Storks and Apes and Crocodiles

Dear victim,

In the process of making this hack, I have come to hate it. I hope you, gentle player, will come to feel the same way. There is no overworld to this hack (automatic saving), simply 17 + 1 levels of bullshit from a sadist. The hack is directly inspired by the Luigi’s Adventure lost levels and incidentally inspired by the Hyper Mario World special worlds, and so occupies the border territory between very hard and kaizo, depending on whether you view kaizo as a genre or a difficulty, or just think it’s a Japanese magazine. There are few if any of the traditional kaizo traps (invisible blocks, post-goal deaths), or techniques (shell-jumping), but the expectation that the level be played in a strict way, and the certain necessity for trial and error or familiarity with the course lay-out, lead me to feel the classification I’ve given it (kaizo light) is accurate. I hope you have fun.

Love, morsel.

v1.12 I apologise for updating this again, but in the last update “-Stage 13: fixed a sparky so he doesn’t despawn,” I used red spikes which are empty tiles instead of kill ones, creating an accidental softlock. This is the absolute final version–rather than update this again, I will commit seppuku.

v1.11 “I shouldn’t have to update this again.” When I said this, a nasty little god laughed. Hence “stabilised max sliding speed”–this was well motivated but completely idiotic; not sure how to fix it without breaking other things, so it has now been reverted to normal. Also forgot these changes: -Stage 13: fixed a sparky so he doesn’t despawn. -Stage 15: in boss, set layer 2 to interact with sprites.

Version 1.10 I wanted to update the hack as there was a bug in stage 10 whereby the p-switch occasionally wouldn’t spawn. I still don’t know what causes this, but I put in some code to take account of it happening. I took the opportunity to go over the hack and fix some other things, viz.: -Stage 1: stabilised max sliding speed (to $30, instead of values between $2F and $31). This also applies to other stages with sliding obstacles (stage 2, stage 12, some stage 17 sublevels). -Stage 3: made one jump easier and added a hint for a blind thing. -Stage 5: fixed the part where you can go under everything. -Stage 9: made football player kick consistently. -Stage 10: fixed disappearing p-switch bug. -Stage 12: changed music. -Stage 13: changed music and palette for second half. Everyone seems to find the second half pretty hard so I made it more lenient. Also disabled the killing of thwomps and thwimps with blocks (it is unreliable and confusing). -Stage 14: made the first half more streamlined to reduce potential waiting. -Stage 16: fixed the jump where you can skip one of the disco ball obstables. -Stage 17: changed boss music. -Motor Skills: fixed beginning of room 4; made first hit of boss more consistent; fixed final hit of boss so you need to be standing on ground for it to count. There are miscellaneous other changes for small graphical anomalies and text box messages. I shouldn’t have to update this again.

v1.06 Thanks to linkdeadx2 playing this hack, we have: Changes -stabilised position of hammer bro. in level 3 -forced collection of star in level 4 Not changed -while you can double hit switches in level 6, by aiming for the centre of the switch, you can reliably not do so; there is code in a later level preventing double hitting when you can not reliably avoid it.