a translation of yume nikki (and LSDDE to some extent) into the game language of Super Mario 64.
yume nikki uses effects to guide and encourage the player to explore and find new areas, while B3313 in theory uses the stars, but in practice, everyone just wants to jump around and see weird shit.
the stars are usually very boring and easy or not intuitive at all, but i can't really see a version of the game in which they don't exist so i can't really complain.
the areas themselves are perfectly uncanny, resembling the real game so much that the changes feel uncomfortable at times. the biggest highlights to me are the different versions of peach's castle (aka the main hub), like the "demo" version, that looks amazing.
i'll also praise the soundtrack, the original songs are amazing and Dry Town is very beautiful and foreboding.

overall, it's a neat little thing but for it to reach its full potential there needs some work.

note: i have only played 0.7, not 1.0, but i'll watch the vinesauce vid for that -_-

I went into this expecting a quaint little spooky Mario rom hack, but I was instead greeted by one of the single most gripping, immersive, and fun 3D platformer collectathon experiences I've ever played.

The combination of horror and collectathon platforming is so strange, yet it works remarkably well. The game toys with your knowledge by tossing countless remixes and reimaginings of classic Mario 64 levels, that just feel slightly off in one way or another.

And even on top of the weird redux's of beta and retail levels, theres also countless brand new levels, that fit right in with the original games design philosophy, and even in some instances, enhance and improve upon it.

There are a staggering 450 yellow stars and 13 red stars in the game, with only the 13 reds being required in order to, "beat." the game, but I found myself collecting as many yellows as I could because exploring was so much fun.

Every turn of the castle was a new mystery, with new levels and new theming. The castle is sprawling and massive, and warps in on itself multiple times, but its so impeccably designed that I never got truly lost, and I began to memorize pathways to certain levels and important intersections.

The game feels like a playable dream, it has a sublime, surreal, dreamlike atmosphere that feels so palpably uncomfortable yet strangely engaging throughout the entire experience.

This is a once in a lifetime experience. If you enjoy Super Mario 64 I implore you to play this game, it blew me away in every sense.

genuinely HOW is this on backlogged
regardless of my confusion this is super impressive and provides so much to play, its a really fun thing for discord streams and stuff. Unrelated to the game itself but sadly the ongoing very publicly brought up drama amongst the development side of both the official and unabandoned version leaves a slightly bad taste in my mouth and its probably had some genuine effects on how i feel when playing the game. its still amazing though and better than basically every official mario game

[Played through the Unabandoned A2 version.]

Remember the Super Mario 64 iceberg?

As someone who grew up on the game and its DS port, mid-2020 was a very fun time period for me. The renewed interest in the game and its development, with the gigaleak serving as its climax, was genuinely very entertaining to watch unfold; Luigi’s model being uncovered 24 years and 01 months after the game’s Japanese release was my “you had to be there” moment.

Anyways, all that resulted in a lot of mythology spawning around the game and its heavily storied development. A lot of it shares blood with creepypastas and general modern internet rumors - the kinda stuff you’d hear on the playground, but lamer and less believable. Nearly four years later, B3313 embraces all that mythology and interest in Super Mario 64 and turns it into a weird, dense Yume Nikki-esque soup.

This romhack is impossible to review comprehensively. It pulls from the preview builds, the gigaleak’s assets, the iceberg, and a lot of internet mythos, as I previously mentioned. As such, my review will consist mostly of broad strokes.

Starting with some of the negatives, the game’s controls are deliberately worse than SM64. Mario is really slippery (especially when skidding, he goes on for way too long), and at first, you don’t have the backflip, long jump, and breakdance kick. The triple jump gets the slow fall twirl thing you get from stomping on Fly Guys and Spindrifts in exchange for a bit of height. That’s good for distance, but Mario cannot grab ledges while slow falling. Adapting to this was a nightmare.

I understand the decision to alter the controls like this - the controls are pulled from the Space World demo of the game. They were retooled for the final release precisely because of how loose they felt. Level design isn’t kind all the time either, with a lot of jumps you barely have the height for. Normally, I wouldn’t complain about difficult level design, but the slipperier controls and very precise jumps makes it worth noting and a source of annoyance. I understand and respect why the decision to make the controls like this was made, but I miss the precision the final game had.

