This topic is for the purpose of discussing #3172: Hoandjzj's SNES Super Metroid Phazon in 35:11.67

Per the [wiki Rules]Rules[/wiki],

Hacked games are allowed for submission. However, they go through more scrutiny than other games. This is because the hack itself is under judgment. It must be a quality hack and have an audience following. It must be a quality TAS on its own merit but also must show something interesting compared to other games of the same game engine.

There are about three things I can spot here that look unique relative to the other Super Metroid runs ([movie 1368]of which[/movie] [movie 1195]there are[/movie] [movie 1270]an abundance[/movie], including [movie 1651]another hack[/movie], not to mention [submission 2136]at least[/submission] [submission 2449]four submissions[/submission] [submission 2731]showing alternate[/submission] [submission 3023]routes/versions[/submission] and [submission 2635]another hack submission[/submission] which were rejected): the warp area (possibly the only real unique feature of this hack), the X-Ray/water trick to preserve a Shinespark charge, and something else which escapes me (which I'll go back and add if I remember what it was). In lieu of actual original content besides the above, we have questionable, low-visibility recolours (just look at the suggested screenshot above), a handful of rooms reused from the original game, silly-looking sprite-swaps of bosses, and seemingly meaningless renaming of items. In essence, I found this too much of a pain on the eyes to watch and not enough original content here relative to the glut of other Super Metroid runs on the site to warrant enduring that. I vote No.

I certainly enjoyed playing this hack, so thanks for making the TAS! I doubt it'll be published here, but I enjoyed watching it. Was detouring for the Red Phazon worthwhile? It's not really needed; you just have to do a couple of hellruns if you skip it, and I think the early supermissiles is still possible even without it. One of the hellruns is rather lengthy though, I'll grant; the energy requirements might mean you'd need to grab more energy tanks, which might make it not worthwhile. But given how long it takes to get the Red Phazon...plus, going without is more impressive. :) I liked the use of the speedbooster echoes to kill enemies that you usually need the wavebeam for. Speedbooster use in general was quite nice. But what was the highjump needed for? Okay, judging from the fact you turned the speedbooster off for a very short lava trip, I'm guessing this is an in-game-time run, not a realtime run. I do have to wonder if it would be possible to manipulate Ridley to not go where you can't shoot him. Anyway, enjoyable enough, but I'm staying the heck out of the Super Metroid flamewar that's pretty much continually simmering around here. Not voting. sgrunt: what rooms did you see re-used? To my knowledge there's no terrain in common between the hack and the original game. Also, there's more changes to the game that don't get shown off in this hack. In particular the beams have wildly varying behaviors (spazer is a machinegun, more or less) and the item progression is almost completely different compared to usual. Of course, since these don't get shown off, to the average viewer that doesn't mean much, so you're just left with the admittedly questionable palette decisions. Though personally I liked the sprite replacements.

Enjoyed watching the YouTube encode. It seems pretty optimal and I think the hacks section is pretty sparse overall anyway. I don't really understand the practice of turning down TASes of hacks that aren't groundbreaking. I think this one would be fine and I enjoyed watching it through--it's definitely different enough from SM in my book. Yes vote.

I have no experience with this or any of the other SM hacks. But have to say that I don't think this hack is that great. The main thing I noticed was the extremely low density of normal enemies. That alone made this much less interesting than the standard game. None of the new graphics are appealing. Why would you make Samus gray? You don't need to go that far to make her suit look less feminine. It seems the main goal of this hack was to create some interesting situations for wall jumps. It does succeed in that. But still vote no. Could be a nice edition to demos or gruefood delight though.

ew. what's wrong with Ridley's face?

One of the hellruns is rather lengthy though, I'll grant; the energy requirements might mean you'd need to grab more energy tanks, which might make it not worthwhile. But given how long it takes to get the Red Phazon...plus, going without is more impressive. :)

I tried to keep going without Red Phazon, and the result is: slower more than 1min ingame-timer ^^! The main reason is I can't acquire the 1st Phazon Missile under lava (if Samus suitless in lava, she loses 1 energy per 2 frames, but with Red Phazon, she loses 1 energy per 4 frames!) then I have to go back to POWERPLANT for the 1st Phazon Missile, and have to acquire Echo Beam (Wave Beam) also (there is a room requires to kill all the enemy :) . Furthermore, I have to go to PHAZON MINE 2 times, if suitless, the recharged energy will be 2 times more! :D

What was the highjump needed for?

:D I tried this too! I skip the Hi-Jump boots, and when I come back to PHAZON MINE the 2nd time, it's very waste frame to jump to some high-places, even I used Speed Booster to jump higher. And when acquiring Blue Phazon under water, without Hi-Jump Boots, I have to continuous walljump. In total, I wasted 11second to acquire Hi-Jump Boots, but in return, I'm faster than 1 second after acquiring Blue Phazon :)

I do have to wonder if it would be possible to manipulate Ridley to not go where you can't shoot him.

