Holy shit, this looks really impressive!
Can't wait for Nintendo to slap a DMCA on it.
He worked 4000 hours on the project to deliver such an impressive mod, yet the trailer is sub-amateurish. :v:
[QUOTE=IntenseBarney;51147238]Holy shit, this looks really impressive!
Can't wait for Nintendo to slap a DMCA on it.[/QUOTE]
I'm not familiar with how well Nintendo treats ROM hackers, but he'll more than likely get hit considering he's both asking for donations and included full ROMs instead of just patches. Especially with all the publicity.
I remember seeing some WIPs about this! Pretty impressive stuff.
A little saddened by the lack of density still, though. Areas look huge but it feels like all activity is a little too spread out as a result
Looks like a great rom hack, definitely gonna give it a play.
Damn this looks great. The romhacking community is such a wonderfully beautiful thing. Reminds me of the modding community of old.
Been able to try it out for the past few days, exceptional programming work.
It's mostly solid, but there are several issues with the gameplay that needlessly hamper it down and come across as fake difficulty.
For example, they changed how the camera works. This in itself does not seem problematic and the controls are straightforward, with Peach explaining them on the save/load area. However, it's still one of the most horrendous cameras I've seen in any video game, and can make the game close-to-unplayable at times. The most notable example is that the camera is designed to try to avoid going underwater. This does not seem like a bad thing until you try getting some of the stars in the world 4 area, where you have to do a precision race through rings that have extremely dodgy collision recognition all while fighting the camera. (The only way to get it to follow behind you is to purposely dive as low as possible at the beginning of the race, which is unintuitive and sometimes won't work, as you will occasionally still have the camera suddenly try to raise to a surface that does not exist in the race and make it basically impossible to navigate the rings and still win) Not too big of a deal by itself, but Mario now has only 6hp and a separated air meter. However, because of how it is set up, you drown WAY faster (about 1hp per second once the meter runs out), making some swimming missions really tedious with about 2 seconds of leeway and leaving you SOL if you hit an enemy.
Speaking of dodgy collision detection, a lot of the levels have a plethora of varying slope grades. This makes the levels look smoother in appearance, but emphasizes a flaw in SM64's movement engine: about 15-20% of the time, I arbitrarily lose my ability to do certain jumps on some surfaces and suddenly sit down to slide on others, all with no degree of indication of what will cause this and what won't since some super steep slopes (think of the absurdly steep slope in the final bowser level of the regular SM64) are still able to be run up. Several levels also have issues with props causing Mario to near-instantly die via auto-crushing him, which is clearly unintentional considering one of these is a [i]partially inflated balloon from you trying to jump on it before you have pumped it fully[/i], but super infuriating. Overall, the levels feel like they should be of similar difficulty to the regular SM64 or even easier, but these flaws make them needlessly difficult at times, especially since some levels do not have a general sense of navigational paths (i.e. that underwater race does not really indicate where you should go despite only one path being valid and several forks existing, as if it was designed with the assumption that you should not be winning the race at the beginning despite the opponent giving you a small headstart and not having rubberbanding) As such, the most fun levels end up being the ones with terrain shaped the most similarly to levels found in Super Mario 64, itself.
On a more positive note, the Bowser's Castle level has amazing visuals, and the level themes are very new and do not try to be safe, the soundtrack is nice and there is a plethora of powerups, ranging from stuff like the Frog Suit (which makes you able to breathe underwater and swim faster), Fire Flower and Bee Mushroom to even things like FLUDD and Yoshi. Totally-new powerups are present, too. There are minigames as well. Liked Mario Party's Mushroom Mixup/Hexagon Heat? There is a survival version of it here that is pretty addicting.
In short: If you're a SM64 fan looking forward to a hack that breathes new life into the game, this is definitely a solid attempt if you can tolerate some infuriating issues that really break the pleasure of it at times. However, do not go in expecting the hack to be something you would have expected on a market shelf despite all levels being new, as the game kinda throws you in with the assumption that you know exactly what you should be doing for any given scenario and probably would be considered a 6-to-7/10 game if the base SM64 game is a 9-to-10/10. Effectively, it feels like the game is designed by a brilliant programmer with a solid understanding of the limits of the Nintendo 64 who is not particularly well-versed in level design, and as such the main merit of playing is to marvel at some of the things he was able to pull off without having SM64's source code.
[b]Worth mentioning[/b] though is that most of these flaws will only be a major factor if you are going to attempt to 100% the game, and if you are just going to casually stroll through the game until you have enough stars to fight the final boss, then you should be able to enjoy it just fine. Just keep some of the above in mind should you get frustrated and make sure to ask Peach on the save file map to find out the camera controls, as you absolutely need to know them in order to find the game playable.
-snip-
[QUOTE=The Duke;51148200]words[/QUOTE]
The water camera is pretty terrible with trying to stay out of the water. I hope he patches default behavior back in for that. That underwater ring race was a bitch.
Land though, I found the camera as good as it ever was in Super Mario 64, but I found it is the levels themselves that give it grief. Particularity on the level you enter via the rocket. Climbing the towers or entering cramped areas kills it. I found its best to use the closer up camera that follows mario and ground level (C button UP) to climb the towers or enter the base and use R trigger to correct as needed.
I think the grey textured stuff is what you can run up like the slope grade doesn't matter.
The balloon pump also crushed me. It was kinda hard to get on top of the damn thing too once you fill it.
Overall it has bugs, but I like it a lot more than Star Road. The levels are fun, though I'd like a hack that keeps the SM64 level themes, I find some of them way out of place for a mario game, but that is just personal taste.
I thought super mario 64 hacks died long ago. :what: but still :goodjob:
Why is Mario sneaking around pink bob-ombs? I thought they were supposed to be the nice ones.
[QUOTE=Hidole555;51151909]Why is Mario sneaking around pink bob-ombs? I thought they were supposed to be the nice ones.[/QUOTE]
Around pink, never blink
I wonder how many A presses it takes to beat this game.
I used to be really into the mario 64 hacking scene way back when, and the most impressive thing I ever saw at the time were just model imports from stuff like Banjo Kazooie. It's absolutely crazy seeing stuff like this. I used to think I'd only see gameplay overhauls of this caliber in SMW romhacks.
Oh wow it's that guy who does all that cool shit with the game. I guess his stuff finally released. I don't remember where I saw it but I remember seeing his functioning Yoshi with eggs and FLUDD as well. Pretty amazing that people can do this shit with such old games.
A bit of an update, but apparently the developer of the hack has listened to the complaints of people and fixed auto-squishing being lethal (instead forcing Mario out of the object) and the camera being horrid (now the camera noclips through walls, making gameplay a lot more tolerable in tighter areas), which were my main issues a few posts up. Several other bugs, such as some ledges not being treated as grabbable, were also fixed.
[video=youtube;Ho0CHVAT4jM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho0CHVAT4jM[/video]
The only major ones that weren't are the underwater camera and Mario sliding a lot. However, this patch does not affect the save file, so if you are using the first release, you can just place the new version in the same folder as the old and continue where you were.
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