The camera can be particularly atrocious. B3313’s original courses feature level design that’s far more claustrophobic than SM64’s - a lot of this is intentional because of the atmosphere it shoots for, but a lot of the time that sort of level design combined with the awful camera getting stuck results in platforming that’s not unnerving or “living a dream”-y, but rather just annoying. A lot of the time, when twirling and slow falling after a triple jump, the camera likes to point up, which is the one angle that’s not useful when jumping, and that led to my death more than once. Yes, I agree SM64’s camera can be particularly insufferable, but I ran into this way more frequently in B3313 and I feel I touched maybe what, 10% of the total areas?

Moving on, B3313’s scope is the main selling point and it delivers. It’s absurdly cryptic and expansive, with so many layers of places to go that if you fuck up and die it can take a long time to get back to where you were. This is what I meant by the game being impossible to review comprehensively - so many areas with so many warps that it’s impossible to keep a map of them in your head. Granted, the hack indirectly recommends against this, with Yoshi saying to “just let it happen, like a dream.”

The game leans hard into the “every copy is personalized” meme, and the amount of sheer variety in stuff does help with the feeling it’s pulling from your mind. There are a lot of different versions of the 15 courses found in the final game, ranging from small differences in geometry and color palette to entirely new weather and features added. There are also a lot of variants of the castle and its interior halls (with the hud even changing depending on what “era” of the game you find), with access to each being granted differently, as well as a many, many all-new courses. It’s all highly labyrinthian, and fucking up and dying can toss you many, many minutes back. The game even uses your system time to activate a few effects, which is pretty impressive to me!

The most fascinating part about it to me, though, is how… dreamlike it all feels. Areas vary wildly in size, with some being tight mazes and others being enormous. Combined with the constant fog, endless-feeling amount of doors and paths, and the always at least slightly-off-kilter music contributes heavily to that feeling that you’re playing a dream of the game… but with beta elements mixed in.

Where the game loses me a bit is in its horror elements. I get why they were included - analog horror and conspiracies were prominent elements of the mythos that formed around the game in mid-2020. And, to its credit, the game seems to pull near-entirely from those sources; from my research, a lot of it originates from Greenio’s “Super Mario 64: CLASSIFIED” series (even including the AI core asking to be destroyed), with some references to older creepypastas and hacks like sm64.z64, BUP 64, and Faceless.

I’m just not too confident in how the game handles its horror aspects. There’s a lot of warning when you get to the areas with horror elements (sometimes to the point of there being “no entry” signs, unusually dark color palettes, and text boxes telling you to piss off), so they’re easily avoided, but at the same time, pulling off scares in SM64 is kinda really difficult aside from jumpscares? Mario can just schmoove and parkour around, and it kinda takes the edge away when the evil entity that’s chasing you struggles to keep up with long jumps and dive recovers.

I’m also not too big on most of the big scares causing crashes as well. There are only a few “true” jumpscares (one of which I had the misfortune of running into about an hour into my playthrough; if you see faceless Toads, turn back) but being forced a trillion layers back is already punishing enough for not being cautious enough and letting curiosity get the best out of you. Forcing a reset just adds a few more seconds to that.

Anyways, there’s actually a way to progress in this and “beat” it. Technically 100% is achievable, but going for all 450 stars (!) in this spaghetti mess of a game sounds like torture, so I’ll keep it at technically. Back to it, beating Bowser and other bosses gives the player Red Stars. Collect all 13 of them, and you can take the long ass route to the ending. Collecting Red Stars is also crucial to unlocking Mario’s full moveset which… is weird? I’d rather have all the tools at the start to explore these big ass areas.

Outside of that? No real progression aside from unlocking Green Stars at 120 (I think). This ultimately works in the hack’s favor and helps sell the “endless dream” aesthetic, though - getting lost and exploring is part of the appeal. If I recall correctly (I may be wrong on this), older versions had the final level be accessed by climbing up and up in the castle lobbies, and I feel I prefer that approach; there’s a clear, intuitive path the player can follow to beat Bowser for good, but going up and up also reveals many of the paths the player can explore and lose themselves in. Ultimately though, it’s not like I’m playing this to beat it; once I got the long jump and backflip, I just resumed walking around aimlessly trying to find new stuff.

On a last note, the music is… weird. I said it uses a lot of off-kilter versions of the Super Mario 64 soundtrack, but it goes a step further and includes a few tracks from other Mario games that were released before it. A lot of the remixes are good; out of those, “Eel Graveyard” and “Dry Town” are the absolute highlights for me. On the other hand, there’s a few tracks I found intolerable, particularly one used for a few volcano areas. You can make familiar music sound like a distant memory and what you’d hear in a dream without making it actually headache-inducing - most of the game does that!

