Games worth discovering

You’re once, twice, three times a Super Mario World ROM hack, and I love you…

8K View2022-10-14

Super Mario World was a pack-in game for the Super Nintendo when it was released in North America 1991, but it is still (arguably) one of the best games for the system. Hell, even I dig it and I don’t even like Mario games all that much…but I vividly recall the first time I saw it in action. While I was in college, my next door neighbor in the dorms had a SNES and a couple of the launch games, Pilotwings, Gradius III, and of course Super Mario World. Each and every time I walked by his door while he was playing this new-fangled Mario game I stopped to watch for a bit because everything about that game just popped off the screen in a way that games on the NES (and, yes, even the Sega Genesis) just did not. The graphics, music, sound, gameplay…the whole experience was nothing like I had seen on a home console up until that point.

Well, today I’m going to talk about not one, not two, but THREE…yes, that’s right…THREE Super Mario World ROM hack games that I think are worth your time and attention here in the 21st century. Thanks again to SNES Drunk and his excellent channel for the heads up on these.

A PLUMBER FOR ALL SEASONS

This a truncated Super Mario World experience with absolutely zero in terms of narrative development, but what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality. As the title (which is borrowed from one of favorite plays/movies, A Man for All Seasons) hints at each world represents a different season: there's a spring world, a summer world, an autumn world, and a winter world to explore while doing what Mario does best: being the most cheerful, “bounding-est” plumber in the world who collects a boatload of coins in the process.

Another big draw here is the 16-bit pixel art graphics that are custom made for this game. They are, in a word, gorgeous, and for that reason alone A Plumber for All Seasons deserves a playthrough.

SICARI REMASTERED

So if it wasn’t for the recycled sound effects, I would have never guessed that his game was a hack of Super Mario World. I suppose the floaty jumping feels the same at times as well, but otherwise this seems like a completely different game…and I mean that in the best way possible.

The story that’s told in Sicari is a little too overblown and fan-fiction-y for my liking. Something about vampires, and gods, and freeing an evil goddess. Yeah, yeah, let’s just get to the jumping and the platforming, shall we? This game most certainly has that in spades with scads of unique level themes, original graphics, six main worlds, along with two bonus worlds, six unique bosses, and not to mention two main playable characters, the titular Sicari and her android gal-pal K-16, each with their own style of play.

One odd thing of note, one of the main musical themes in Sicari Remastered sounds a great deal like a 16-bit version of the main theme from Skyrim, The Song of the Dragonborn to be exact, which is an odd choice for a cutesy platform game, but I guess if you are going to "borrow" borrow from one of the best.

SICARI 2: THE BRINK OF TIME

This is the sequel to Sicari Remastered if you haven’t guessed that yet, and again, there’s no way in the world I would ever believe that this was originally Super Mario World unless you told me so.

Sicari 2 does everything a good sequel should do, which is take what’s awesome in the original game and make that better while eliminating some of the rougher edges found in the first one.

The only thing Sicari 2 doesn’t do well, unfortunately, is the story once again. This time the creator of this series, Yukivee, borrows heavily from the MCU (Avengers: Endgame specifically) by spinning a yarn about time-traveling heroes searching for six all-powerful ston…I mean shards, of course, that are needed to save the world.

That nonsense doesn’t really matter though because this hack’s got the goods where it counts (i.e., tight jumping and platforming and slick graphics and music) and is quite the achievement overall. Bravo, Yukivee!

At the end of the day, the main thing that really and truly amazes me about these ROM hacks, beyond their quality, is that they are typically created by one person (with maybe some assistance from a rag-tag team of a few volunteers if they are lucky) over several years for NO money. If that doesn’t define the old axiom of “doing it for the love of the game” then I don’t know what does.

If you are interested in other cool ROM hacks like these, check out the post I wrote a couple months ago about the Beatles Adventures in Pepperland. You’ll be glad you did.

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