I can't manipulate this XD

It's doesn't matter if this submission is published or not, you guys entertained, that makes me pleased :D:D:D

I checked out your YouTube encode, and I really enjoyed it! I remembered watching another Super Metroid hack that was published recently and, shockers, you made that one as well! Seems like you really enjoy Super Metroid hacks (after grazing over your YouTube channel, that's a huge understatement!), have you considered the Super Metroid Zero Mission hack? I have played a good chunk of it on my Wii and I had a lot of fun with it so far. :D Now, as for this movie, there were a few things that stuck out to me: -The Draygon fight was refreshing, I'm sick of seeing him demolished in a fraction of a second. Awesome! -Although enemies were sparse sometimes, I can't help but think this was optimal for the run for entertainment and speed. Sure, there wasn't a fight in every room, but with taking damage to save time, the energy would have to be replaced later. -As for the hack itself, I personally didn't feel there was much rehashing with rooms from the original game. I'm pretty familiar with it as it's a top Metroid game for me, but there's only so much that can be changed without breaking the game. I don't have a very strong knowledge of SM hacks, though. I'm not sure what the game can and can't handle. -I really liked the use of 2x Shinespark to pass through the bomb wall, it was really cool to me! This is a would-be Yes vote from me, but I'm still a Lurker, and don't know when that will change. If I'm able to before voting ends, I definitely will! As for this being accepted... I'm thinking will be rejected, unfortunately (my basis for comparison is the MM2 hack situation). =/ I totally agree with the rules for ROM hack submissions, especially that the hack itself must be scrutinized. However... the earliest hack publication is 3.5 years ago, and 8 truly unique hacks are published to date (I don't count ones like Knuckles in Sonic, or Street Fighter Rainbow, etc...), and 4 hacks are in the Gruefood Delight. There are 3 SNES hacks published, 1 of them being your MockingBird one. I'm not saying the rules are too harsh, or unreasonable, but I'd like to see either two things... Either hacks are given their own section, and not just shared with alternate goals, demos, etc. Or, more hack submissions should make it into the Gruefood. Either way, good luck on this and future submissions! :D Yech, long-winded post. x.x

I'm trying to watch this in my emulator, but I'm having trouble with the patch. My copy of the Super Metroid ROM seems to be fine, but when I apply the patch, snes9x says I have a bad checksum, displays a garbled first screen, and then does nothing else. I have SNESTool, and I know I used it to fix Super Metroid Mockingbird by deleting a header, but that doesn't seem to be working here. Can anyone help?

The md5sum of the original image I patched to get this to run in the emulator is 21f3e98df4780ee1c667b84e57d88675, and the resulting patched image has one of 937d6f3262d5c89a2b1b208a250cf444. The md5sum of the patch itself is fd0ffea29fa7ce93ce5badb786052010. If those don't check out for you, perhaps you need to find a different image / patch?

The colors being a bit muted gave this a very dark feel. I really liked that. The use of the X-Ray Scope to preserve Speed Echoes was really cool, and overall, I like this a lot more than I like Mockingbird. Voting YES on this run, and I propose that this run obsolete the Mockingbird run.

-As for the hack itself, I personally didn't feel there was much rehashing with rooms from the original game. I'm pretty familiar with it as it's a top Metroid game for me, but there's only so much that can be changed without breaking the game. I don't have a very strong knowledge of SM hacks, though. I'm not sure what the game can and can't handle. This is a would-be Yes vote from me, but I'm still a Lurker, and don't know when that will change.

Having some infamy in the world of SM hacking for a project that I promised would be released 4 years ago, I can tell you a little about the state of SM hacking. Basically, the tools are pretty powerful and you only need a minute knowledge of hex editing to completely repoint to free space; it's possible to easily add in new tilesets and change room sizes/proportions. There is a bevy of information available on the subject (best reference is here). I have gotten a trained eye for hacks over the years and I can also see the rooms that weren't significantly altered; however, in the schema of hacks available, this is definitely one of the more original and interesting ones. The community around SM hacking is really nice and helpful and it's not at all hard to get into. It takes a long time to make a quality hack and there's still some limitations, but at this point level design is limited mostly to your imagination and creative talent (being good at tileset drawing/ripping also helps). I believe you need 50 posts to move past "lurker" status.

The colors being a bit muted gave this a very dark feel. I really liked that. The use of the X-Ray Scope to preserve Speed Echoes was really cool, and overall, I like this a lot more than I like Mockingbird. Voting YES on this run, and I propose that this run obsolete the Mockingbird run.

I'm curious why you specifically think this should obsolete Mockingbird. I don't know of any mandatory limitation on how many hacks we can have, so it isn't strictly necessary, and to me these are very different viewing experiences. However, I'm rather tired of arguing about voting; if you don't feel like explaining, no worries. I don't think this will get published anyway, because there is a general resistance on the site to hack TASes etc. I'm still not entirely sure why we can't accommodate hack TASes more liberally, as they have their own section and are already guaranteed to be watched mostly by fans of the original game--I would think that it wouldn't hurt to have four or five runs of different good-quality hacks for popular games. But of course that's just my two cents.