Wrapping it up, B3313 is one of a kind. The only other prominent hack I know of that does something like this is “Breaking the Barrier”, but that feels extremely limited in comparison. If you’re looking for a tightly-designed romhack, I’d suggest looking elsewhere. Instead, I’d recommend this for those of you who lived through and witnessed the internet mythology surrounding SM64 in mid-2020; B3313 is not only a love letter to that time period, but also a near-perfect snapshot of it, and the experience is generally enhanced by at least knowing the context which spawned this romhack.

I’m not giving this a star rating, though. I absolutely recommend playing this if you were in that mid-2020 SM64 niche like I was, and it remains a really impressive romhack from a technical standpoint all around (seriously the amount the game was modified and expanded is insane), but I dunno if I give it a high rating because of that, or if I give it a lower rating because of the slippery controls, camera that likes to not cooperate and get stuck, and the sometimes grating music. Yes, I know that stuff’s on purpose, but purposefully unpleasant things are still unpleasant!

Play it for yourself if you think it looks cool is my recommendation. I think it’s worth a shot.

Personally I think the whole iceberg deal that inspired this game and the Creepypasta moments it has are a little cringe-y, but in the end I think B3313 does a solid job replicating a lot of the weird and subtle eeriness of Mario 64 and cranking it to the max. Many of the new areas in the castle feel like they came fresh out of dreams I had about Mario 64 when I was a kid. The whole concept of most of the levels being abstract, half-remembered/alternate timeline versions of Mario 64 levels we all know and love is also a very cool idea, even if I did get a little sick of all the Whomp's Fortresses in the end.

can something be obnoxiously juvenile but also a totally unique lightning-in-a-bottle experience at the same time? because that's B3313 to me. the internet iceberg meme/creepypasta origins of this ended up leading to the creation of something that is kind of unlike anything else in existence (even if it is heavily indebted to stuff like Yume Nikki), but it is also somewhat inherently limited by its origins.

it's sort of like if Mario's castle was reimagined as Constantine's Mansion in Thief: The Dark Project, mixed with Yume Nikki and various internet memes. in your endless hours wandering through the confusing labyrinth of the castle, there are isolated moments that are unique and brilliant. and then there others that are just sort of… there. you’ll spend 15 minutes wandering through a bunch of fairly bland, indistinct rooms and corridors and then you’ll come upon something really haunting and memorable. and then, maybe, you'll be right back in the bland mazes. maybe you'll run into some creepy thing and crash the game. maybe creepy thing will be interesting and well executed, or maybe it'll just be obnoxious boilerplate creepypasta stuff.

these contradictions get more and more noticeable the further into it you are. some of the levels are really interesting/bizarre alternate universe takes that recontextualize the original Mario 64 and seem to offer greater commentary about the nature of how nostalgia shifts things into an alternate universe that is actually different from the source of the memory. "i like to remember things my own way. how i remembered them, not necessarily how they happened" says the deeply troubled Fred Madison in David Lynch's Lost Highway. but other times it feels like you wish you were spending more time in the new/more unique areas you occasionally stumble upon, and less in the 6th variation of old Mario 64 levels.

B3313 feels almost like a bigger AAA game to me in both the sheer scope of the project that's filled with a lot of internal contradictions, and in also how much it truly doesn't respect your time. that’s probably the nature of things of this size, and that a lot of people were involved contributing in what seems like a very tumultuous dev cycle after a certain point. but perhaps that explains a lot about the sometimes inconsistent/varied nature of the experience.

i will personally admit to not caring whatsoever about the personalized copy of Mario 64 meme or the numerous ways this hack borrows from different beta builds of Mario 64. i like Mario 64 a lot, but it is absolutely wild to me the way that game has been metabolized into the consciousness of videogame world. and so i do think the whole “this is a beta version of the game” thing and slavishly cobbling together any and every scrap of asset or idea that was cut from an early documented build of Mario 64 to put on this thing is a bit of a dead end artistically. most of the stuff Nintendo used in earlier builds just seemed like temp assets and doesn’t seem THAT interesting to me outside of that context. it's just not very interesting to those of us who are not 17 years old anymore and not still spooked by internet lore. it just feeds back into a lot of fan culture content machine around big franchises that just feels like this self replicating beast that never really goes anywhere and is always invariably beaten back into conformity by the big companies that are in control of these properties.

i am someone who loves strange and unique experiences. but to me, i want stuff that i guess attaches itself more to telling a specific kind of story through what it’s doing, and B3313 is a bit too much online meme-referencing for me to take that aspect of it very seriously at all. B3313 doesn’t have the narrative coherence of a MyHouse which i guess is the other big artsy creepypasta game mod of the moment. and it doesn’t have the artful direction of a Yume Nikki, which it is obviously cribbing the general kind of surreal abstract multidimensional wander maze thing from.

