Challenge is important, but overwhelmingly punishing difficulty (where, for instance, players routinely encounter unavoidable deaths) is usually a sign of poor game design. For the most part, video game designers try to carefully balance difficulty. Most people would probably think of kaizo games as setting out to achieve the exact opposite of what games generally aim for. I think of it as a kind of contrapasso, which makes it all the more delightfully fiendish.
It’s often the case that these traps are aimed squarely at players who attempt to take the easiest path through a level. The idea is that the designer sets up a particularly nasty obstacle that the player will trigger with little to no forewarning.
One of the most fascinating elements of kaizo games is the concept of a kaizo trap.
If you’re curious, I highly recommend checking out Josh Bycer’s fantastic piece on the topic. There’s a whole culture around kaizo games. Players take an existing game - including its assets, like character sprites - and “remix” them to build eye-wateringly difficult levels. H ave you ever heard of a kaizo game? The concept is pretty straightforward. However, since the wow factor of the latter half has remained intact after all these years, and since it is responsible for me getting into the medium that is ROM hacks, I can't give it a lower score than 5 Stars depite its many flaws.Super Mario Bros. Something more subjective is that there's also no custom music, but at the same time the age of the hack would mean that the music would be too dated to work on accurate emulators, as shown in the Cheep Demo. Something that hasn't held up however, is the below avarage level design that makes some of the stages boring to play through once the wow factor is gone, which is something that happens quite frequently during the first half of the game, since many of the lesser gimmicks and are easily available on SMW Central by now.Īnother thing that hasn't aged well is that some of the bosses, while impressive, are heavily rng dependent due to them only being vulnerable during a certain selection of attacks. The ROM hack that got me into smw ROM hacks, and many of the bosses and gimmicks still hold up today.
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