A mod for Super Mario World
Super Demo World: The Legend Continues is a project put together with the goal of displaying the capabilities of the SMW Level Editor Lunar Magic. Super Demo World, was first released in 2001 as a few short levels to show off custom blocks which had varying requirements for when they could be broken such as the typical only when big breakable bricks or bricks that could only be broken with a fireball. Since then, the project has gone on to be a complete hack of SWM spanning across and heavily altering all of its levels. As this hack is designed with the explicit goal of showing off Lunar Magic, players will find a wide variety of challenges across Super Demo World‘s many meticulously crafted levels and will assuredly find themselves stretching out fiber of their SMW muscles along the way. Each on of the castles in this hack come with a quirky blurb at the end once you defeat the boss, many of them referring to bizarre or somewhat dark scenarios where the Koopa’s were experimenting on the eggs or simply hording them for buffets.
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That said, some of the things hacked in are pretty interesting, like the powerup that allows you to summon a message box. The problem with a lot of these hacked into summonable items is that if you get hit, the game will drop the item responsively, and if you need to bring that specific item somewhere (like the end of the level), it can be frustrating.
I get the feeling, though, that the devs meant for the player to use save states. One of the hidden messages even mentions one of the devs using them. The hacks difficulty is brutal otherwise, at least at points, and finding the use for a lot of the hack’s special items is a challenge in itself. I liked the puzzly elements of this hack but I didn’t have the patience to figure them all out and used a video guide.
This hack will stick with me because of the idiosyncratic level design. There are a lot of stark level design choices that lack aesthetic flair but also make the hack stick out. You could flip a coin on whether the basicness of the design made the level distinct or if it make the level forgettable, though. The Star World level designs get especially surreal with how much throw at you and how unconcerned they are appearing like an actual environment.
The second special world and how it unfolds is also pretty cool. I was surprised how fresh this hack was, even today, but I get the inkling that maybe the reason newer hacks don’t do a lot of these ideas is because of them are hostile to the player.