all of this is to say: why did i give it 4 stars and 30+ hours of my time, then? maybe it comes down to: there is an indelible, haunting Tower of Druaga-esque charm to all of it. the commitment to being cryptic and giving the player nothing and doing all these machinations behind the scenes in the game is kind of remystifying what has been lost in a lot of consumer-facing art in general. in games, with all the talk of FromSoft games or like the last couple Zeldas bringing back "old school" difficulties and design values, those are meticulously tested commercial products… not community made romhacks. they simply can’t go anywhere near as far out there as something like this. and we in general are in a moment when so much art seems paralyzed and unwilling to take chances out of risk aversion from industries that have been strip-mined by the rich and powerful. something like B3313 stands in contrast to that - completely unwilling to compromise itself.

with B3313, oftentimes there really is nothing on the other side. but that emptiness starts to feel really intentional after a certain point. as a player, what's interesting in the feeling that you want the design to follow some kind of logic that you can eventually glean so that you can understand what the designers were getting at is that it feels almost like an intentional choice to have it consistently not do that. occasionally it does hint at a deeper language/design sensibility, but mostly it doesn’t. there are times when the “story” or the progression of stages seems to be developing into something more coherent, but then the rug is pulled out from under you. and that happens over and over. because it’s all rug pulls at the end of the day. the message of the design is: whatever happens, whatever journey you go through… it’s all inevitably a way to throw you back into the maze. you’ll always be endlessly wandering the maze.

to me, that says something about Nintendo games in general - how you have these long journeys that (in the case of the newer Zelda especially) aggressively don’t respect your time and send you to all these interesting locations. and then it always just sorta ends, because there’s nothing really deeper at the core a lot of the time. it's escapist entertainment, often with some kind of crypto-conservative values and imagery in it. B3313 feels totally unafraid to unearth and make you fully experience that ugly side.

maybe a lot of our larger culture right now, especially obsessive lore-based fan culture, are just variations of that too. increasingly everything seems like it's hostile, broken down, and filled with different kind of rug pulls. the ground feels totally unstable and there is no “there” there a lot of the time, but we keep shoveling through hoping for new discoveries and hoping for it all to make sense. it’s like being in an abusive, codependent relationship. there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. it’s a disempowerment fantasy. and B3313 captures that feeling absolutely perfectly, in such a uniquely fleshed out way.

there are moments to B3313 that are genuinely unique and fun too, like some of the more creative creepypasta scenarios that i won’t spoil here. or like, occasional stages like the one when you have to climb some structures that are supposed to be some sort of bob-omb factory. you activate the “self-destruct” sequence when you enter which causes you to have to outrun rising lava until the top. and then you get to the top and there’s a little yellow bob-omb guy sitting in a little office and just complaining about how you destroyed the whole factory. it does make me wonder if there’s like some kind of commentary on the tropes of Mario games being attempted in small moments like that. like the fact that Mario is basically a cipher who everything resolves around, and none of these other characters have any agency.

of course, none of that is delved upon for very long. because invariably, you're going to get fed back into the maze. and so that's both the great strength and the great flaw of something like B3313. it doesn't try to offer a way out, it just tries to express what is there. and in doing so it captures a feeling perfectly, in a way that is inspiring. even as a memey internet romhack, it is absolutely something i would call an "art game". there are a lot of memorable areas and moments that really explores the latent strangeness and darkness of Nintendo games, and the latent surrealism of a lot ofearly 3D games in general. it’s also real testament to how far romhacking/modding community projects can really go artistically, along with MyHouse.wad. it could have an enormous impact on a lot of games stuff that comes further down the line. so it’s definitely something that demands more attention and respect outside the whole memey lore ecosystem a lot of this stuff usually occupies. it of course, comes from that however and will probably will do itself no favors in distinguishing itself from that.

i only hope in the future that people take the ambition and interesting ideas from this and run with it in a way that feels unafraid to make a larger statement about the world, and doesn't just do the cowardly thing of retreating with its tail between its legs back into insular internet memes and the online lore ecosystem fed by various content creators. whether or not you think B3313 subverts or further perpetuates that that i guess is up to you. but i still think we have a pretty far way to go.

It's my opinion that to fully appreciate what this game is you have to be a little obsessed with the whole Mario 64 mythology that has been built up throughout the years. Lost builds both real and fake, never ending reports of players finding eerie and unfitting elements in such a classic game that pretty much always has eyes on it, the rise of analog horror fueling a new wave of atmosphere and nostalgia focused content - everything plays a part in it.

