps more tighter and harder to cheese or be skipped.

• Qubasa Sport Field: Added extra munchers to avoid skips.

• Forgotten Library: Fixed the ending screen. If you jump in the corners, you would be teleported to the boss fight.

• Yamato Bamboo Field: Added a cement wall next to the end of the second half to avoid the player from walking to death. Colliding with an enemy in the right corner of the boss arena damages the player. I have no idea how to fix that issue. The boo cloud in the first half may cause sprites to warp. I don’t know a fix for it at the moment

• Kyushu Bridge: Changed enemy placement to avoid the despawn of a yellow koopa.

• Mechanical Oedo: A lot of nerfs and adjustments. Basils are reverted to hurt only, instead of instakill. Removed a cheese from the first half. Second half now contain two reset pipes. Enemy placement adjusted. Removed slowdown in a certain spot. Added powerup remover in a certain spot to avoid players of cheesing the next obstacles. Adjusted 1-up checkpoint placement.

• Setsuma Village: Adjusted boss arena.

• Gorgeous Stage Fort: Made a jump involving the buzzy beetle less tight. Fixed item index in one of the rooms.

• Mutsu Mountainroad: Adjusted the checkpoint that leads to the boss, so it’s closer to the player. Fixed typo in one of the cutscenes.

• Credits: minor tweaks.

MINOR BUGS:

• Yamato Bamboo Field: Colliding with an enemy in the right corner of the boss arena damages the player. I have no idea how to fix that issue.

• Mutsu Mountainroad: There’s a small bug with the last message box sprite in the game. At first, it won’t show any message, but if you hit it again, it will display normally a message. I have no idea what causes this weird bug.

• Gorgeous Stage Fort: Sometimes the boss of the area will spawn in T-Pose until the health bar fills up. This is just a very minor weird behavior. The boss works as usual.

• Miscellaneous: Hitting the brick blocks with small Mario will cause them to use weird colors. It’s just a minor graphical glitch, the blocks work fine.