@Azumak :D Yeah I'm a fan of Super Metroid, and I like its hacks as well, and I mostly play the hacks than the original XD Since the original was TASed perfectly and really awesome, I'm hoping for some hack-TASes! This is mainly for entertainment, and relaxing at the moment you beat the hack, and look at the completed time, you know you done it well XD And, special thanks for your vote ;) @mklip2001 I downloaded the patch from metroidconstruction.com, use SMILE to remove header from the original, and used Lunar IPS to patch :D

This hack looks really ugly. I'm sure it's fun to play but it looks like someone ate watercolors and took a big dump all over the palette.

I'm sorry but this was... well... crap. The hack in itself is not fun and looks utterly horrible, much like most hacks. This was run well... but not entertaining enough by a long shot. I'm going to have to simply vote no. Mr. Kelly R. Flewin

This hack is an A-list hacks on Metroidconstruction.com, so I think it's pretty nice, and worth TASing :P

I watched it on youtube and liked the run how you gave some explanations during the video.

sgrunt and Hoandjzj: Thanks for the help! I ended up watching the encode after all, but I'll check these ideas out. First of all, I must say this was a pretty entertaining run. The play quality and route look good, though it's tough to tell whether it would be faster to find different times to refill ammo and health. The run becomes especially more interesting after you get the Speed Booster, and you do some very cool things with it. Thank you, Hoandjzj, for making the run, whether or not this gets published here. However, it seems likely that people will only want one hack of SM published (see the judging decision for Mockingbird, as well as discussion around Rockman No Constancy). Given that, here are my plusses and minusses of this hack compared to Mockingbird. Plusses:

• More interesting map layout and variety
• Less backtracking
• Fewer instances where you lose significant time dodging enemies

Minusses:

• Same complaints about the graphics that sgrunt mentioned
• Boss fights are generally less interesting. Phantoon in Mockingbird was much more entertaining than Ridley in this game.
• Mockingbird looks like more of a challenge, especially early in the game. The enemy dodging in it is more impressive, where as in this game you run into very few enemies for a long time.

I guess I would be fine with any verdict that happens to this hack, given all the points above. I vote Meh.

Just 1 hack of SM will be published?! :D That means, if Saturn releases his SM Redesign any% TAS, then every hacks of SM will be obsoleted =]]

As far as I'm aware there's no official policy on hack publications, but judging from audience response, I wouldn't expect to see more than one hack published for any given game, at least not until the publication process gets revamped.

I've finally finished the hack so I could watch this TAS without spoiling anything. It was a pleasure to watch, thank you Hoandjzj! The slow Ridley fight looks bad :/ - any additional missile pack should save 3-4 seconds. Have you considered the missile pack above the golden torizo? Maybe the one above the beginning of the long shinespark to the red tower? - any additional phazon missile pack should save ~10 seconds, though I don't remember any near your path. :/ Also, why didn't you group the Metroid/Core X? If you freeze several at the same position you can hit all of them with one missile. Compared to Mockingbird Station, both hacks have some strong points and some weak points. Mockingbird had a few very interesting rooms (e.g. the spike room to grapple, the phantoon fight), but also a lot of dull rooms you had to endure several times due to all the backtracking. Phazon doesn't have as much backtracking (just a few quick visits to the central hub), but pointless long walks through empty rooms to get anywhere. For the first half of the run, samus doesn't appear to be in any danger. Not sure which one I prefer.

Incidentally, I'd love to see you do a TAS of Eris, if you think you're up to it. :)

The slow Ridley fight looks bad :/ - any additional missile pack should save 3-4 seconds. Have you considered the missile pack above the golden torizo? Maybe the one above the beginning of the long shinespark to the red tower? - any additional phazon missile pack should save ~10 seconds, though I don't remember any near your path. :/

Yeah ^^ I know it, so I try to collect more Missiles if it's on my route! The missile pack "above the golden torizo" requires Phazon Missile to open, but I'm run out of it, I tried to wait if Torizo release more balls, but it still wastes more than 2s! The Missile pack "above the beginning of the long shinespark to the red tower" requires shinerspark (and one shot to reveal it, of course :) if I collect it, then I have to shinerspark again, in total it'll take more than 4s :D Phazon Missiles are hard to acquire, their place is hard to reach, and waste time! The one closest to my route is above Speed Booster, but acquiring it... :/ still waste time, and waste 10 Missiles, consider that, I skip it :P

Also, why didn't you group the Metroid/Core X? If you freeze several at the same position you can hit all of them with one missile.

The Core X isn't slow my move, but it drains much energy, if I want to shot it I have to aim up or down, so I can only shot it when I jump. And it requires 2shots to freeze, and because I want to save my Missile so I freeze it instead :)