February 10th 2024 - Quite recently I got a ROM for the original Super Mario World off some github page, I wanted to give the game one last try and attempt beating it, since I hadnt played it in years, and I never really managed to get past forest of illusion as a child.
For whatever reason the rom was named "Super Mario 1991", which really didnt make sense... Like- the original mario world isnt even from 1991, its from 1990!
Everything went on normally until I reached King Koopa's castle in world 7, where I encountered something... out of place, to say the least.
Is that... Remilia Scarlet? Yeah, I was surprised too, She even came with her own text screen!
not only that, but the HUD also changed, seemingly out of nowhere. I suppose the G and P counters were for Graze and Power, like in the original Touhou 6, they seemed to be broken though since the power meter was just stuck on MAX, and the graze counter just alternated from random numbers every few seconds.
What really caught my eye though was the new "Bomb" feature, where if you pressed start + B the screen would start rapidly flashing, and the boss would get stunned for a few seconds, allowing you to jump on her head and damage her. Bombs would also be refilled to 3 every time the player lost a life.
A few other changes to note were that the powerup storage was removed, the star counter was replaced with items, but worked virtually the same, and the "Mario" text on the top left corner was replaced "Player", and displayed lives as little red stars.
SHIT!
Another thing was that Remy had this awful, AWFUL attack where she would rapidly shoot giant donut shaped projectiles in every direction, you could never predict on what direction they were going to be shot, so most of the time I would just get cornered by them and die.
The good thing about that was that the projectiles could be spin jumped on, so you could platform your way through them and hit remilia in her big fat low res head.
after losing 2 lives and spamming bombs nonstop, I finally beat her. The last part was a real nightmare, near the end of the fight chunks of the ground would disappear, making it harder to dodge her projectiles, and Remy would also start rapidly moving from side to side across the screen making it real tough to land a hit on her.
After I was done with Remilia, the moon in the background turned blue, and the screen faded to black while mario was frozen in place.
Afterwards the game got stuck in a black void for...
MORE THAN 40 MINUTES!
Until the game finally woke up and displayed the results screen.
After that was finished with, the game showed a mute text screen for a few seconds, and then returned me back to the map, with King Koopa's castle replaced with a strange glowing gateway with a cross on the top. I had to stop playing here since I had to go out with my dad, so ill give an update on the next day.
I dont really believe in all that "OOOO SCARY HAUNTED GAME" bullshit, so I think the most likely reason for why the game is like this is that the person that uploaded the ROM to github accidentally uploaded a fanmade romhack instead of the original game.
nonetheless, I still think its awesome, and I cant wait to see what other cool custom shit this ROM has to offer.
Hope this takes somewhere actually interesting and not another freakin' grassland for the millionth time.
February 13th 2024 - Alright, Im back!
Havent even started up the game yet and its already doing weird stuff, the ROM suddenly just renamed itself to... this? I have no idea what it means, or why it renamed itself to that seemingly out of the blue.
A txt file was also created, but when I tried opening it it just showed me an error and deleted itself afterwards.
I scanned the ROM for any viruses but it seemed completely clean, so I really have no idea why or how it renamed itself and created a random txt file on my desktop.
Anyways... onto the actual game.
Turns out that portal did lead me somewhere interesting after all!