I often see the argument that the new generation of internet users is "making horror not scary", pointing out how the Backrooms now resembles the SCP Foundation and blaming them for the mascot horror trend that has produced some less than stellar cash grabs. While I personally don't enjoy the "personalization AI" theory and many other concepts that are a bit too far off from reality... so what?

I think that, when faced with a company such as Nintendo, who has the tightest grip on what Mario is and how you should be experiencing at every second of their games with the sole intent of fueling more dollars into their bank accounts, the boldest thing you can do is create something that is cringe. Something that doesn't make sense - or rather, only makes sense to you, at a certain mindset and point in time. Become unmonetizable. Make Mario have the hyper realistic bloody eyes if you want. It's your game.

In a climate where games preservation pretty much /has/ to overlap with piracy to be effective, I think making a rom hack like this that takes elements from real old SM64 builds and combining them with fanmade concepts and rumors old and new is fantastic. It's taking this game that is held to such high standards as "the beginning of 3D gaming" or whatever and getting weird with it.

After 20+ stars of playing, it becomes impossible to differentiate what is real, fake, old or new. It's eerie and comforting and nostalgic and innovative and any other feelings that it makes you feel. It can always be "that deep". It's oddly exciting to get to play something that wasn't ready to be shown to you. Some of the maps even kill you after a certain amount of time to prevent you from seeing the unfinished content. I think that's awesome. Games don't come out of thin air ready, they go through multiple iterations and what you get from the store is the cleanest, most sanitized and marketable version.

I think Mario should run through 5 identical castle lobbies until he goes through 3 fake paintings in a row and eventually reaches a huge cake with an equally huge star - which is actually a quicksand trap that kills him instantly. I'm glad someone else agrees.

Music highlight. Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes.

Video games aren't fun anymore.

Minecraft was at its best in whichever version came after the first one I played, because that was my First Update and was new and exciting to me.

I will talk about the game peaking in its beta while also expressing pure insipidity as soon as the ender dragon is found and/or killed, despite the fact that this did not exist during the supposed Golden Age of Minecraft.

Microsoft ruined Minecraft by making it accessible across 8 distinct platforms and keeping the simpler combat that I insist is better than

Mojang, who ruined Minecraft with the Beta 1.3 with the Beta 1.4 with the Beta 1.8 with the Release 1.0 with the Release 1.3 with the Release 1.5 with the Release 1.6 with the Release 1.9 update. Oh, the train stopped? Just kidding, with the Release 1.13 with the Release 1.14 with the Release 1.16 with the Release 1.17 with the Release 1.18 with the Release 1.19 with the Release 1.20 update. Yes, every single one of these updates spread across the last literal decade individually ruined Minecraft. Oh sorry, I forgot to start the timeline at Infdev

Yes, I can list at least one reason for every update charted out above. I will use however much or however little knowledge I have of Minecraft to relentlessly batter these algorithm-oriented talking points inside my head as I play, so I can reinforce the growing status quo to garner clicks and views all built around a narrative of disinterest, creative bankruptcy and an inability to keep the intrinsic flame alight.

A sandbox, that contains things I am not forced to engage with, but will make it my problem despite the game letting me choose my version to play on. They made the game too easy, they made the game too hard. They made the game too directed, they made the game too wide. They changed too much, they changed too little. Vanilla is boring, modders can do better. Mods are too different, I prefer Vanilla.

Minecraft 45 Bugs Compilation is ruining minecraft, how haven't Mojang fixed this yet? Minecraft 45 Bugs Compilation (2012) is funny, can't wait to try this on my creative world. Minecraft was better when it was simpler and we'd make 8-bit calculators out of only redstone and torches.

Minecraft grew up, I did not. I grew up, Minecraft did not.

...

How do I live like this? I don't. Imagine being this miserable. I love Minecraft just as much today as I did over a decade ago. Dipped my feet into mods, played dozens of adventure maps, was there at the twin-birth of Battle Royale (Survival Games in MC + the mod for Arma II) and here to see the entirety of Shrek at 720p encoded as block placements in-game.

"Video games aren't fun anymore." get real. Love the gang that plays Minecraft with me who still have a sense of humor, imagination and intrinsic motivation to simply build together.

Good night.

How to host a java server: PaperMC + server flags
How to manage Minecraft Java installs: Prism Launcher (recommended) or MultiMC
How to install mods: Modrinth
Wiki/further reading: Minecraft Wiki (not fandom)